Harrell Fletcher,
2007
Harrell Fletcher received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from California College of the Arts. He studied organic farming at UCSC and went on to work on a variety of small Community Supported Agriculture farms, which impacted his work as an artist. Fletcher has produced a variety of socially engaged collaborative and interdisciplinary projects since the early 1990’s.
His work has been shown at SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Wattis Institute, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Sculpture Center, The Wrong Gallery, Apex Art, and Smackmellon in NYC, DiverseWorks and Aurora Picture show in Houston, TX, PICA in Portland, OR, CoCA and The Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, WA, Signal in Malmo, Sweden, Domain de Kerguehennec in France, The Tate Modern in London, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. He was a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Fletcher has work in the collections of MoMA, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, SFMOMA, The Hammer Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum, The De Young Museum, and The FRAC Brittany, France. From 2002 to 2009 Fletcher co-produced Learning To Love You More, a participatory website with Miranda July. Fletcher is an Associate Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.
Faith Wilding,
2007
Faith Wilding emigrated to the United States in 1961 from Paraguay. She received her MFA at CalArts where she was a founding member of the Feminist Art Program. Wilding is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work addresses aspects of the somatic, psychic, and sociopolitical history of the body. Recent publications, lectures, exhibitions and performances focus on issues of cyberfeminist (women and technology) theory and practice, with particular emphasis on biotechnology. Wilding has exhibited and lectured widely in the USA and Europe. Her audio work has been commissioned and broadcast by RIAS Berlin; WDR Cologne; and National Public Radio, USA. Wilding has published in MEANING, Heresies, Ms. Magazine, The Power of Feminist Art, and other books and magazines. She is the recipient of two individual media grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Currently, Wilding is a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the MFA in Visual Art Program at Vermont College of the Union Institute and University.
Anoka Farquee,
2007
Anoka Faruqee (b. 1972, Ann Arbor) earned her M.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art in 1997 and her B.A., Painting from Yale University in 1994. Faruqee is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program, and residencies at the Skowhegan School of Art and the PS1 National Studio Program. Her grants include the Pollock Krasner Foundation and Artadia. Currently, Faruqee is director of graduate studies in painting/printmaking at Yale School of Art, and has previously held positions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Cal Arts, where she was Co-Director of the ArtProgram.
Faruqee’s work has been exhibited in the US and abroad at venues including: MoMA/PS1, Queens, NY; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR; and Björkholmen Gallery, Stockholm, among others. Faruqee recently curated the major exhibition Search Versus Re-Search: Josef Albers, Artist and Educator, and directed a short film about Albers’ art and teaching, for the Yale School of Art 32 Edgewood Gallery. She is represented by Koenig & Clinton gallery in New York, and Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco. Faruqee lives and works in New Haven, CT.
Takao Kawaguchi,
2007
Takao Kawaguchi is a performer who uses his body as his sole medium in collaborations with artists like Fuyuki Yamakawa, known for his creations that utilize medical equipment to isolate bodily functions like the beat of the heart and synchronize them with sound, light and video images in unique forms of expression, and Atsuhiro Ito, who uses a device called “optron” that amplifies the electronic noise of florescent light tubes to create powerful displays of light and sound. In this interview we talk with Kawaguchi about his artistic activities, which include his work as a current member of the legendary 1990s performance/artist group “dumb type.”
The Speculative Archive,
2007
The Speculative Archive produces videos, photographs, installations, and published texts. From 1999 to 2003, Archive projects centered on state secrecy and the production of the past. Current works address the use of documents—images, texts, objects, bodies, and physical structures—to project and claim visions of the future. The Archive is a collaboration of Los Angeles-based artists Julia Meltzer and David Thorne. Recent projects have been exhibited in the 2006 California Biennial (Orange County Museum of Art), Gallery Akbank Sanat (Istanbul), Kunstmuseum Goteborg (Sweden), Palazzo de la Papesse, (Siena, Italy), Apex Art (New York), Momenta (New York), the Hayward Gallery’s (London) travelling exhibition program, Whitechapel Gallery (London), the Oberhausen Short Film Festival (Germany), the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Video Festival, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival, among others.
Claire Sherman,
2007
Claire Sherman is a painter currently living and working in New York City. Her work is in the collection of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, Kansas), the Margulies Collection (Miami), and other noteworthy public and private collections. She has had solo exhibitions in New York's DC Moore Gallery and DCKT Contemporary, Amsterdam's Galerie Hof & Huyser, London's Houldsworth Gallery, and Chicago's Kavi Gupta Gallery.
Sherman's main body of work consists of landscapes painted with oil on canvas. Their subject matter, more specifically described as icy glaciers, ominous islands, rocky terrain, and foliage, is in line with philosophical discourse on the sublime. Sherman is influenced by the writings of Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-François Lyotard who discussed the sublime and the beauty of the natural world.
clairesherman.com,
Hamza Walker,
2007
Hamza Walker was born in 1966 in New York City, has spent 22 years as the Director of Education and Associate Curator for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. He was also on the faculty of The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. He has written for Trans, New Art Examiner, Parkett, and Artforum, and penned catalogue essays on Darren Almond, Rebecca Morris, Giovanni Anselmo, Thomas Hirschhorn, Moshekwa Langa, and Katharina Grosse. He hasl also organized the first United States exhibition of works by Antwerp native Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven in 2010. At the Ren, Hamza has curated numerous group exhibitions that speak to the contemporary moment, including Teen Paranormal Romance (2014); Suicide Narcissus 2013); Black Is, Black Ain’t (2008); and New Video, New Europe (2004). He also worked closely with individual artists on many solo exhibitions, including William J. O’Brien (2011); Kateřina Šedá, It Doesn’t Matter (2008); Mai-Thu Perret, “And every woman will be a walking synthesis of the universe” (2006); and Simparch and Kevin Drumm, Spec: An Electro-Acoustic Investigation (2001). Prior to his work at the Renaissance Society, Walker was the Public Art Coordinator for the City of Chicago, Department of Cultural Affairs. Walker is the Executive Director of Los Angeles nonprofit art space LAXART since late 2016.
William J. O’Brien,
2008
The raw, often attitudinal sculptures and paintings of William J. O'Brien reject the sentimentality and preciousness generally associated with the handmade. Working extensively in ceramic, the artist creates highly tactile surfaces—some with bulbous, quasi-organic protrusions, others with hand-carved hatchings or the occasional sardonic grin—and further heightens these grotesque topographies with gestural applications of color and glaze. O'Brien's mixed-media canvases show a similar interest in textural interplay and an almost obsessive pursuit of pattern; the result is a dense cacophony of disparate elements, conveying a studied messiness. O'Brien's work has been exhibited widely, including at the University of Chicago's Renaissance Society (2011), the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art (2007), the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (2005), and Artists Space in New York (2004).
Deborah Stratman,
2008
Stratman's work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Hammer Museum, Witte de With, Walker Art Center, Yerba Buena Center, ICA London, MCA Chicago, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, Museum of the Moving Image NY, Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archives, Los Angeles Film Forum, San Francisco Cinemateque, REDCAT Los Angeles, Gene Siskel Film Center, Harvard Film Archives, Her work has screened extensively at Film Festivals such as Rotterdam Int’l Film Festival, Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Images Festival, Toronto Int’l Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and the Sundance Film Festival, and many others. Deborah Stratman is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art & Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She earned her MFA from California Institute of the Arts (1995), and her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1990).
Gaylen Gerber,
2008
Gaylen Gerber is an artist and educator known primarily for his gray monochrome paintings, which he refers to as “backdrops” and “supports.” Often foregrounding the works of other artists with his own painted backgrounds, he challenges viewer perceptions of art’s context and neutrality. Gerber has exhibited at Musee d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; FRAC-Bourgogne, Dijon, France; Neues Meuseum Weserburg Bremen, Germany; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; Art Institute of Chicago; Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall, Copenhagen; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Renaissance Society, University of Chicago; Lisson Gallery, London; Galerie Nachst St. Stephan/Rosemarie Schwarzwalder, Vienna; Galerie Susanna Kulli, Zurich; Daniel Hug Gallery, Los Angeles; and Donald Young Gallery, Chicago.
