Join artists Leigh Ledare and Lyle Ashton Harris for an exhibition walkthrough and discussion of Acting Out: Works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, moderated by writer and cultural critic Lynne Tillman. Followed by a reception for the participants and audience.
Leigh Ledare creates work that raises questions of agency, intimacy and consent, transforming the observer into the voyeur of private scenes or situations dealing with social taboos. Using photography, the archive, language, and film, he explores notions of subjectivity in a performative dimension, his interventions putting in tension the realities of social constructions and the projective assumptions that surround them. Ledare’s projects have been exhibited extensively in the US and abroad. Recent exhibitions include: The Plot, The Art Institute of Chicago (2017); Vokzal, The Box, Los Angeles (2017); Place du Jardin aux Fleurs, Office Baroque, Brussels, as well as numerous group exhibitions including the 2017 Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016). Ledare’s work has also been the subject of major surveys at Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2013), and WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2012). Publications by Ledare include: Double Bind Conversations (Art Resources Press, 2015), a book length dialog co-authored with Rhea Anastas; Ana and Carl and some other couples (Andrew Roth, 2014), a collaboration with Nicolas Guagnini; Leigh Ledare, et al. (Mousse Publishing, 2012), edited by Elena Filipovic; An Invitation (Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies, Columbia University, 2012), a photolithography edition; Double Bind (MFC-michèle didier, 2012); and Pretend You’re Actually Alive (PPP Editions and Andrew Roth, 2008). Ledare’s work is in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; The Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. In 2017 Ledare was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Lyle Ashton Harris (born 1965, Bronx, New York) has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance art. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic. His work is included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and has been exhibited internationally as well as in the Venice Biennale, the Bienal de São Paulo, and most recently at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, presented on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Cinéma du Réel. He was the 2014 recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 2016. Harris’s multimedia installation Once (Now) Again, was included in the 78th Whitney Biennial, his three-channel video work Ektachrome Archives (New York Mix), 2017, was acquired by the Whitney Museum, and an artist monograph titled Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs was published by Aperture in 2017. The artist currently lives and works in New York City and is an Associate Professor of Art at New York University. Lyle Ashton Harris is represented by Salon 94, New York.
Lynne Tillman writes novels, stories, and criticism. Her novels are Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; Cast in Doubt; No Lease on Life, Finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award (1998), and American Genius, A Comedy. Her fiction collections are: Absence Makes The Heart; The Madame Realism Complex; This is Not It; Someday This Will Be Funny, and The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories. Tillman’s books of nonfiction and essays are The Broad Picture; The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965-67, with Stephen Shore’s Factory photographs; Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeanette Watson and Books & Co, and What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism (2014). In March 2018, her sixth novel Men and Apparitions was published by Soft Skull Press. Her fifth novel American Comedy, A Genius was has just appeared in a new edition (Soft Skull Press, 2019).
Tillman’s writing is published frequently in artists’ books, gallery books, and museum catalogues, including ones on Jeff Koons; Barbara Kruger; Jim Hodges; Roni Horn; Joan Jonas; David Wojnarowicz; Carroll Dunham, and Cindy Sherman. In 2016, her story “Still Moving” appeared in Justine Kurland’s Aperture monograph, Highway Kind. An essay on Raymond Pettibon’s work, “Playing Both Sides,” was published in the New Museum catalogue for Pettibon’s first New York retrospective (February 2017). In 2018, her essay/story on Anne Collier’s work was published by Karma Books. And, in fall 2018, her essay “Warhol, Existentially,” was published in the Whitney’s retrospective of Warhol, the first in 20 years. Tillman is a frequent panelist and moderator for museum and gallery events, most recently, she curated and moderated a panel at the Whitney on Warhol’s significance (or not) for younger artists.
