Walid Raad is a New York based artist who generally addresses the contemporary history of his native Lebanon with conceptual work that tackles the representation of traumatic events and collective history through fictitious and factual means. In 1999 Raad founded The Atlas Group and for Tuesday Evenings he presents The Loudest Muttering is Over. Documents from The Atlas Group Archive, a mixed-media presentation of The Atlas Group’s archival material inspired by obscure historical circumstances.

Mike Smith is a performance and video installation artist whose work was most recently included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and is the subject of the career survey Mike’s World. In the 1970s Smith created the persona “Mike” which he describes as “the human equivalent of a supermarket generic brand.” Smith’s work reveals great truths in its bland presentation of the “everyman” as seen in this Tuesday Evenings presentation, A Night with Mike.

Laura Anderson Barbata is an artist born in Mexico who now lives and works in New York and Mexico City. Working in photography, video, drawing, sculpture, installation, and public art, Barbata has made a name for herself with exhibitions and performances most recently at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and throughout Latin America and Europe. Since 1992 she has worked primarily in the social realm, initiating projects in the Amazon of Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, Norway, Mexico, and New York City.

Gavin Morrison is curator of Fort Worth Contemporary Arts at Texas Christian University and a director of the curatorial initiative, Atopia Projects. For this Tuesday Evenings presentation, Cowboys on the Lido, Morrison considers a hypothetical Texas pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennial in 2011 (also the 175th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Texas), asking, “What would it mean for Texas to be presented in this context and at a time where nation-states and cultural identity are often subject to continual negotiation?”

Nicola Vassell is a curator, art writer, and currently a director of Deitch Projects in New York. For this Tuesday Evenings lecture, Vassell presents DARK ART: A New Conversation with Abstraction, in which she proposes that “a new and grittier form of abstraction permits us to theorize that a younger generation of painters, consciously or not, is producing ruggedly electric paintings that tell somber and vicious tales . . . making a statement on the sociopolitical inevitability of a world gone mad.”

Fahamu Pecou is an artist working in Atlanta, where he began a branding campaign for his own career as a painter. Fahamu Pecou is the Shit (which began in 2002 with paintings of the artist on the cover of art and culture magazines, t-shirts, posters, a mockumentary, and guerilla street art) is fashioned after similar celebrity campaigns Pecou created for various rap and hip-hop artists through his design business, Diamond Lounge.

Richard Wentworth has been a leading figure in New British Sculpture since the late 1970s. Celebrated as an art intellectual, Wentworth has long been respected as an artist, writer, teacher, and curator. His work has been featured in significant exhibitions including the 50th Venice Biennale and Global Cities at the Tate Modern. He is also readily recognized for organizing Thinking Aloud, the critically acclaimed exhibition that opened at the Hayward Gallery in 1999 and followed with a national tour.

March 24, 2009

Rosson Crow is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. Crow’s large-scale, raucous paintings have been described as “inspired by diverse references—Baroque and Rococo interior design, cowboy culture, Las Vegas architecture, theatre, and music—their dominant scale pulling the viewer into the psychological space of the spectacle. These paintings oscillate between celebration and desolation.” This Tuesday Evenings presentation serves to set up the Modern’s FOCUS: Rosson Crow, which opens the following weekend.