2019 MacArthur Genius Grant winner Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972, USA) combines Native American traditions with the visual languages of Modernism to explore the contemporary confluence of personal identity, culture, history, and international social narratives. Gibson is a member of the Choctaw and Cherokee nations. He currently lives and works in Hudson, New York. One of his most recognized series involves punching bags that Gibson deftly transforms into aesthetic totems. Another of Gibson’s long running series involves an examination of transformational garments. A selection of these garments were exhibited in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

Gibson’s work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Eiteljorg Museum, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, amongst others. Recent exhibitions include Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire is Applied to a Stone it Cracks, Brooklyn Art Museum, NY; Jeffrey Gibson: CAN YOU FEEL IT, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, USA; She Never Dances Alone, Times Square Arts; Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, USA; Jeffrey Gibson: The Anthropophagic Effect, New Museum, New York, USA; and Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, USA, and Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA,

In partnership with the Brown Arts Initiative.

Guadalupe Maravilla is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer. At the age of eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. In 2016, Maravilla became a U.S. citizen and adopted the name Guadalupe Maravilla in solidarity with his undocumented father, who uses Maravilla as his last name. As an acknowledgement of his own migratory past, Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts of immigrant culture, particularly those belonging to Latinx communities.

Maravilla currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Additionally, he has performed and presented his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Queens Museum, New York; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Museum of Art of El Salvador, San Salvador; X Central American Biennial, Costa Rica; New York;, Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, New York; and the Drawing Center, New York, among others.

Awards and fellowships include; Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship 2019, Soros Fellowship: Art Migration and Public Space 2019, Map fund 2019, Creative Capital Grant 2016, Franklin Furnace 2018, Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant 2016, Art Matters Grant 2013, Art Matters Fellowship 2017, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship 2018, Dedalus Foundation Grant 2013 and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Award 2003. Residencies include; LMCC Workspace, SOMA, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Drawing Center Open Sessions.

In partnership with the Brown Arts Initiative.

Janine Antoni is a visual artist who was born in Freeport, Bahamas in 1964. She received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is known for her unusual processes. Her body is both her tool for making and the source from which her meaning arises. Antoni’s early work transformed materials like chocolate and soap and used everyday activities like bathing, eating, and sleeping as sculptural processes. She carefully articulates her relationship to the world, giving rise to emotional states that are felt in and through the senses. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality speaks directly to the viewer’s body.

Antoni has been featured in numerous international biennials including documenta14, the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, the Istanbul Biennial, the Kwangju Biennial, the Prospect.1 Biennial in New Orleans and the SITE Santa Fe Biennial. Antoni is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship (1998), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award (2011), Creative Capital Grant (2012), and Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2014). Her most recent major exhibition, I am fertile ground, was presented at The Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, NY in 2019. Antoni currently resides in New York and is represented by Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York, and Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco.

In partnership with the Brown Arts Initiative.

Ticket released February 5
bit.ly/SVALS0219

Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer who researches the living matters of the unified multi-dimensional being that has grown out of the surface of our planet. Her work is driven by research but inspired by questions of form. She advocates for the role of the amateur in the production and interpretation of knowledge, while a longstanding interest in nature and artificiality predicates her recent responses to anthropogenic climate change.

Past projects focused on industrial agriculture in a global, corporate food system, as well as agroecological methods of growing. Pentecost has exhibited work nationally and internationally at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany; 13th Istanbul Biennial; White Chapel, London; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy, 3^rd Mongolian Land Art Biennial; Higher Pictures, New York; Corcoran Museum, Washington, DC; Milwaukee Art Museum; Whitney Museum, Stamford, CT; Transmediale 05, Berlin; and American Fine Arts, New York. She is a professor in the department of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and holds degrees from Smith College and the Pratt Institute.

Register for event here: bit.ly/FVALS1030

Described by The New York Times as “one of the quiet giants of post-conceptual photography,” Deschenes has exhibited her work regularly since receiving her BFA in 1988 from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. The first comprehensive survey exhibition of her photographs, organized by Eva Respini, was on view at the ICA Boston in 2016; for the occasion of this exhibition, a monograph was published by Prestel. She has most recently mounted solo exhibitions at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Campoli Presti, London and Paris; Secession, Vienna; and Sutton Lane, Paris and Brussels. Featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, she is most recently the recipient of the 2014 Rappaport Prize awarded by deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Her work is represented in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

FPS (60), 2018. Silver gelatin photograms mounted on Dibond, 60 parts, each: 60” x 2.5”, overall dimensions: 60” x 445”

Ticket sales beginning Wed. Oct 2
Register for event here: bit.ly/FVALS1016

Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, Brendan’s projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, Brendan’s projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance hall, part political protest…always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity. Brendan is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is currently the recipient of a 2017 Canada Council New Chapters grant. His projects have shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (New York); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); The Getty Museum (Los Angeles); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); MAC (Montreal); among a great many others. He is currently artist-in-residency and faculty at Northwestern University and represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago. Upcoming projects in 2019 include performances and solo presentations at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art (Washington); the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago); and the Noguchi Museum (New York).

Image: As One , 2015, 4 channel video installation, and digital photo series (shown: digital print), 50” x 40”.

Register for tickets here: bit.ly/FVALS1002

Sanford Biggers’ work is an interplay of narrative, perspective and history that speaks to current social, political and economic happenings while also examining the contexts that bore them. His diverse practice positions him as a collaborator with the past through explorations of often overlooked cultural and political narratives from American history. As creative director and keyboardist, he fronts Moon Medicin, a multimedia concept band that straddles visual art and music with performances staged against a backdrop of curated sound effects and video.

Livestream: www.brown.edu/web/livestream

We will check tickets at the door- please print your ticket(s) and have them ready when you arrive at the event. If you do not have a printed ticket or a mobile ticket, you will be asked to join the standby audience line. All unclaimed seats are released to the standby audience 15 minutes before the program start time. Once the event begins, late admission will not be allowed into the main event area. If you arrive late, you will be directed to the lower level to watch a simulcast, should space be available.

First come, first seated. Registration does not guarantee admission.

The Guerrilla Girls are feminist activist artists. We wear gorilla masks in public and use facts, humor and outrageous visuals to expose gender and ethnic bias as well as corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture. Our anonymity keeps the focus on the issues, and away from who we might be: we could be anyone and we are everywhere. We believe in an intersectional feminism that fights discrimination and supports human rights for all people and all genders. We undermine the idea of a mainstream narrative by revealing the understory, the subtext, the overlooked, and the downright unfair.

Presented by The Department of Visual Art.
This project is made possible, in part, by the Brown Arts Initiative, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, History of Art and Architecture, the Department of Modern Culture and Media, Program in Literary Arts, the Pembroke Center, the Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender, and the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies.

Copyright © Guerrilla Girls and courtesy of guerrillagirls.com

Please register for tickets here.
Tickets released three weeks prior to event.

Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet, artist, filmmaker, and activist. Her work addresses ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. It began in the mid 60’s as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard”. It was included in Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, Germany 2017, and is collected in the Tate Modern, MoMA and Guggenheim Museum. Her most recent solo shows were at The Brooklyn Museum and the MFA, Boston, 2018.

Her most recent books are: New and Selected Poems, 2018, AMAzone Palabrarmas, 2018, About to Happen, 2017, Read Thread, The Story of the Red Thread, 2017.  

Please register for tickets here.
Tickets released three weeks prior to event.

Jane Dickson is the painter of American darkness. First recognized in the early 1980s for her depictions of Times Square. Dickson was part of the politically charged 1980’s scene of artists working at the intersection of street art, hip hop, film and installation like David Wojnarowicz, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, and her filmmaker husband Charlie Ahearn. She was a member of the influential artist collectives Colab (Collaborative Projects) and Fashion Moda in the South Bronx. As one of the organizers of the now legendary Times Square Show for which she created the poster and digital animation that ran hourly on the Spectacolor sign at 1 Times Square, the first computerized light board in New York. This groundbreaking digital installation led Dickson to initiate the “Messages to the Public” series, in 1981, with the Public Art Fund, presenting a series of animated artworks on the billboards of Times Square and bringing first public attention to her friends, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, David Hammons, Crash among others.

Image attached - Copyright of John Dean courtesy of Goya Contemporary Gallery

Please register here: goo.gl/HNWEjz

Kori Newkirk was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1970, and received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (1993) and his MFA from the University of California, Irvine (1997). He also attended The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (1997), Cooper Union, New York City, Brighton Polytechnic, Brighton UK and SUNY Cortland, New York. His work has been shown in solo and group shows around the world and has been written about in various publications across the spectrum. In addition he has also been awarded numerous grants and fellowships. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Jessica Simmons is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. She received a BA from Brown University (2007), and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2015), where she was also a Writing Fellow. Hovering within the haptic, oblique space that exists between the language of abstraction and the abstraction of language, her work spans photography, drawing, printmaking, art criticism, and poetry. She has exhibited work both nationally and internationally, including at Grice Bench, Los Angeles (2017) and Material Art Fair, Mexico City (2017). She contributes essays and reviews to Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles.

Please register here: http://goo.gl/sxthoa

Carole Freeman (American / Canadian, b. 1954) grew up in Winnipeg, Canada and attended the Royal College of Art in London, UK (M.A., Painting).

Freeman’s talk will focus on her 2018 New York solo exhibition “Unsung”, portraits of little known Americans who bring to light current socio-political issues. Other recent Canadian solo exhibitions include “Something About Winnipeg”;  “Portraits of Facebook”, opened by the managing director of Facebook Canada; and three exhibitions of celebrity portraits featured during the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Freeman has received international recognition through Los Angeles group exhibitions with David Hockney, Elizabeth Peyton, Frank Auerbach, Picasso, and Matisse, and the shortlist exhibitions for Young Masters Art Prize 2017 in London, UK. Commissions include those by New York art critics Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith, Los Angeles art dealer Leslie Sacks, and Lord and Lady Glentoran of Dublin, Ireland.

Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine, April 15, 2018

Art
Carole Freeman: “Unsung”
The difference-makers.  
These transporting portraits are beautiful meditations in paint on great women and men like Rachel Carson, who wrote the world-changing “Silent Spring”, and Hugh Thompson Jr., the helicopter pilot who tried to halt the 1968 My Lai massacre. Each is rendered lovingly and intensely; the works impart that the chariot to greatness comes in many forms and that every artist is also one of these mighty figures, laboring with passion in private shadows. —J.S. Jim Kempner Fine Art, 501 West 23rd Street, through May 7 

Please register here: goo.gl/gVBLy9

Jean Shin is recognized for her monumental installations that transform everyday objects into elegant expressions of identity and community. Her work has been widely exhibited in over 150 major museums and cultural institutions including at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona and Crow Collection in Dallas, Museum of Fine Art Houston and Barns Foundation. In recognition of excellence, she has received numerous awards including two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, Pollock Krasner Grant, among others.

Jonathan Allmaier lives in New York, where his work is represented by James Fuentes. His work has been discussed in The New Yorker, San Francisco Arts Quarterly, Hyperallergic, TimeOut New York, New American Paintings, The Brooklyn Rail, New York Magazine, and other publications. In 2014, James Fuentes published Which World, a collection of his essays. He earned his BA in Philosophy and Visual Arts (honors) from Brown University, and his MFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art.

*Please note the location for this event has changed*

Teju Cole is the photography critic of the New York Times Magazine and the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard. He was born in the US in 1975 to Nigerian parents, and raised in Nigeria. He currently lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of four books.

Teju Cole has contributed to the New York Times, the New Yorker, Granta, Brick, and many other magazines. His photography column at the New York Times Magazine, “On Photography,” was a finalist for a 2016 National Magazine Award.

Presented by The Department of Visual Art
Supported, in part, by the Department of Africana Studies, Brown Arts Initiative, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Program in Literary Arts, Department of Modern Culture and Media, and the Mollie D. Manneville Lectureship Fund

Shaun Leonardo’s performance practice is participatory in nature and invested in a process of embodiment, promoting the political potential of attention and discomfort as a means to disrupt meaning and shift perspective. His recent commission for the Guggenheim Museum, Primitive Games, exemplifies this practice. This body of work is the pillar for his conversation with Christina Yang, Director of Public Programs at the Guggenheim Museum. Together, Shaun and Christina will navigate a discussion around the motivations and process of actualizing a performance as dynamic and challenging as Primitive Games and what it means for artists and museums to sustain a social practice.

Workshop: Wed. Oct 3, 2-4pm
The goal of this project is to ask the question: Are we, through non-verbal action, able to model and momentarily restore purpose to the act of debate, by seeing difference not as a hindering factor but as a necessary component to reaching consensus and enacting change? This project is an attempt to investigate the ways in which platforms of discussion may be rethought and possibly reinvented. Therefore, ideas of opposition/ confrontation/competition will be held at the center of all exercises as a way to formulate body language around non-verbal debate.

Presented by the Department of Visual Art and the Brown Arts Initiative.

Yevgeniya Baras is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Yevgeniya has a BA and MS from the University of Pennsylvania (2003) and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007).

Yevgeniya co-founded and co-curated Regina Rex Gallery on the Lower East Side of NY for eight years. The gallery closed in the Spring of 2018. Yevgeniya has curated and co-curated over twenty exhibitions at Regina Rex and other galleries in NY, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

Yevgeniya has been teaching painting, drawing, and art history for the past ten years to college students. She is currently teaching at RISD and Sarah Lawrence College.