A.K. Burns, October 5, 2021
A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in New York. Using video, installation, sculpture, drawing, writing and collaboration Burns queries notions of value as they are embodied at the nexus of language and materiality. Burns has exhibited internationally with works acquired by public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; and the Julia Stoschek Collection, Germany. Burns is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Art, a 2016 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award recipient. A frequent collaborator, Burns was a founding member of artists activist group W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Greater Economy). Burns is represented by Michel Rein Gallery, Paris/Brussels; and Video Data Bank, Chicago. A.K. Burns is currently a Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College, Department of Art & Art History and serves as faculty in the Bard MFA Program.
To join the zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81484622438
Dr. Cynthia Hawkins, November 11, 2021
In my practice I combine both non-objective and abstraction methods. Abstraction uses the real to interpret and the known world, while a non-objective method refuses the real and instead uses the elements of art to make art, disregarding the actual. Abstraction in the visual and plastic arts is misrecognized as incomprehensible when in fact, abstraction of the visual is imbued with elements similar to jazz. These conversations – visual art elements of movement, form, color, line create, that is orchestrate a compositional whole that results in a two - dimensional composition of color, lines, and shapes that implies deep and shallow space.I have always looked at the particulars of what is around me and reinterpret them. I use various scientific theories and images from astrophysics, microbiology, space-time and mathematics. I wonder about cognitive science and how the eye interprets what we see; what do those signs and signifiers mean? Can the signs we take for granted be understood in some other way?
I use natural forms; such forms lend themselves to becoming other than that which they are. Stones have history and evolutionary processes; they make their way up to the surface by natural forces, or by being mined. They are heavy, smooth, rough and bound, too, by gravity. Yet in the mind and hands of the artist, rocks can fly through the air, and do fly through space. Can the color of a rock that flies, leaving the earth’s orbit, change its nature, its color? It might be that the rock attains agency. With the help of one whose effort is to make something new and different happens to open a door to an alternative way of being, thinking and looking.
Cynthia Hawkins received her PhD in American Studies from the Department of Transnational Studies at the University at Buffalo. She has presented lectures based on her dissertation research African American Agency and the Art Object 1868 – 1917; other presentations include Dox Thrash, Robert Blackburn, Genre Scenes in the Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection, and has received fellowships that include Black Metropolis Research Consortium. She is currently Gallery Director and Curator at the State University of New York, Geneseo’s Bertha V.B. Lederer Gallery and teaches as an adjunct in history and art history departments. She received an MA in Museum Studies from Seton Hall University and an MFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art. Her research interests include, 19th century American and African American History, theory, U.S. museum formation, race, gender, identity, citizenship, and cultural studies. Cynthia Hawkins is an abstract painter with a national exhibition record; she lives in Rochester, New York with her partner and his dog.
Barbara Takenaga, February 22, 2022
Eileen Quinlan, March 7, 2022
Eileen Quinlan (born 1972, Boston) is an internationally known American artist exploring the material boundaries of the photographic process and its personal and conceptual implications. She often collaborates and exhibits with a close community of artists, including her husband, Cheyney Thompson and friends, Tanyth Berkeley, Walead Beshty, Liz Deschenes, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Matt Keegan, Lucy McKenzie, Blake Rayne, and Sara VanDerBeek. Quinlan often begins her work with still-life and studio photography, and subjects the images further darkroom and material manipulation. Her works oscillate between abstract and representational, suggesting that the lens-based process is indiscriminate in its capacity to capture, while at the same time acknowledging the often intimate and personal implications of Quinlan’s practice. Quinlan begins each series (each image, in fact) with a polaroid which serve as the basis from which further decisions are derived.
Quinlan earned a BFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1996 and a MFA from Columbia University in 2005 and lives and works in New York. Her first solo museum survey at ICA Boston in 2009 was followed by group exhibitions New Photography curated by Roxana Marcoci at MoMA (2013), What Is a Photograph? curated by Carol Squiers at ICP (2014), Outside the Lines: Rites of Spring at CAM, Houston (2014). A survey of polaroid works dating from 2005 to 2017 entitled Too Much was shown at Miguel Abreu Gallery in 2018. Quinlan’s work is in many private and museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, LACMA, Los Angeles MOCA, UCLA Hammer Museum, the Ackland Museum, among others. OSMOS Books also published a book surveying Quinlan’s use of polaroid film from 2006 to 2017 entitled “Good Enough,” edited by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz.
Heeseop Yoon, April 5, 2022
Heeseop Yoon was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. She holds her BFA from Chung-ang University, Seoul, Korea and MFA from City College of NY, NY. She is known for her large-scaled line drawing installations and also very intricate black and white drawings.
She has had solo and two-person shows at Triple Candie, March Gallery, and Bose Pacia, all NY; Arario Gallery, Seoul; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Monmouth University, West Long Branch, NJ; OZ Arts, Nashville, TN; and in Solitaire with Sara Berman at Sapar Contemporary, NYC. She has recently also shown with Nuanced, Dedee Shattuck Gallery, Westport, MA; TRAVERS, William Holman Gallery, NY,NY; Crossing Borders, Periphery Space Gallery, RI; and Drawing in Space, Des Moines Art Center, IA.
She has exhibited in museums and art centers internationally, including MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; The Bronx Museum, NY; Seoul Arts Center, Korea; China Association for Science and Technology (CAST), Australiaand Media Art Center, Beijing, and has participated in several residencies such as the Lower East Side Printshop, Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation; Skowhegan School of Painting, and Artist Alliance Inc., all NY, and Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen Germany. She completed her first public mural installation in Italian Market in Philadelphia and had a recent solo exhibition at Cityway Gallery, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, IN.
She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Derrick Woods-Morrow, April 14, 2022
Derrick Woods-Morrow, Excerpts from Acts of Divination (II) - Negation of Sight, Documentation of 2-hour durational performance (2019), photograph, 54” x 36”
edition of 4, +2 AP
Derrick Woods-Morrow's (b.1990) work is a meditation on deviation and disruption, on language and representation - on growing up in the American South. Currently based in Chicago and originally from Greensboro, North Carolina his artistic practice explores black sexual freedoms and the complicated histories concerning access to these freedoms.
As he navigates historical archives, he searches for moments, or ‘glitches’ that show alternative queer futures, existing, emboldened, and exacting – Freedom. Together, with other Queer Folx, he creates photographs, moving images, performance, installations and sculptures that recognize histories they were written out of and future places they wish to occupy.
Woods-Morrow’s work questions the very validity of the personal archive, of memory (ever fleeting), and of being ever-present with oneself. He is questioning the performance of the self untethered from expectation, both in his art, and his life – a new ideal of intimacy, where darkness liberates us, and blackness is inherently queer.
A recipient of the 2018 Artadia Award, Derrick Woods-Morrow received his MFA in Photography from the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 2016, and was most recently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Photography and Teaching Artist at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is an alum of the Fire Island Artist Residency & Chicago's Bolt Residency. He has screened films at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center & Chicago Arts Incubator. His work has exhibited in collaboration with Paul Sepuya in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; at YNCI V: Detroit Art Week Expo (curated by Darryl Terrell); in Photography Now at The Center for Photography at Woodstock; and Down Time: On the Art of Retreat at the Smart Museum Chicago (curated by Leslie Wilson and Berit Ness). In Winter of 2019, a new film, much handled things are always soft (2019) will debuted in collaboration with the VISUAL AIDS 30th Annual Day With(out) ART programming at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art LA, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum, The New Museum & over a hundred institutions worldwide.