IN CONVERSATION:
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 7
4PM
ARMORY LIVE THEATER
Featuring artists Jeanne Silverthorne, Jimmy Wright, Oliver Herring, and Wilmer Wilson IV – moderated by Robyn Farrell, Senior Curator at The Kitchen.
The 2024 Focus section explores the experimental spirit of the fair’s founding in 1994 at The Gramercy Park Hotel and the namesake International Exhibition of Modern Art in 1913 at New York City’s 69th Regiment Armory. In this panel, participating Focus artists will join the section’s curator Robyn Farrell to discuss how their work reflects these avant-garde histories—in and beyond New York City—probing the radical strategies and poetic interventions of interdisciplinary forms and cultural exchange.
Jimmy Wright, Club 82: Leopard Woman, 1974. Courtesy of the artist and Corbett vs Dempsey (Chicago) and FIERMAN (New York).
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
JEANNE SILVERTHORNE
Jeanne Silverthorne is a sculptor based in New York. Solo exhibitions include the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Whitney Museum of Art, Rocca Paolinea, Perugia, P.S.1, New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, University of Kentucky Museum, career surveys at the Wright Museum, Beloit, and Rowan University. Her work is represented in collections such as MOMA, New York, Phillips Collection, SFMOMA, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, RISDI Museum.and featured in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Art News, Sculpture Magazine and the Brooklyn Rail, among other publications. Silverthorne has been the recipient of a Guggenheim grant, a Joan Mitchell award, Penny McCall award, Anonymous was a Woman.
Courtesy of Jeanne Silverthorne.
OLIVER HERRING
Oliver Herring is a visual artist known for his use of experimental techniques as a means to better understand human nature, individual behavior, and interpersonal dynamics. His first solo exhibition in 1993 at the New Museum in New York featured hand knit Mylar and tape sculptures made in response to the loss of one of Herring’s artistic heroes, playwright and drag performer Ethyl Eichelberger. These sculptural works transcend gender associations in exquisite forms that express mortality, the body, loss, absence, and refuge.
Herring’s creative practice later evolved to include videos, performances, drawings, three-dimensional photographic sculptures, and choreography. Many of these works focus on brief yet intensive collaborative encounters with volunteer participants. The resulting works not only record these impromptu activities, but also reveal the poignancy implicit in strangers exploring their vulnerabilities and embracing trust.
Over the last twenty-two years Herring pioneered TASK - a simple performance structure that manifests itself as an ongoing series of parties and workshops. TASK has become established as not only as a happening for the art world but as an educational tool in schools at all grade levels, and as a social icebreaker. Performed all over the world, TASK has also taken place in partnership with the National Art Educators Association; Turnaround Arts, (an initiative of the President’s Committee for the Arts and the Humanities); the school district of Melbourne, Australia; and Art21. A book on TASK was published in 2009 by Illinois State University.
Herring’s work is in the collections of many major institutions, and has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, NY; the Whitney Museum of Art, NY; Performa 09, NY; the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; The Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA, etc. He has also exhibited at the Camden Art Center, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto; He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen; A4 Art Museum, Chengdu; McAM, Shanghai; Xth Lyon Biennale, Lyon; Performa 09, NY; 2010 Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, and so on.
Me Us Them, a fifteen-year survey of Herring's work, was organized in 2009 at the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY. Herring was also featured on Season 3 of PBS’s program Art21, Art in the 21st Century, and serves on Art21’s board of directors.
Courtesy of Oliver Herring.
JIMMY WRIGHT
Jimmy Wright (1944), a Kentuckian, moved to New York in 1974 after studying with the artists comprising the nascent Harry Who / Imagist scene at the Art Institute of Chicago. With the city as subject, he documented the luminosity of the New York skyline at night and the flourishing queer landscape of gay bathhouses and bars throughout Manhattan.
Wright is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Academy of Design, Art Institute of Chicago, Speed Art Museum, Hammer Museum, and other public institutions. FIERMAN and Corbett vs. Dempsey represent the artist.
Photo by Benjamin Fredrickson.
WILMER WILSON IV
Wilmer Wilson IV (b. 1989) investigates the representation of Black bodies in contemporary life. Based in Philadelphia, Wilson IV is concerned with “the way that blackness is shaped in and by city space” and inspects the relationships between figure and environment through his employment of urban materials. Wilson’s work can be found in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; The Phillips Collection; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond among others. Wilson holds a BFA from Howard University and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania.
Courtesy of Wilmer Wilson IV.
ROBYN FARRELL
Robyn Farrell is Senior Curator at The Kitchen in New York where she organizes and oversees exhibitions, publications, live and online programming. Before The Kitchen, Farrell was an Associate Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she served on the curatorial teams for fifty projects including career surveys with Barbara Kruger (2021) and Gregg Bordowitz (2019). Farrell holds an MA in Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has served as a visiting lecturer moderator for the Gene Siskel Film Center.
Photo by Clare Britt.
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