Coco Fusco,
2006
Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer and the Andrew Banks Endowed Professor of Art at the University of Florida. She is a recipient of a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco's performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, two Whitney Biennials (2008 and 1993), BAM’s Next Wave Festival, the Sydney Biennale, The Johannesburg Biennial, The Kwangju Biennale, The Shanghai Biennale, InSite O5, Mercosul, Transmediale, The London International Theatre Festival, VideoBrasil and Performa05.
Fusco's works have also been shown at the Tate Liverpool, The Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York. Fusco is the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) and The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is also the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). Her new book entitled Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba was recently issued by Tate Publications in London. Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985) and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007).
Pedro Lasch,
2006
Pedro Lasch was born and raised in Mexico City. He divides his time between North Carolina, where he teaches art, art theory, and visual studies at Duke University since 2002, and New York (NY), where he leads on-going projects with immigrant communities and art collectives, such as 16 Beaver Group since 1999. His solo exhibitions and projects include Open Routines (Queens Museum of Art, 2006), Black Mirror (Nasher Museum of Art, 2008), and Abstract Nationalism & National Abstraction (The Phillips Collection, 2014); he has also participated in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, MASS MoCA, Walker Art Center, CAC New Orleans (U.S.A.); Royal College of Art, Hayward Gallery, Baltic (U.K.); Centro Nacional de las Artes, MUAC (Mexico); the Gwangju Biennial (South Korea), the 12th Havana Biennial (Cuba), and Documenta 13 (AND AND AND), among many others. The author of two books, his art and writings have also appeared in numerous catalogues and edited collections, as well as journals across disciplines like October Magazine, Saber Ver, Art Forum, ARTnews, Cultural Studies, and Rethinking Marxism,and international news like The New York Times, The Philadelphia Weekly, El Universal, and La Jornada.
Kamrooz Aram,
2006
Kamrooz Aram's diverse artistic practice engages the complicated relationship between traditional non-Western art and Western Modernism. Through a variety of forms including painting, collage, drawing and installation, Aram has found the potential for image-making to function critically in its use as a tool for a certain renegotiation of history. He received his master's degree in Fine Arts from Columbia University in 2003. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Palimpsest: Unstable Paintings for Anxious Interiors at Green Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE (2014); Kamrooz Aram/Julie Weitz at Michelle Grabner's space The Suburban, Chicago, Illinois (2013); Brute Ornament: Kamrooz Aram and Seher Shah, curated by Murtaza Vali, at Green Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE (2012); Negotiations at Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York, New York (2011); Generation After Generation, Revolution after Revelation at LAXART, Los Angeles, California (2010) and Kamrooz Aram: Realms and Reveries at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams, Massachusetts (2006).
Aram has also been awarded grants from Art Matters (2014), the New York Foundation for the Arts (2004) and the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program (2001). Aram's work can be found in public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio; the Rose Art Museum] at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and M+, Hong Kong. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Robert A. Pruitt,
2007
Robert A. Pruitt lives and works in Houston, Texas. He has had solo shows at ArtPace, Project Row Houses and the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, as well as New York's Clementine Gallery. He participated in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.
The artist has written of his work: “I have been educated by the contemporary art system, but my neighborhood, and most of its residents, are unaware of this world, and that world is unaware of it. This is the dichotomy out of which I work. An inhabitant of two worlds, my work attempts to bridge the gap between African cultural traditions supposedly lost to African Amercans, and contemporary art making tactics. I fuse Hip-hop sensibilities, rewritten histories, and penchant for the found, (or cheaply bought) object. I romanticize the revolutionary ideologies of the seventies, the dope fresh styles of the eighties, and the conceptual art making practices of the nineties. I collect objects, quotes, and events from my stereotypically disenfranchised neighborhood, bring them back to my studio, and mix them up to make art. My materials are artifacts stained with memory and meaning. I use these artifacts to make objects and images that expound on the black condition in America, and I use a chitlin circuit style of humor to sneak it into the subconscious of my audience.”
Cheryl Donegan,
2007
Cheryl Donegan received her B.F.A. in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. at Hunter College in New York. Donegan's work integrates the time-based, gestural forms of performance and video with forms such as painting, drawing, and installation. Direct, irreverent, and infused with an ironic eroticism, Donegan's works put a subversive spin on issues relating to sex, gender, art-making and art history. Using her body as metaphor in her earlier works, Donegan's performative actions before the camera often resulted in or related to process paintings and drawings. Her work has been exhibited internationally including at the 1995 Whitney Biennial, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Tang Museum of Art; New York Film and Video Festival; 1993 Venice Biennale; and the Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, France. Donegan recently exhibited new work at Galerie VidalCuglietta, Brussels, and White Flag Library in St. Louis. Donegan was a faculty member in the Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Art, New York from 1997-2013. She has been a frequent seminar leader and guest critic at Yale University, was a a faculty member at Skowhegan School of Drawing and Painting, Summer 2011 and a visiting artist/lecturer at numerous art programs in the United States. She lives in New York with her two sons and husband, writer Kenneth Goldsmith.
Claire Bishop,
2007
Claire Bishop is an art historian, critic, author, and Professor in the Art History Department at CUNY Graduate Center, New York since September 2008. Previously Bishop was an associate professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Warwick, Coventry from 2006 to 2008 and a Tutor in Critical Theory in the Curating Contemporary Art Department at the Royal College of Art, London from 2001 to 2006. She studied Art History at St John's College, Cambridge (1990-1994) and completed her MA and Ph.D at Essex University in 1996 and 2002 respectively. Bishop is editor of Participation (2006) and Installation Art: A Critical History (2005) and is a contributor to many art journals including Artforum and October; her essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” which appeared in October in 2004, remains an influential critique of relational aesthetics. Her books have been translated into over eighteen languages. Her current research addresses the impact of digital technologies on contemporary art, as well as questions of amateurism and 'de-skilling' in contemporary dance and performance art.
Emily Jacir,
2007
Jacir works in a variety of media including film, photography, installation, performance, video, writing and sound. She has exhibited extensively throughout the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East since 1994, holding solo exhibitions in places including New York City, Los Angeles, Ramallah, Beirut, London and Linz. Active in the building of Ramallah's art scene since 1999, Jacir has also worked with various organizations including the Qattan Foundation, al-Ma'mal Foundation and the Sakakini Cultural Center. She has been involved in creating numerous projects and events such as Birzeit's Virtual Art Gallery. She also founded and curated the first International Video Festival in Ramallah in 2002,. She curated a selection of shorts; Palestinian Revolution Cinema (1968 – 1982) which went on tour in 2007.
Between 2000 - 2002 she curated several Arab Film programs in NYC with Alwan for the Arts including the first Palestinian Film Festival in 2002. She works as a full-time professor at the vanguard International Academy of Art Palestine since it opened its doors in 2006 and she also served on its Academic Board from 2006 through 2012. Jacir led the first year of the Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program in Beirut (2011-2012) and created the curriculum and programming after serving on the founding year of the Curricular Committee from 2010-2011.
Catherine Sullivan,
2007
Catherine Sullivan (born 1968) is a Chicago-based artist whose work combines video and performance. She was educated at the California Institute of Arts and the Art Center College of Design. She is a former actor, and studied as a graduate student under Mike Kelley.[3] She currently teaches at the University of Chicago.
Five Economies (big hunt/little hunt) (2002) restages scenes from films including The Miracle Worker, Marat/Sade, Persona and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?.'Tis Pity She's a Fluxus Whore (2003) combines filmed re-enactments of a 1953 production of John Ford's play and a 1964 Fluxus performance. Her works D-Pattern and The Chittendens were made in collaboration with the composer Sean Griffin. She won an Alpert award in 2004 and her works are held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate and the Miami Art Museum.
Emna Zghal,
2007
Emna Zghal is a Tunisian-born U.S. based visual artist. Her work was featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Tunisia and beyond. Zghal received fellowship residencies and done projects with: the Women’s Studio Workshop, the Newark Art Museum, the MacDowell Colony, the Weir Farm Trust, and the Cité Internationale Des Arts in Paris. Reviews of her work appeared in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Artforum, and ARTnews, The New Yorker in addition to many Tunisian publications. Her portfolio of prints The Prophet of Black Folkabout the 9th Century African slave revolt in Iraq was acquired by Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, NY. Other works of hers are part the New York Public Library, Yale University, The Museum For African Art in New York, Grinnell College, and numerous other public and private collections in the U.S. and Tunisia. She taught at Grinnell College, Purchase College and Parsons New School of Design.
Nayland Blake,
2007
Nayland Blake is an artist whose mixed-media work has been variously described as disturbing, provocative, elusive, tormented, sinister, hysterical, brutal, and tender. Among his most famous pieces are a log cabin made of gingerbread squares fitted to a steel frame entitled Feeder 2 (1998). When it went on display at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, visitors furtively nibbled off bits and pieces of the cabin’s interior walls, while the smell of the gingerbread filled the gallery.
Another well-known work is Starting Over (2000), a video of the artist dancing with taps on his shoes in a bunny suit made to weigh the same as his lover, Philip Horvitz. Blake was included in the 1991 Whitney Biennial and that museum’s infamous Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art exhibition in 1994. Maura Riley curated a retrospective of 30 years of Blake's art, “Behavior,” which was presented in late 2008-early 2009 at Location One in New York City. His work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Des Moines Art Center, among others. He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery, and lives and works in New York City.
