A.K. Burns
A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Using video, sculpture, and installation she produces queries into the socio-political constructs that give form and meaning to contemporary notions of the body. Currently, Burns is developing Negative Space, a cycle of five video installations that take speculative fiction as a point of departure. The third installment is commissioned by EMPAC at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. Burns’ work has been exhibited internationally at the New Museum, NY; the Tate Modern, London; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Sculpture Center, NY; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. Burns was a 2016-17 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and a recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award. Burns currently teaches at Hunter College Graduate Department of Art & Art History, and in the Sculpture Department at NYU Steinhardt.
Dread Scott
Dread Scott is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is exhibited across the US and internationally. For three decades he has made work that encourages viewers to re-examine cohering norms of American society. In 1989, the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed one of his artworks and President Bush declared it “disgraceful” because of its use of the American flag. His art has been exhibited/performed at MoMA/PS1, Pori Art Museum (Finland), BAM (Brooklyn) and galleries and street corners across the country. He is a recipient of grants from Creative Capital Foundation, the MAP Fund, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation and his work is included in the collection of the Whitney Museum.
Andrea Bowers
Los Angeles multimedia artist Andrea Bowers’ work explores the intersection between activism and art. Her main focus is the necessity of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience in the lives of women. Andrea’s recent work investigates the continued exploitation of the poor and working class. Her intricate photorealist drawings, large-scale graphics works, videos, and ephemera pay homage to a multitude of movements and causes particularly feminism, climate justice, immigrant rights and workers’ rights. She is a proud member of the SEIU local 721 and currently a member of the Bargaining Committee for the Otis College of Art and Design Part-time Faculty Union. She has been teaching in the Otis Graduate Public Practice Program since 2007. Bowers is represented by Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Andrew Kreps in New York, NY,
Xu Bing
Xu Bing is an artist deeply engaged in a global art practice, addressing with his work cultural and national identity as well as social change. He moved to the United States in 1990. From 2008 to 2014, Xu served as the vice president of CAFA, Beijing, where he is now a professor and the director of Academic Committee. He currently lives and works in Beijing and New York.
Xu has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the British Museum, London, among other major institutions. Additionally, Xu’s works have been displayed at the 45th, 51st, and 56th Venice Biennales, the Biennale of Sydney, and the Johannesburg Biennale, among other international exhibitions. In 1999, Xu Bing was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of his “capacity to contribute importantly to society, particularly in printmaking and calligraphy.” In 2006, the Southern Graphics Council conferred on Xu its lifetime achievement award in recognition of the fact that his “use of text, language and books has impacted the dialogue of the print and art worlds in significant ways.” In 2015, he was awarded the 2014 Department of State-Medal of Arts for his efforts to promote cultural understanding through his artworks. That April, he was appointed as an A.D. White Professor-at-large by Cornell University.
Spencer Finch
Spencer Finch pursues the most elusive and ineffable of experiences through his work— from the color of a sunset outside a Monument Valley motel room to the afternoon breeze by Walden Pond, the shadows of passing clouds in the yard of Emily Dickinson’s home or the light in a Turner painting. With both a scientific approach to gathering data and a true poetic sensibility, Finch’s installations, sculptures and works on paper filter perception through the lens of nature, history, literature and personal experience. Recent major projects include Painting Air, an installation made for the artist’s 2012 survey at the RISD Museum of Art, in which more than 100 panels of suspended glass of varying reflectivity refract and distort an abstract mural inspired by the colors of Claude Monet's garden at Giverny. He has had extensive international solo exhibitions and projects at many major institutions such as The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY, Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, MACRO, Rome; Museum De Fundatie, Zwolle and the The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Finch was also a participant in the 53rd International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2009 and the 2008 Turin Triennial. Spencer Finch lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
John Newman
New York-based John Newman has had over 50 one-person shows and participated in numerous group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. His sculpture, drawings, and prints are represented in numerous public collections including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Tate, the National Gallery of Australia, the Albertina Museum in Vienna among many others. He has been the recipient of the many awards and residencies including the Rome Prize, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Chinati Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Gottlieb Foundation, the Pollack-Krasner Foundation, the NEA and a Senior Research Fulbright Grant to India. He is the former Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at the Yale School of Art and has taught and lectured in many international universities and museums throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia.
Newman is represented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York City.
Phaan Howng
Phaan Howng (American, b. 1982) is a 2015 Mount Royal School of Art alumna whose interdisciplinary artistic practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, and performance.
Howng received honors for her recent work and has given artist talks regionally. Her latest solo and group exhibitions include Biological Controls: If It Bleeds We Can Kill It at School 33 Art Center, Baltimore; Strange Genitals, Art F City, Brooklyn; and Emergency Contacts for Alt+Esc’s No Vacancy 2, also in Brooklyn, NY.
Christian Rattemeyer
Christian Rattemeyer, Associate Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at MoMA (New York) since 2007, has curated and co-curated the exhibitions Unfinished Conversations: New Work from the Collection (2017), Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1960-1980 (2015), Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan (2012), Eyes Closed/Eyes Open: Recent Acquisitions in Drawing (2012), Projects 95: Runa Islam (2011), I Am Still Alive: Politics and Everyday Life in Contemporary Drawing (2011), Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection (2009) and Lines, Grids, Stains, Words (2007). From 2003 to 2007 Rattemeyer was the curator at Artists Space in New York and previously worked for Documenta11 in Kassel, Germany.
His most recent book is Exhibiting the New Art. Op Losse Schroeven and When Attitudes Become Form 1969 (London: Afterall Publishers 2010). Rattemeyer has taught at several art schools including the Center for Curatorial Studies and the MFA Program, both at Bard College. He holds an MA in Art History from the Freie Universität Berlin and an MPhil in Art History from Columbia University.
Charles Long
Since the early 1990’s, Charles Long has explored the possibilities of sculpture through a rich vocabulary of materials, colors, images, and shapes. Incorporating references to art history, popular culture, nature and his own experiences, Long’s work embraces modernist convention as a means of connecting inner and outer realities, forming pathways between one’s mental and bodily experiences and the surrounding environment. Through his many bodies of work over the years, the artist has consistently confronted formal parameters associated with sculpture as obstacles to push beyond, seeing modernism’s trajectory as unfinished and full of possibility.
The artist has received a number of honors and awards, most recently the 2008 Award of Merit Medal for Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. Throughout the past two decades, Long’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions worldwide. His most important solo presentations include CATALIN at The Contemporary Austin in Texas (2014), Fountainhead, a public commission in Dallas, Texas organized by the Nasher Sculpture Center (2013), Pet Sounds at Madison Square Park in New York City (2012), Seeing Green, a solo project in conjunction with All of this and nothing: The 6th Hammer Invitational at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2011), 100 Pounds of Clay at Orange County Museum of Art in California (2010), and More Like a Dream Than a Scheme at David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University in Rhode Island, which traveled to SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico (2005).
His work was featured twice in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1997, 2008), and has also been included in notable group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, SculptureCenter in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, among other museums.
His work is represented in important public and private collections worldwide, including those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, St. Louis Art Museum in Missouri, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.
Carmel Buckley
Carmel Buckley was born in Derby, England lives and works in London and Cincinnati. She studied at Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic, Escuela de Bellas Arte, Madrid University, San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico City and at the School of Visual Arts, New York as a Fulbright Fellow. She is currently Professor of Art at The Ohio State University. She has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Art Sculpture Award and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Award. Recent solo exhibitions include The Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, OH (2009), Clay Street Press, Cincinnati, OH (2011), and The Center For Recent Drawing, London, England (2012), and Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (2014). Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Gallery North, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, England (2005); at Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati, OH (2006); at E:vent Gallery, London, England (2009), and Sculpture Key West, Key West, FL (2011).
Kristen Hileman
Kristen Hileman is the BMA’s Curator of Contemporary Art and Department Head since late 2009, Hileman oversaw the reinstallation of the museum’s Contemporary Wing in 2012 and has brought a diverse array of artists and their works to Baltimore through her Black Box, Front Room, and On Paper exhibition projects. She organized the major BMA survey Seeing Now: Photography Since 1960 (2011), and Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection (2009-10), the first full career museum retrospective of that artist’s work, for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
Ian Bourland
W. Ian Bourland is a critic and historian of the global contemporary. He holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Chicago and his undergraduate in International Relations from Georgetown University. His research explores the intersections between recent art, the legacy of modernism, and the history of globalization. He has taught or lectured at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barnes Foundation, and the Smithsonian, and is an alum of the Whitney ISP in Critical Studies.
Ian's writing on Siah Armajani, Rashid Johnson, Brendan Fernandes, Yto Barrada, Wangechi Mutu, Yinka Shonibare, and others has appeared in a range of publications, from Parasol Unit and Jeu de Paume to Artforum and African Arts. He contributed a chapter to James Elkins's Theorizing Visual Studies, edited Faile: Works on Wood (Gestalten 2014), and is the author of the forthcoming Ghosts of Modernism, on photography and politics in the 1980s. In addition to courses on the history of photography, African-American studies, and art in the twentieth century, he has taught seminars on urban theory and landscape, postcolonialism, and African antiquity and divination.
Mika Yoshitake
Mika Yoshitake is Associate Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. At the Hirshhorn, she has organized Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors (2017), Le Onde: Waves of Italian Influence (2015), Days of Endless Time (with Kelly Gordon), Speculative Forms, and Gravity’s Edge (all 2014); Sitebound: Photography from the Collection and Dark Matters (with Melissa Ho in 2012), and coordinated Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950 (2013) and Ai Weiwei: According to What? (2012). A specialist on postwar Japanese art, Mika earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from UCLA, which culminated in the AICA-USA award-winning exhibition and book, Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha (2012). She has published in Artforum, Art in America, and Exposure and in numerous exhibition catalogues including Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place (Dia Art Foundation, 2014); Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-garde (MoMA, 2012); Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity (Guggenheim, 2011); Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949–78 (Seattle Art Museum, 2009); and © MURAKAMI (MOCA, 2007).
Owen Duffy
Owen Duffy is an art historian, writer, and curator based in New York. He has published in ArtReview, Momus, CURA., and Art & Education, among others, and has presented his research at such institutions as the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and LASANAA Live Art Hub, Kathmandu. He has been a visiting critic at the Rhode Island School of Design and through Frame Finland and earned his
Sara O'Keeffe
Sara O’Keeffe, the assistant curator at the New Museum, was part of the team that organized the 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, featuring 51 artists from more than 25 countries, and pursuing numerous lines of inquiry. Questions included: What are the new visual metaphors for the self and subjecthood when our ability to see and be seen is expanding, as is our desire to manage our self-image and privacy? Is it possible to opt out of, bypass, or retool commercial interests that potentially
Evelyn Hankins
Evelyn Hankins is the Senior Curator who organized Mark Bradford's Pickett's Charge exhibition at the Hirshhorn. Hankins has been working at the Hirshhorn since 2007, and has organized the Robert Irwin: All the Rules Will Change, a two-part project that opened in April of 2016 that comprised of a historical show focusing on Irwin’s groundbreaking artworks from the 1960s and a major new scrim installation in response to the Museum’s distinctive architecture. Other recent projects include Jennie C. Jones: Higher Resonance; Over, Under, Next: Experiments in Mixed Media; and co-curating At the Hub of Things: New Views of the Collection. Previously, she held curatorial positions at the Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She earned her Ph.D. in art history from Stanford University.
Pickett’s Charge builds upon the Hirshhorn’s continued commitment to showcasing the ways that artists respond to the unique political and cultural climate of their time. Through its free exhibitions and public programs, the Hirshhorn is dedicated to fostering conversation around the forces that shape creative expression in the twenty-first century.
Bradford (b. 1961) is a Los Angeles–based artist whose work addresses socio-political issues such as race, class, and gender, while also engaging art history. For over two decades, he has expanded the language of abstraction by incorporating personal experience and historical significance into his works. In 2009, Bradford was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant, and in 2016, he was awarded the US Department of State’s National Medal of Arts.
Pickett’s Charge will be Bradford’s first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, and his first major American solo show following his presentation as the US representative for the 57th Venice Biennale, a selection made possible by the US Department of State.
Bradford drew inspiration for this new work from French artist Paul Philippoteaux’s nineteenth-century cyclorama, currently on view in Gettysburg National Military Park, Pennsylvania. Philippoteaux’s cyclorama depicts Pickett’s Charge—the final charge of the Battle of Gettysburg, which historians cite as the critical turning point of the Civil War and, consequently, of American history (view a 360-video of the 1883-original). Working with a combination of colored paper and reproductions of the original, Bradford transformed the historic Gettysburg imagery into a series of eight powerful, abstract paintings. By cutting, tearing, and scraping through the layers, Bradford reveals the hidden textures and complexities lurking just beneath the surface. Each painting is more than forty-five feet long, and together they will encircle the entire Third Level inner-circle galleries.
The resulting work weaves past and present, illusion and abstraction, inviting visitors to reconsider how narratives about American history are shaped and contested. Posed with his trademark fearlessness, Bradford’s open questions—or rather, the deliberations his work elicits—are particularly timely in contemporary America. And considering that the Hirshhorn is situated on the National Mall, these questions are made even timelier.