Show notes
The body may be a battleground but so is art. People fight over it. Always have. What if art fights back? Speaks its mind? What happens to artists -- and their public -- when an artwork ambushes their expectations? What subjects and materials are vulnerable to changing values? When standards of beauty accepted by one culture are repudiated by another, which becomes the “norm” and who gets to say? Can an artwork affect attitudes or behavior -- particularly in regard to women‘s bodies -- and still retain its integrity as art? What is art, anyway? Shall we discuss?
About Zoë Buckman
Zoë Buckman was born in London, where she is represented by the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, and by Lyles & King in New York, where she lives now. Much of her transformative work, which involves embroidery (threads of trauma), textiles, video and photography, addresses domestic violence by highlighting women’s resilient capacity for tenderness. In addition to gallery exhibitions – she also has shown with Fort Gansevoort in New York and Gavlak in Los Angeles. Buckman has made several public artworks, including Champs, a lighted sign in Los Angeles commissioned by the Art Production Fund. Every night this month, just before midnight, her large-scale digital animation, MENDED, commissioned by Times Square Arts, is displaying her kaleidoscopic imagery – boxing gloves, mandalas, metal chains, flowers -- across twenty electronic billboards on Broadway at the crossroads of the world.
About Jasmin Wahi
Jasmine Wahi is a curator and social activist who cofounded the nonprofit Project for Empty Space in Newark, NJ and New York City. In addition, Wahi has organized independent projects across the world, including “Abortion Is Normal,” an ongoing series of exhibitions, and “American Truth.” She teaches at the Brooklyn College and is a core mentor of the Pratt School of Art’s Pratt Forward program. Previously, she was the inaugural Holly Block Social Justice Curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and a member of the faculty at the Yale School of Art. She also delivered the TED talk, “All the women. In me. Are Tired.” Wahi lives in Brooklyn with her dog Momo.
About Genevieve Gaignard
Genevieve Gaignard is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, where she is represented by the Susanne Vielmetter Gallery. Earlier this year, the gallery presented “Strange Fruit,” an ambitious exploration of the complex links between race, femininity and cultural identity. She was also included in “This Is Not America’s Flag” at the Broad Museum, a group exhibition detailing the fraught symbolism of our national emblem. Her work, including self-portraiture, collage, sculpture and installation, resides in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Perez Art Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. Recently, Gaignard partnered with Orange Barrel Media on “Look At Them Look At Us,” a site sp specific, permanent public art installation in downtown Atlanta, GA.
About Linda Yablonsky
Linda Yablonsky is a renowned critic and arts journalist based in New York. Over the last thirty years her byline has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times and T Magazine, Artforum, W Magazine, Art News, Bloomberg, and many more. In 2002 she helped to pioneer the streaming arts radio channel, WPS1 for MoMA PS1. She also founded and directed NightLight Readings (1991-1999), a monthly writers-in-performance series held at The Drawing Center and other art spaces in New York, and from 2002-2004 was literature curator for The Kitchen. Currently, she contributes the monthly column, New York Insider, to The Art Newspaper and is writing a major biography of the artist Jeff Koons.