Wayne White is a Los Angeles-based artist. Having begun his career as a production designer for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, White is now recognized for his clever and beautifully rendered text paintings. As a wordsmith and draftsman extraordinaire, White juxtaposes irreverent and humorous phrases with the pastoral scenes of existing thrift-store paintings to create something all together new and always compelling.
Stephen Lapthisophon is an artist and educator living and working in Dallas. A student of art history, comparative literature and theory, poetry, film and the sensory world, Lapthisophon’s work varies in form from found objects to images, installations, performances, and sound. His work has been described as “layers of meanings, allusions, and associations.” (Kathryn Hixson, Frieze) For Tuesday Evenings, Lapthisophon presents his work as it confronts and demonstrates means of communication through art.
Gardar Eide Einarsson is the artist featured in the Modern’s first FOCUS exhibition of the 2009–2010 season, which opens December 13.
Susan Rothenberg is in conversation with Michael Auping. Prior to the opening of the exhibition Susan Rothenberg: Moving in Place, the artist and curator of the exhibition discuss the development of Rothenberg’s imagery, from the ground-breaking early horse paintings of the mid-1970s to her fragmented and spinning self-portraits. The artist will also discuss the influence of her move from New York to New Mexico in 1990 and the effect of that landscape/environment on her palette as well as the suggestion of narrative in her subsequent work.
Wellington Reiter, FAIA, is currently the President of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Reiter’s professional practice is Urban Instruments, Inc., and his work ranges from drawings to museum installations and built structures. His projects include the Wright Brothers monument in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, and the entry pavilion to the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts. His drawings of speculative urban conditions were included in the 2008 Venice Biennale for Architecture.
William Lamson is a Brooklyn-based artist recognized for an inventive body of work that, as described on National Public Radio, uses “inexpensive materials and simple structures” to create “visuals that are mesmerizing and, in a word, playful.” Addressing issues of masculinity, amateurism, science, play, and the quixotic quest for personal heroism, Lamson speaks to the spirit of ingenuity in sculptures, photographs, and performances that broaden horizons and entertain the imagination.
Tony Scherman is a Canadian artist renowned for his encaustic paintings found in collections throughout North America and Europe. Erudite and passionate, Scherman brings a wealth of research and a tremendous facility for painting to his melancholic portraits that press hard into the space of the viewer. As Lilly Wei explains in the exhibition catalogue About 1865, “Scherman has an impulse to destabilize precedents, to seek transformations and to view ideologies with skepticism, to be conceptually vigilant.
Joseph D. Ketner II is currently the Henry and Lois Foster Chair in Contemporary Art, Distinguished Curator-in-Residence, at Emerson College, a position that follows his post as the chief curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum where he organized Andy Warhol the Last Decade. As a preview to the exhibition's opening on February 14, Ketner shares insight and expertise on the subject in his presentation Who is Andy Warhol. He explains that, “Warhol is as misunderstood as he is famous.
Peruvian-born artist Gabriel Acevedo Velarde recently embarked on a gradual move from Lima, Peru, to Mexico City to São Paolo, Brazil, and then to New York and Berlin. He uses experiences from his travels to inform his multimedia installations as featured in the Modern’s second FOCUS exhibition of 2010.
John Smith is a British filmmaker living and working in London, where he also teaches part-time as Professor of Fine Art at the University of London. Smith has received notoriety and praise for films that are strongly influenced by the Structural Materialist ideas that dominated British filmmaking during his formative years. Also fascinated by the immersive power of narrative and the spoken word, Smith has developed a body of work that deftly subverts the boundaries between documentary and fiction, representation and abstraction.
