MARTHA ROSLER

 Tuesday, Jan 29, 2019, 4:00pm, Falvey Hall

 Sponsored by the Mixed Media Lecture Series

 

Brooklyn-based artist Martha Rosler works in video, photography, text, installation, and performance. Her work often addresses matters of the public sphere and landscapes of everyday life – actual and virtual – especially as they affect women. For many years Rosler has produced works on war and the national security climate, connecting life at home with the conduct of war abroad, in which her photomontage series played a critical part. In 2004 and 2008, in opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, she reinstituted her now well-known series of photomontages House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, made as a response to the war in Vietnam in the late 1960s. She has also published several books of photographs, texts, and commentary on public space, ranging from airports and roads to housing and gentrification. 

Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, where she continues to live and work. She attended the Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and the University of California, San Diego, where she received her BFA and MFA respectively. She has had solo exhibitions at various institutions, internationally and in the US, including The Jewish Museum, New York (2018); the Seattle Museum of Art, Seattle (2016); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); The Centro José Guerrero, Granada, Spain (2009-10); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007); the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1990); and the Dia Art Foundation, New York (1989). She has been included in numerous group exhibitions at institutions such as The Brooklyn Museum, New York (2015); The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (2013); the LA Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2011), and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (2008). Rosler has also published 17 books of photography, art, and writing, in several languages. She received the Guggenheim Museum Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. 

 DIANA AL-HADID

 Tuesday, Feb 5, 2019 6:00pm Parkway Theater

 Sponsored by the Mixed Media Lecture Series

 

Diana Al-Hadid is a Syrian-American artist who currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Her sculptures take towers as their central theme, drawing together a wide variety of associations: power, wealth, technological and urban development, ideas of progress and globalism. Al-Hadid constructs forms that are a baroque complex of architectural structures and figurative allusions which appear to be in a state between construction and deconstruction. She re-interprets a variety of common sculpture materials, such as cardboard, wood, plaster and metal to create sculptures that are simultaneously dense with material yet seemingly ethereal and gravity defying. Many of Al-Hadid’s newer pieces blur the boundary between sculpture and painting.

Al-Hadid attended Kent State University where she received her BFA and later attended Virginia Commonwealth University where she received her MFA in sculpture. Notable solo Exhibitions include, Akron Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Nasher Sculpture Center. Al-Hadid has also shown in numerous Public Collections, which include, the Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art, Judith Rothschild Collection. 

  ALEX DA CORTE

  Tuesday, Feb 19, 2019 4:00pm, Location TBA

 

Alex Da Corte works with objects and materials that are detached from their original function to give them new potential both symbolically and formally. In working with these objects, Da Corte tries to put aside his own touch in order to reveal and locate the previous touches, the objects own story. In Alex Da Corte’s artwork objects can even act as stand-ins for people: they represent another kind of language that we can pair together to create these sentences that turn into poetry. 

Da Corte’s works belongs to a state of delusion where logic is put aside in order to access the stranger parts of our brains. In this state, the detached objects may seem to be destroying their own icon but Da Corte reminds us, commonly through the American diners never-changing inventory, the bottle of ketchup and the black cup of coffee, that in believing we can undo the icon, we are setting ourselves up for failure. Alex Da Corte works with large scale installations that often include both wall based works, floor pieces, sculptures, lights, colours and scents as well as works from other artists. Da Corte has roots in the pop-art tradition and an incredible love and feeling for colours as well as a sense of how the high-aesthetic may also contain a sense of humour. However, the ‘comedy’ is well balanced with more sincere aspects as some of the works turn mournful or macabre or just plain heart breaking.

Recent solo exhibitions include shows at Karma Gallery, New York, NY, US (2018); Josh Lilley Gallery, London, UK (2017); New Museum, New York, NY, US (2017); The Secession, Vienna, AT (2017); HEART Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning, DK (2016); MassMoca, MA, US (2016); Gio Marconi, Milan, IT (2015); Luxembourg & Dayan, NY, US (2015); ICA Philadelphia, PA, US (2014); White Cube, London, UK (2014); David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen, DK (2014); Carl Kostyal, Stockholm, SE (2014); ICA Portland, ME, US (2013); Artspeak, Vancouver, CA (2013); Joe Sheftel Gallery, NY, US (2012).

 Selected Group Exhibitions include shows at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY, US (2017); The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, US (2017); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, DK (2016); Mitchell, Innes & Nash, NY, US (2014); Zach Feuer, NY, US (2013); Rachel Uffner, NY, US (2013); David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen, DK (2012); Nicole Klagsbrun, NY, US (2011); MoMA, NY, US (2011); Hammer Museum, LA, US (2010); Yvon Lambert, NY, US (2010); MoMA/PS1, NY, US.

 XIAOYU WENG

 Tuesday, Feb 26, 2019 4:00pm Lazarus Auditorium

 

 

Xiaoyu Weng is the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art at the Guggenheim. At the Guggenheim, she has cocurated the exhibitions Tales of Our Time (2016–17) and One Hand Clapping, on view from May 4 through October 21, 2018.

Previously she served as the founding director of the Kadist Art Foundation’s Asia Programs, Paris and San Francisco. She launched the Kadist Curatorial Collaboration, which organizes exhibitions that stimulate cultural exchange, and she oversaw artist residencies and the building of the contemporary Asian art collection. From 2009 to 2010, she worked as a curator at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts (CCA). Her other recent projects include Soft Crash at Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Italy (2016); Robert Zhao Renhui: Flies Prefer Yellow at Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco (2014–15); Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible? at Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014); Invisible Hand: Curating as Gesture, the second CAFAM International Biennial at Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Beijing (2014); and Ming Wong: Making Chinatown at Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco (2013).

Educated at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and CCA in San Francisco, Weng also has written on contemporary art and visual culture for various periodicals and in numerous catalogues, including those published for the 2012 Gwangju Biennial, 2012 Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial, and 2013 Auckland Triennial. She is a contributing editor of Leap, a bilingual magazine dedicated to contemporary art and visual culture from China. Her essay “Working with Archive” won the Artforum Critical Writing Award in 2011. Weng is the recipient of the 2017 Visionary Awards, which are presented by Art in General, New York, to highlight work that champions the transformative power of art and that nurtures and supports diverse artistic talents. Weng was selected for her innovative leadership and singular contributions to the field. She was also the winner of the eighth edition of Premio Lorenzo Bonald per L’Arte Enterprize for international curators in 2015.

 R.H. QUAYTMAN

 Tuesday, April 9, 2019 4:00pm at Lazarus Auditorium

 

 

 

Since 2001, Quaytman’s paintings have been in many ways governed by a strict set of rules. Works are organized into focused groups referred to as “chapters,” which are sequentially numbered and uniquely titled. The paintings are executed on plywood panels that conform to a consistent set of geometrically interrelated dimensions. Screenprinted photographic imagery appears in each chapter, as do abstract compositions. Despite these rigorously held consistencies, Quaytman’s work is not reducible to a systematically applied set of rules. Instead, the artist uses these parameters to explore an array of subjects, while maintaining an overarching, ongoing investigation of the factors that enable a painting to generate meaning, whether they be its content, its mode of production, or the context in which it is encountered.

The decision to imitate the structure of a book by conceptualizing groups of paintings as chapters reflects Quaytman’s belief that images and their meanings are inherently contingent. The significance of each painting is dependent not only on the person standing before it but also on the image next to it, as well as the space inhabited by both viewer and artwork. Accordingly, the subject matter of each chapter is shaped in response to the context in which it is first shown. Taking into account the physical space, its history, and its present identity, Quaytman embarks on in-depth research, sometimes following idiosyncratic threads that are informed by circumstantial connections or the content of previous chapters. For example, the artist’s Point de Gaze, Chapter 23 engages three seemingly disparate topics—the sculpture of Lygia Clark, a medieval Roman Catholic order, and Belgian lace-making—which each relate to the city, Brussels, or the venue, Gladstone Gallery, where this chapter was first exhibited. The artist’s approach, which privileges receptivity over control, mirrors the structure of the chapters themselves, in which individual paintings are as likely to be linked suggestively as they are to posit definitive relationships. Through this open-ended practice, Quaytman explores painting’s capacity to create and accrue meaning in terms that are as expansive as the artist’s ever-growing body of work.

Quaytman has had solo exhibitions at venues including Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2009); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2010); Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York (2010); Kunsthalle Basel (2011); Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (2013); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2016); and Secession, Vienna (2017); as well as R. H. Quaytman: + x, Chapter 34 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2018). Group exhibitions include Abstract Generation: Now in Print, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); A History: Art, Architecture, Design from the 1980s until Today, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2014); and Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015). Quaytman’s work has been included in the Lodz Biennial, Poland (2004); Whitney Biennial, New York (2010); Venice Biennale (2011); and Documenta, Athens and Kassel (2017). The artist was awarded a Rome Prize (1992) and the Wolfgang Hahn Prize (2015). Quaytman lives and works in New York and Connecticut.