Contents for March 14, 2022
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1. Cecilia Vicuña, FF Alumn, receives Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award, La Biennale di Venezia 2022
2. Shirin Neshat, FF Alumn, at MOCA, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, opening March 10
3. Lorraine O’Grady, FF Alumn, at Alexander Gray Associates, Manhattan, April 28-June 11
4. Chun Hua Catherine Dong, FF Alumn, at Arcade Project Curatorial, Brooklyn, thru April 2
5. Melissa Smedley, FF Alumn, live online March 17
6. Maya Ciarrocchi, FF Alumn, named LMCC Arts Center Resident 2022
7. Kenneth King, FF Member, now online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGC5boVWAnc
8. LoVid, FF Alumn, at Postmasters Gallery, Manhattan, opening March 19
9. Ken Butler, FF Alumn, now online at mfmspeakout.simplecast.com
10. Conrad Ventur, FF Alumn, now online at Artnews.com
11. Jerri Allyn, FF Alumn, now online thru Mar. 18
12. Martha Rosler, FF Alumn, at e-flux, Brooklyn, March 18-20
13. Joseph Keckler, Lydia Lunch, FF Alumns, now online at interlocutorinterviews.com
14. Greg Sholette, FF Alumn, publishes new book
15. Michael Bramwell, FF Alumn, at Old Salem Museum & Gardens / Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Winston-Salem, NC, April 15-July 16
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1. Cecilia Vicuña, FF Alumn, receives Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award, La Biennale di Venezia 2022
Please visit the following website:
Thank you.
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2. Shirin Neshat, FF Alumn, at MOCA, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, opening March 10
Please visit the following website:
https://moca.ca/exhibitions/shirin-neshat-2022/
Thank you.
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3. Lorraine O’Grady, FF Alumn, at Alexander Gray Associates, Manhattan, April 28-June 11
Body Is the Ground of My Experience
April 28–June 11, 2022
Dracula and the Artist, 1991/2019. Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Baryta pure cotton photo rag paper. Diptych: 40 x 50 inches each (101.6 x 127 cm each)
Body Is the Ground of My Experience
New York: April 28–June 11, 2022
Alexander Gray Associates, New York announces Body Is the Ground of My Experience, an exhibition of Lorraine O’Grady’s pivotal 1991 black-and-white photomontages. Drawing on formal strategies of Surrealism and on O’Grady’s own visceral, nuanced engagement with aesthetics, representation, and cultural history, Body Is the Ground of My Experience is both a turning point, from live performance to wall installation, and a refined iteration of the complex politically and personally radical theses and practices that have occupied the artist throughout her career.
O’Grady produced the photomontages for her first one-person exhibition at New York’s INTAR Gallery in 1991—this presentation marks the first time in more than thirty years the complete body of work has been on view in the city. Previously known primarily for her work as a performance artist—with incendiary personas like Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83), as well as the dream-like Künstlerroman Rivers, First Draft (1982)—the shift to wall works in Body Is the Ground of My Experience marked a major formal evolution in her practice. Rather than being passive, oblique, or annotative, the title of this body of work foregrounds a truth that might no longer be structurally obvious: even as the form of the work changes from physically embodied performances to works on the wall, the body itself remains a conceptual through line and field for engagement.
In works like The Fir-Palm and The Strange Taxi, a Black body operates as a literal ground on which history acts and is unexpectedly modified. This centering of embodied experience is itself an act of resistance against the dry, disassociated formalism of postmodern photography that dominated the landscape at the time. Against this grain, O’Grady constructs imaginative psychologies and uncanny arrangements influenced by Surrealism, a movement whose literature and images she taught for 25 years at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In Dracula and the Artist, a woman with half-styled hair faces away from the viewer, insisting on her right to interiority. Confronting broken combs that fly at her—their sharp teeth evocative of the titular vampire—she turns away from their allure and violence to embrace her art.
Expanding her interrogation of the body as the foundation of experience, O’Grady’s Gaze and Dream quadriptychs are comprised of portraits of eight individuals, each with a second, smaller image of themselves superimposed on top. Given different prompts to react to, each panel of these works functions as a collapsed diptych—schematically enacting both subjectivity’s stunting by history and latent resistance to it. As the curator Stephanie Sparling Williams writes, “The body layering presents to the world two faces of the same individual, and through the artist’s prompting, both an outer and inner view is captured—the metaphysical and the physical.”
Probing the instability of dualities via the subversion and reconfiguration of art historical referents, Body Is the Ground of My Experience generates an uncanny confluence between the artist’s unflinching gaze and the monochromatic, minimal arrangement of her compositions. An embodiment of O’Grady’s artistic ethos, its pieces illuminate the more universal structures at work as they operate on and are refracted by human bodies across space and history. Created thirty years ago, they bring undeniable resonance to work being created by others today.
Loraine O’Grady was the subject of a 2021 retrospective Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And presented by the Brooklyn Museum, which traveled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC in 2022. Other one-person exhibitions of her work include From Me to Them to Me Again, Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art, GA (2018); Family Gained, Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston (2018); Lorraine O’Grady: Initial Recognition, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Monastery de Santa María de las Cuevas, Seville, Spain (2016); and Lorraine O’Grady: When Margins Become Centers, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2015). Her work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Just Above Midtown: 1974 to the Present, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022); Michael Jackson: On the Wall, National Portrait Gallery, London (2018), traveled to Grand Palais, Paris (2018), The Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany (2019), and Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland (2019); Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Tate Modern, London (2017), traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK (2018), Brooklyn Museum, NY (2018), The Broad, Los Angeles (2019), de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA (2019), and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2020); and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–85, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2017), traveled to California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2017), Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2018), and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston (2018). Her work is represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. She has been a resident artist at Artpace San Antonio, TX, and has received many awards, including the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art, a Skowhegan Medal (2019), the Francis J. Greenburger Award (2017), a 2015 Creative Capital Award in Visual Art, a Lifetime Achievement Award from Howard University, Washington, D.C. (2015), the Distinguished Feminist Award, College Art Association, New York (2014), an Art Matters grant (2011), a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship (2011), and the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2008), among others. In addition to her work as a visual artist, she has also made innovative contributions to cultural criticism with her writings, including the now canonical article, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity.” A book of her collected writings, Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, published by Duke University Press, was released in 2020.
More information on Lorraine O’Grady
More information on Body Is the Ground of My Experience
Covid-19 Safety Measures:
Only vaccinated visitors may enter the Gallery, with the exception of children under 5
Masks required for all visitors
Do not enter the Gallery if you have symptoms of COVID-19 or have recently tested positive
Sales Inquiries
sales@alexandergray.com
Press Inquiries
press@alexandergray.com
Alexander Gray Associates
Alexander Gray Associates is a contemporary art gallery in New York City and Germantown, NY. Through exhibitions, research, and artist representation, the Gallery spotlights artistic movements and artists active in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Influential in cultural, social, and political spheres, these artists are notable for creating work that crosses geographic borders, generational contexts, and artistic disciplines. Alexander Gray Associates is an organization committed to anti-racist and feminist principles.
Alexander Gray Associates is a member of the Art Dealers Association of America.
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4. Chun Hua Catherine Dong, FF Alumn, at Arcade Project Curatorial, Brooklyn, thru April 2
Chun Hua Catherine Dong: Cleavage
March 11 to April 2, 2022
Arcade Project Curatorial
56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn NY 11206
Opening Reception: Friday, March 11, 6 to 9 pm
Gallery Hours: Thursday – Sunday 12-6 pm (and by appointment)
Please visit the following website:
Thank you.
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5. Melissa Smedley, FF Alumn, live online March 17
Hello there,
Fitting for “Womens Herstory Month”, the latest Podcast from Art Ranger, please visit the following website to listen:
https://anchor.fm/melissa-smedley/episodes/Can-you-hear-me-e1f7fhb
Thank you.
Can You Hear me? . This work arose from the collaborative exhibition now at the Monterey Museum of Art called Courage Within Women Without Shelter. In addition, we’ll be in the galleries to visit with visitors and perform with words on Thursday March 17 from 2-4 p.m. and my colleague Denese will be present on March 10th.
Please visit the following website and watch the video:
https://montereyart.org/event/artist-in-the-galleries-courage-within/
Thank you.
Would you like to support The Department of Homeland Inspiration by wearing or sharing a T-shirt ($25)? If so, please let us know, along with sizes, because we will be placing the bulk order this month.
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6. Maya Ciarrocchi, FF Alumn, named LMCC Arts Center Resident 2022
Please visit the following website:
Thank you.
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7. Kenneth King, FF Member, now online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGC5boVWAnc
Reunion @ Happy Valley Retirement Village
Please visit the following website:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGC5boVWAnc
Thank you.
To celebrate the first anniversary of my comic movie series, the next installment features a whodunit scandal with topical irony — a Russian takeover. I play 8 characters in 7:36 minutes: Boris Badenough, Russian oligarch secretly scheming to take over Happy Valley and steal all its assets, along with the gang: 150-old Ole’ Grandpa, British TV fanatic Randy Pincer, construction worker Buddy, over-the-hill actresses Kate Heartburn and Tallulah Bankhead, renegade cook Foo Chi, & BBC reporter Basil Wraithbone.
Other movies on my Youtube channel: Kenneth King Media
Info @ kennethkingmedia.com
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8. LoVid, FF Alumn, at Postmasters Gallery, Manhattan, opening March 19
Please note the gallery will have extended hours from 12pm to 8pm on Saturday, March 19 for the opening of the exhibition
Postmasters is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition with LoVid.
Titled “Hold On,” the show will present a series of digital tapestries and NFTs. Both are spatial and time-based compositions that translate interaction with human gesture into two fundamentally different formats.
LoVid is well known for recorded videos and live performances, where the audiovisual landscapes of moving image and sound are created through custom-built analog synthesizers. The hands-on process itself involves connecting lots of cables, twisting knobs, and flipping switches to make and mix RGB colors forming shapes, patterns, and rhythms. The imagery from the videos and performances is often transformed into digitally produced fabric that comprises costumes, merch, installations, clothing, collages, and sculptures.
For this exhibition, the tapestries and the NFTs were created simultaneously. Both constitute LoVid’s “Hugs on Tape” series.
The tapestries are dynamic still objects. They enable time expansion with frozen moments as the video-synthesizer-born forms and colors are copied, pasted, flipped, and repeated to a looping visual effect. The compositions are in dialogue with traditional patterns of decorative and textile arts. Instead of elements from the natural world, images generated by the electronic instrument act as parallel to nature/humanity/wood/Lincoln Logs in the digital/technological/blockchain/cyborg age.
LoVid’s tapestries – sown, patched and embroidered – are the physical manifestations of digital experiences. They ride the waves of tension between material and media while expanding the screen and internet-based spaces. Traditional fabric arts, including weaving and sewing, have a deep historical connection to programming, engineering, and early computers. The new tapestries in “Hold On” are inspired by a patchwork of storyboards (drawn images as cinematic storytelling), video dance (bodies moving inside a frame), and traditional crafts (symbolism, myths, folklore, vegetation patterns).
LoVid’s NFTs – “Hugs on Tape” videos – are of the moment.
The series started in the dark depths of the pre-vaccine pandemic lockdown. Yearning to feel close to far away friends and family, LoVid asked them for short videos of hugs. These were then animated using raw video footage from over 20 years of LoVid recordings.
“Dressing” their bodies in our video patterns showered these friends with love since LoVid’s video patterns are like raw emotions, non-verbal communication channels carried by electricity. Hugs are also a response to endless images of solitude and selfies across social media and NFT platforms, an act of togetherness.
– LoVid
LoVid continues the “Hugs on Tape” series as both NFT animations and tapestries. The hugs are filled with generosity, humor, fragility, tenderness, and love. They animate and eternalize the choreography of the quotidian, of spontaneous contacts.
Hugs are enveloping and bring bursts of joy. They give comfort, hope, physical stimulation, and reassurance during particularly unstable and uncertain times.
LoVid was established in 2001 as a collaboration between artists Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus.
Their work has been exhibited internationally including among others: Honor Fraser Gallery, Postmasters, And/Or Gallery, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Real Art Ways, BRIC, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Mixed Greens Gallery, The Science Gallery Dublin, The Jewish Museum, Daejeon Museum, Smack Mellon, Netherland Media Art Institute, New Museum, and ICA London.
LoVid has performed in venues including: The Parrish Museum, Issue Project Room, River to River Festival, Lampo Chicago, Tectonics Festival, Museum of the Moving Image, MoMA, The Kitchen, Siskel Theater Chicago, and International Film Festival Rotterdam.
LoVid’s projects have received awards, residencies, and grants support from: Wave Hill, NY Hall of Science, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Graham Foundation, UC Santa Barbara, Signal Culture, Cue Art Foundation, Eyebeam, Harvestworks, Wave Farm, Rhizome, Franklin Furnace, Turbulence.org, New York Foundation for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, Experimental TV Center, NY State Council of the Arts, and Greenwall Foundation.
Their work has been reviewed at Art in America, The New Yorker, Bmore Art, Hyperallergic, Garage, and NYLON, and published in, Handmade Electronic Music (third edition), Emergence of Video Processing Tools, PAJ (Journal for Performance And Art), Maker Magazine, Leonardo Music, among others.
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9. Ken Butler, FF Alumn, now online at mfmspeakout.simplecast.com
Please visit the following website:
Thank you.
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10. Conrad Ventur, FF Alumn, now online at Artnews.com
Please visit the following website:
Thank you.
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11. Jerri Allyn, FF Alumn, now online thru Mar. 18
Hi everyone,
I just finished a panel presentation about CETA – the Comprehensive Ed Training Act in the 1970’s that funded a lot of artists doing community projects in the 1970s. When I worked at the LA Women’s Video Center/Woman’s Building (WB) in L.A., Rickey and I made a Public Service Announcement about gay rights. There are now 150 WB videos with the Getty Research Center. The Getty allowed me 10 days access for the panel presentation.
Rick and I did a fun one … Hope the link works for you!
Jerri xo
There are 3 PSAs, all a minute long.
Sign in as me to view #3 video, 1 min long, featuring Rickey & me! Instructions below.
We are providing you with remote access until March 18, 2022.
To access the recordings(s), please visit the following website:
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/2006m7wlesb
Thank you.
and click on the “Access digital files” link under the View Online tab.
Then, login using the following information:
Username: JAllyn
Password: Getty123
Choose ‘GRI Special & General Collections’ from the drop-down menu.
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12. Martha Rosler, FF Alumn, at e-flux, Brooklyn, March 18-20
Please visit this link:
Thank you.
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13. Joseph Keckler, Lydia Lunch, FF Alumns, now online at interlocutorinterviews.com
Please visit this link:
Thank you.
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14. Greg Sholette, FF Alumn, publishes new book
https://www.lundhumphries.com/products/the-art-of-activism-and-the-activism-of-art
Thank you.
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15. Michael Bramwell, FF Alumn, at Old Salem Museum & Gardens / Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Winston-Salem, NC, April 15-July 16
News media contact
Daniel K. Ackermann
336.721.7372 or DAckermann@oldsalem.org
HOUSE PARTY:
R.S.V.P. B.Y.O.B.
April 15 – July 16, 2022
Imaginative Exhibition at MESDA and Old Salem Brings Together Work by Artists Past and Present
David Drake ● Michelle Erickson ● Theaster Gates
Renee Green ● David Hammons ● Lonnie Holley
David Jarbour ● Todd Johnson ● Glenn Ligon
Alison Saar ● Kara Walker
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (March 18, 2022) – Old Salem Museums & Gardens and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) will present an exhibition of important artists past and present for a “house party” at the Museum. The exhibition is organized by guest curator Michael J. Bramwell with assistance from Old Salem and MESDA’s chief curator Daniel K. Ackermann. The House Party will include work by David Drake, Michelle Erickson, Theaster Gates, Renee Green, David Hammons, Lonnie Holley, Todd Johnson, Glenn Ligon, Alison Saar, Kara Walker, and others. House Party will be installed in one of MESDA’s most significant period rooms, a dining room reclaimed from Thomas Porcher’s Berkeley County, South Carolina, plantation house before it was demolished in the 1930s.
“In the 19th century the guests invited to a house party in this space would have been excluded or reduced to a service capacity, but now they bring their own bags to interrogate the material legacies of enslavement and its plantation forms,” says guest curator Michael Bramwell. “The exhibition is at once a memorial to the 135 people enslaved by Thomas Porcher at his White Hall plantation and a celebration of the Black craftspeople responsible for the carvings and woodwork in the dining room.” Recent scholarship in The MESDA Journal identified some of the Black craftspeople responsible for the woodwork in the room, including men named Sharloe, Jemmy, Jupiter, Jacky, Cyrus, and Dick. “This is what social justice work looks like in cultural space, at least as I think about it,” says Bramwell.
“Since MESDA was founded in 1965, we have always invited researchers and scholars to engage with our collection. Inviting artists and makers to engage with our unique holdings is a natural extension that helps us to continue to see the objects in our care in new and different ways,” says Daniel Ackermann, chief curator of Old Salem and MESDA. “As both a scholar of 19th century American Black art, and a contemporary visual artist himself, Bramwell is uniquely suited to help us see our collection in new ways and spark important conversations between past and present.”
HOUSE PARTY is an extension of Old Salem and MESDA’s Art Out of Bounds initiative launched in 2019. It is part of a long tradition of contemporary art collaborations at the museum, including Fred Wilson’s 1994 residency at Old Salem and his installation Insight/In Site/In Sight/Incite: Memory. This project builds on Bramwell’s work as one of Old Salem and MESDA’s inaugural Southern Pathways visiting curators in 2020. House Party expands on the work of Old Salem and MESDA’s nationally recognized Hidden Town, Art Out of Bounds, Study South, Access, and Equity initiatives.
HOUSE PARTY is funded in part by the Chipstone Foundation of Milwaukee and the Wunsch Americana Foundation of New York. “We are thrilled to be working with our partners at Chipstone and the Wunsch Americana Foundation to push forward innovative and inclusive new approaches to curatorial practice in our galleries,” says Frank D. Vagnone, president and CEO of Old Salem and MESDA.
Educational and public programs are planned. Timed admission to the exhibition is included with any Old Salem and MESDA Ticket.
About Visiting Curator Michael J. Bramwell
Michael J. Bramwell is a professional visual artist, educator, and scholar of African diasporic material culture. He has exhibited work and curated installations internationally. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where his dissertation focuses on the work of David Drake, an enslaved poet, potter, and abolitionist who worked in the Edgefield District of South Carolina.
About Old Salem Museums & Gardens
Old Salem Museums & Gardens is a unique living history site that shares the rich, authentic, and diverse cultural history of the early South—with special emphasis on the Moravians in North Carolina, enslaved and free people of African descent, and indigenous peoples of the Southern Woodlands—through the preservation and interpretation of material culture, architecture, and cultural landscapes. Its museums—the Historic Town of Salem, the Museum of Early Southern
Decorative Arts (MESDA), and the Gardens at Old Salem—are quickly becoming nationally known for innovative and novel interpretive models and programs. oldsalem.org
About the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts at Old Salem Museums & Gardens The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) is the preeminent center for the research of decorative arts and material culture of the early South. Part of Old Salem Museums & Gardens, MESDA is home to the finest collection of southern decorative arts and related research materials in the country. The museum is internationally recognized for its contributions to the study and understanding of the history, decorative arts, and material culture of the American South. mesda.org
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Danelly Reyes, Franklin Furnace University Intern, Winter 2022
