For almost 40 years, Catherine Opie has been documenting with psychological acuity the cultural and geographic identity of contemporary America. This unique artist monograph presents a compelling visual narrative of Opie's work since the early 1980s, pairing images across bodies of work to form a full picture of her artistic vision. With more than 300 beautiful illustrations and made in close collaboration with Opie, the book marks a turning point in the consideration of this artist's work to date.

Hurvin Anderson will be joined in converation with Michael Prokopow on Thursday 22 April at 6pm GMT (12pm CST)

Cultural historian Michael Prokopow, who is preparing a monograph about Hurvin Anderson, joins the painter in a conversation that places Anderson’s current exhibition at The Arts Club in the context of his career. Along with recent landscapes, Anderson includes in this exhibition Flat Top, 2008, a classic painting from the barbershop series that brought him international attention. By bringing together these two series, Anderson contrasts interior and exterior Jamaican spaces, while defining a throughline across his oeuvre in terms of structure, abstraction, and perception. Prokopow will draw on his deep knowledge of the artist to bring forth these and other threads in Anderson’s thinking and making.

To register, please click here

The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago IL

9 April - 7 August 2021

‘I have entered a new place, slightly unsure. Actually, through making paintings you engage with questions you are unsure about. My struggle with Jamaica: I don’t know it and I know it. I have this romantic vision of it and a lot of the painting is fighting that romance’
— Hurvin Anderson

The Arts Club of Chicago opens today with Anywhere but Nowhere, Hurvin Anderson’s first solo exhibition in Chicago. For more information please click here. 

On 22 April at 7 PM (CEST) Hurvin Anderson will be joined in conversation with Michael Prokopow, the writer of his upcoming monograph, to discuss the relation and contrasts between his newest works and the Barbershop series – examining interior and exterior Jamaican spaces, Anderson will talk about defining a through line across his oeuvre in terms of structure, abstraction, and perception. To register please click here. 

Amy Sillman, Rebecca Sears, lecturer in the Department of Classics in Arts & Sciences; and curator Meredith Malone will discuss Sillman’s animated video After Metamorphoses (2015–16), the artist’s response to the Roman poet Ovid’s mythic tale of transformation, desire, and power. Sillman’s five-minute video will be screened in advance of the Q&A and is available for viewing now.

To join the ZOOM conversation and live Q&A on 10 April at 11 am (CDT) register here

John Gerrard: Minds Rising Spirits Tuning
13th Gwangju Biennale

Gerrard’s latest piece, Corn Work (Corrib) (2020) is a simulation projected on a cube cast in polished mirror aluminum that features four Straw Boys, figures drawn from Celtic paganism. Still present in rural areas, these young men wear costumes made of straw and are said to visit brides in advance of weddings, recalling rituals in which anonymized human figures unleash celebratory and often ecstatic behaviors. Gerrard collaborated with contemporary dancers, aged sixteen to seventy, who “performed” and animated these figures in suits made from heirloom Irish grain types that correspond to the annual cycle: barley (spring), oat (summer), rye (autumn), and wheat (winter). Each dancer arrives and leaves in a formal exchange on seasonal solstices and equinoxes, echoing the production of flour through the circular motion of the mills as well as an early sun symbol, the solar cross. Through novel forms of technology like motion matching and neural networks, both time and space are captured as data, and a perpetual choreography is produced. In the backdrop, the landscape follows the temporal cycles of Galway, Ireland—where the work was initially presented as a site-specific commission—and the flow of the river Corrib against the rise and fall of daily and annual temperatures.

For Gerrard, these figures originate from a time when a more equitable relationship between humans and the landscape was still intact. Their movements carry the melancholic legacy of exhausted ecologies across the globe and follow a choreographic logic with a keen capacity to “learn,” respond to, and transform a landscape. The artist has described their movements as “a lament, a slow circular solar performance informed by motions of denial, pain and suffering. This is a grieving work for a nonhuman world that perishes as human populations thrive and expand.”

Renowned filmmaker and video artist, Steve McQueen will speak about his interdisciplinary practice across the art world and in mainstream cinema, focusing on the social, psychological, and political traumas thematized in his work. 

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

12:00 PM - 1:30 PM (GMT-7)

Register here to join. 

A+D Thursdays is a public lecture series embedded inside our Creative Gateway undergraduate course. The series exposes students and the public to a range of creative forms across the visual arts, performance, literature, film, and design. It introduces students and the community to our campus’s major museums, presenters, and academic departments, as well as to select Bay Area arts organizations and regional partners.

Further information

Michael Landy: Michael Landy's Welcome to Essex, Firstsite, Essex

Firstsite will present a new body of work by Michael Landy that explores the recent history of his home county, Essex, and its contemporary portrayal in popular culture. The exhibition will unpack stereotypes of the county and question the influence of the media in conjunction with political agendas, in forming regional and national identities and often harmful stereotypes that deviate from on-the-ground reality.

For Welcome to Essex Landy has created an archive entitled Essexism which will occupy several of Firstsite’s gallery spaces. The archive highlights the stereotyping of the county’s population, into figures such as ‘Essex Man’ and ‘Essex Girl’ and comprises of clips from TV shows and films, plus books, magazine articles, music and newspaper articles from the last 30 years. Landy will also look to the history of Essex, such as the Plotlanders, who in the early 20^th-century went from London’s East End to self-build small houses on unwanted farm land in places such as Dunton, near Basildon. 

Connecting this history to experienced reality, Landy has been exploring Essex on foot, taking a series of walks around the county with notable cultural figures from Essex. Conversations undertaken and locations visited will be represented in the show in a new commission on Firstsite’s 140-metre curved internal wall.

Exhibition dates: 25 June - 5 September 2021

Further information

Hurvin Anderson: Monograph, Lund Humphries

As part of the Contemporary Painters Series, Lund Humphries publish the first comprehensive overview of Hurvin Anderson, now available to pre-order. Drawing on interviews with the artist, Michael J. Prokopow offers a critical assessment of Hurvin Anderson’s painting practice to date alongside 100 colour illustrations. 

The Lund Humphries Contemporary Painters Series offers comprehensive, accessible, authoritative and highly illustrated monographs on the world’s leading living painters. Its aim – to ‘take the pulse’ of contemporary painting.

Further information

Hurvin Anderson: School Prints 2021, The Hepworth Wakefield

Hurvin Anderson is one of six artists to create a limited edition print for The Hepworth Wakefield's School Prints 2021. 

Launched in 2018 by The Hepworth Wakefield, School Prints is an ambitious five-year project to engage every primary school child in Wakefield District with contemporary art. Each year, the participating schools are gifted a set of limited-edition prints by leading contemporary artists for display in school and are supported with an in-depth engagement programme led by local artists to encourage creativity across the curriculum.

Further information