Sable Elyse Smith
Tuesday, October 23
Prentis 101
6:30pm
Sable Elyse Smith
Tuesday, October 23
Prentis 101
6:30pm
Naama Tsabar
Tuesday, October 16
Prentis 101
6:30pm
Naama Tsabar (b. 1982, Israel) Lives and works in NYC. received her MFA from Columbia University in 2010. Solo exhibitions and performances of Tsabar have been presented at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, Museum of Art and Design (New York), The High Line Art (New York), Kunsthuas Baselland, Switzerland, Palais De Tokyo (Paris), Prospect New Orleans, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, The Herziliya Museum for Contemporary Art in Israel, MARTE-C (El Salvador), Frieze Projects New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery (New York), Paramo Gallery (Guadalajara), Dvir Gallery (Israel), Spinello Projects (Miami). Selected group exhibitions featuring Tsabar’s work include TM Triennale, Hasselt Genk, Belgium, ‘Greater New York’ 2010 at MoMA PS1, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Belgium), The Bucharest Biennale for Young Artists, Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard, Casino Luxembourg (Luxembourg), ExtraCity in Antwerp (Belgium).Tsabar’s work has been featured in publications including ArtForum, Art In America, ArtReview, ARTnews, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Frieze, Bomb Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, Wire, and Whitewall, among others.
Naama Tsabar at the Guggenheim (video)
Justine Kurland
Thursday, October 11
Prentis 101
6:30pm
Justine Kurland, known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and their fringe communities, has spent the better part of the last twenty years on the road. Following in the photographic lineage of Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld, Kurland’s work examines the story of America—and the idea of the American dream juxtaposed against the reality. Since 2004, Kurland and her young son, Casper, have traveled in their customized van, going south in the winter and north in the summer, her life as an artist finely balanced between the demands of a parent and the demands of her work. Casper appears at different ages in the photographs, against open vistas and among the subcultures of train-hoppers and drifters around them. Kurland’s vision is in equal parts raw and romantic, idyllic and dystopian.
Recent work departs from the road trips she is known for and returns home: her apartment in New York City, her hometown of Fulton, New York, and her mother’s home in rural Virginia. Kurland invaginates fragments of this life (her cat, lovers, a bloodied tampon) with allusions to a matrilineage including Carolee Schneemann, Betty Tompkins, Judy Chicago, Hannah Wilke, and Emily Roysdon.
Justine Kurland (born in Warsaw, New York, 1969) received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA from Yale University. Her work has been exhibited extensively at museums in the United States and internationally. Recent museum exhibitions include The Open Road at the Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, Michigan; More American Photographs, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and Off the Grid #1 and #2, Fotodok, the Netherlands. She was the focus of a solo exhibition at Mitchell-Innes and Nash this spring and a two-person exhibition at Higher Pictures this summer, both in New York City. Her work is in the public collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, and International Center of Photography, New York, as well as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, among others.
Justine Kurland in Conversation with Her Son, Casper (via Aperture)
Justine Kurland for the New York Times Magazine
Justine Kurland in the New Yorker
Jon Kessler
Tuesday, October 2nd, 6:30pm
Prentis 101
With his chaotic kinetic installations, Jon Kessler (b. 1957, Yonkers, New York) critiques our image-obsessed, surveillance-dominated world. His machines are at once complex and lumbering, combining mechanical know-how with kitschy materials and images. Structurally complex and narratively engaging, Jon Kessler’s multimedia sculptures often deliver an emotional punch beyond their humble means. With his distinct vocabulary, Kessler taps into our all-too-real modern-day anxieties, but at the same time, spirits us away into an exciting wonderland that is ultimately uplifting.
rafa esparza is a multidisciplinary artist who was born, raised, and is currently living in Los Angeles. Woven into esparza’s bodies of work are his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship. He is inspired by his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that come forth as a result. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory and (non)documentation as primary tools to interrogate and critique ideologies, power structures and binaries that problematize the “survival” process of historicized narratives and the environments wherein people are left to navigate and socialize. esparza’s recent projects have evolved through experimental collaborative projects grounded by laboring with land vis a vis adobe, a labor inherited by his father Ramon Esparza, where the artist shares institutional space and resources to invited Brown and Queer artists and cultural producers. esparza is invested in working in the local geographies that are the Southwest including Mexico and Latin-America.
please join us Tuesday for a lecture by the inimitable
Kembra Pfahler is a New York City-based interdisciplinary artist, and is the current lead singer of her band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, along with her long-time partner in the arts, Samoa.
Pfahler grew up in Los Angeles amid the first wave of LA punk in the 1970s, on a surf goth diet that included Diamanda Galas, The Screamers, Johanna Wendt, Parliament Funkadelic, and surf filmmakers like Bruce Brown. After high school, Pfahler left for New York to attend the School of Visual Arts (SVA). Her films and performances were shown in New York throughout the 1980s. During this decade she lived through the AIDS epidemic, which would shift the course of her life forever. She gave up all harmful substances in the late 80s in honor of her friends who had died from AIDS, and started a band that combined what she had been articulating through an abyss of mediums for ten years. The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black was born: a theatrical rock band the likes of which none had experienced in some time. Over the course of a decade beginning in the 90s, she toured, made records and films, and cemented her footprint in the landscape of minor cultural icons. In 2006, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black gave a conceptual concert, entitled Sound of Magic, at Deitch Projects. Recently, the Independent Film Channel produced a special film on the group called: I Believe in Halloween. She claimed popularity was an abscess that would pop, and is a self-claimed anhedoniac.
Dara Birnbaum
* rescheduled*
Tuesday, December 4th / 6:30pm / Prentis Hall, Room 101
artnews / E.A.I. / art in america / cabinet
Please join us!
Tourmaline
Tuesday, September 11 / 6:30pm / Prentis Hall, Room 101
Tourmaline is a filmmaker whose work includes Atlantic is a Sea of Bones, The Personal Things, Lost in the Music and Happy Birthday, Marsha! She is also an editor of TRAP DOOR, an anthology on trans cultural production published by the New Museum & MIT Press.
Tourmaline makes film and installed video that highlights the capacity of black queer/trans social life to impact the world while living what is simultaneously an invisible—and hypervisible—existence. The throughline of her filmmaking focuses on everyday people and their mundane creative acts that blur the lines and liens of what constitutes public
She received a BA from Columbia University and is the recipient of the 2018 Publishing Triangle Award, 2017 HBO & Queer/Art Prize and 2016 Art Matters Foundation Grant.
Her work has been presented across the world including at the MOMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum, MOCA LA, Brooklyn Museum, BAM Cinema and the New Museum and has appeared in Vogue Magazine, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Artforum, Culture Magazine, Art in America and Teen Vogue.
Welcome back or welcome for the first time!
Our first VALS lecture of the 2018-2019 school year will be:
Aki Sasamoto
Tuesday, September 4th / 6:30pm / Prentis Hall, Room 101
Aki Sasamoto works in sculpture, performance, video, and whatever other medium it takes to get her ideas across. In her installation/performance works, Aki moves and talks inside the careful arrangements of sculpturally altered objects, activating bizarre emotions behind daily life. Her works appear in gallery spaces, theater spaces, as well as in odd sites. Shown at SculptureCenter, the Kitchen, Chocolate Factory Theater, Whitney Biennial 2010 at Whitney Museum, Greater New York 2010 at MOMA-PS1, New York; National Museum of Art-Osaka, Mori Museum, Take Ninagawa, Yokohama Triennale 2008, Japan; Gwangju Biennial 2012, South Korea; Shanghai Biennale 2016, China; Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016, India; and numerous other international and domestic venues. She has collaborated with musicians, choreographers, mathematicians, and scholars. She teaches in the Sculpture Department at Yale School of Art. Aki likes food.
Aki’s website
& some press: frieze / art21 / artforum