EXPO Chicago

EXPO CHICAGO

September 18 – 21

Booth 609

 

Dotty Attie (b. 1938) Since the 1970s, Attie’s multi-panel compositions have explored gender identity, politics, and culture through the re-imaging of well-known paintings and photography. With her recombinative process Attie makes power visible through the use of subtly subversive paintings and carefully composed text.   Attie was a founding member of A.I.R Gallery, which opened in 1972 as one of the first artist-run galleries for women in the U.S.  Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, among others. In 2012 Attie’s paintings were featured in This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL. The exhibition also traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA and the The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

 

Dinh Q. Lê (b. 1968) Best known for his large-scale photographs and video works, Lê has developed an artistic practice that insists on deeper engagement with the way global crisis is perceived and understood. Lê’s photoweavings push the possibility for creating three-dimensionality with two-dimensional materials. Lê has been creating photo-tapestries for nearly two decades with sourced images of various conflicts – from the Vietnam War to the genocide in Cambodia. Cut apart and then woven together, the work evokes the idea that there is no true historic ‘moment,’ but rather that history is a complicated series of multifaceted narratives. He participated in the 2013 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012, the 2009 Biennale Cuveê in Linz, Austria, the 2008 Singapore Biennale, and the 2006 Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, in Brisbane, Australia. His work has been exhibited at major institutions including: Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, Australia; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, Massachusetts; and the Asia Society, New York, New York, among many others. His work is currently the subject of the solo exhibition Crossing the Farther Shore at the Rice University Art Gallery.  The Mori Museum of Art in Tokyo is currently organizing a survey of his work for 2015. Lê's work is also included in numerous permanent collections including The Museum of Modern Art, The Ford Foundation, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art.

 

Jessica Stoller (b. 1981) uses clay as a vehicle to explore the constructed, often idealized world of femininity, gathering imagery across cultural lines and histories, fixating on the subjugation of the female body. Stoller uses a myriad of techniques to create her highly detailed works which embody a powerful sense of oppositions which blur the lines between real and imitated, normal and abnormal, perceived beauty and the bodily abject. Stoller's work has been reviewed, in such publications as The New York Times, Artforum, Ceramics: Art and Perception, and N. Pandora Feminist Journal, among others. Stoller has been honored to participate in residencies including the Kohler Arts & Industry Program, WI and The Museum of Arts and Design’s Open Studio Program, NY. A recent Peter S. Reed grantee and a Louis C. Tiffany Nominee, her work is also included in numerous private collections.

 

Martha Wilson (b.1939) For over forty years Wilson’s work has revealed contestations inherent in feminist and socially engaged practices, paralleling the ways that identity and posturing are not just projected, but negotiated. Her performance, video, photography and text work created between 1971 and 1974 investigated the self, as well as the notion of self-perception, through both physical and cultural lenses. Trained in English Literature, Wilson was teaching at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design when she became fascinated by the intersection of text and image.  She moved to New York in 1974. In 1976, Wilson established Franklin Furnace, a non-profit art space, and has ran the institution ever since, providing a platform for over-looked and underappreciated artists of the 1980s and 1990s. Since 2009, Independent Curators International has traveled the exhibition Martha Wilson: Staging the Self to six institutions throughout the United States and published a corresponding catalogue Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces which received The Specific Object 2011 Publication of the year award.

 

David Wojnarowicz (1954 – 1992) channeled a vast accumulation of raw images, sounds, memories and lived experiences into a powerful voice that was an undeniable presence in the New York City art scene of the 1970s, 80s and early 90s. Through his several volumes of fiction, poetry, memoirs, painting, photography, installation, sculpture, film and performance, Wojnarowicz left a legacy, affirming art’s vivifying power in a society he viewed as alienating and corrosive. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related complications on July 22, 1992 at the age of 37. His artwork has been included in solo and group exhibitions around the world, at institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The American Center, Paris, France; The Busan Museum of Modern Art, Korea; Centro Galego de Art Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Barbican Art Gallery, London; and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne Germany. His works are in permanent collections of major museums internationally and are the subject of significant scholarly studies. Highly influential to the current generation of artists, writers and activists, his work continues to be subject of important exhibitions. Wojnarowicz has been the subject of two retrospectives, at the galleries of the Illinois State University in 1990 curated by Barry Blinderman and at the New Museum in 1999 curated by Dan Cameron. Among his numerous books, published by Random House and Grove Press, among others, his memoir, "Close to the Knives" has recently been translated into French. Recently historian Cynthia Carr released an acclaimed biography on Wojnarowicz entitled Fire in the Belly. In 2014, Wojnarowicz’s work will be featured in an upcoming exhibition Take it or Leave it: Institution, Image, Ideology at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The Whitney Museum of American Art will present a retrospective of Wojnarowicz’s work in the spring of 2016.

 

Martin Wong (1946-1999) was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in the Chinatown district of San Francisco, California. Wong's works are charged with a multitude of levels that address the artist's personal, poetic and social concerns, reflecting a sense of compassion and self-identification that still resonates today. He studied ceramics at Humboldt State University, graduating in 1968. During the '70s he was active in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene, and was involved with the performance art groups The Cockettes and Angels of Light. In 1978 he moved to Manhattan, eventually settling in the Lower East Side, where his attention turned exclusively to painting. Wong set forth to depict urban life on the Lower East Side where he then lived. Through his visual diary he built a landscape of stacked bricks, crumbling tenements, constellations and hand signals. His narratives were populated by the neighborhood's denizens including firemen, the incarcerated, graffiti artists, and families, including his friend and poet, Miguel Piñero. Wong died in San Francisco from an AIDS related illness in 1999. Wong's work can be found in museum collections including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Bronx Museum, de Young Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Cleveland Museum of Art. He had a one person show Sweet Oblivion at the New Museum in 1998.  In the fall of 2013 an exhibition of Martin Wong and his Circle, organized by Carlo McCormick, opened at the Museum of the City of New York. A one person traveling exhibition of his work accompanied by the release of a major publication is scheduled to take place at the Bronx Museum, New York, in 2015.

 

Thomas Woodruff (b. 1957) is a conceptual artist who uses traditional figurative painting techniques, archetypal formats and hybrid visual vocabularies from history to create contemporary “structures of contemplation” in the form of elaborative paintings in series. Over the years, Woodruff has worked as an artist, illustrator, educator, and curator.  He has designed works for theatre, dance, opera, and television, and has worked as a tattooist.  He is the Chair of Illustration and Design at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and continues to inspire young artists with his eccentric, visually complex, and visionary paintings. His works have been included in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally including the Whitney Museum of Art (NY), The Norman Rockwell Museum, MA, the Kohler Arts Center, WI, and the National Gallery of Australia. His work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, NY, MIT List Center, MA, The New School, NY, the Honolulu Museum of Art, HI, the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA, the Greenville County Museum, SC, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia.