EventsThe New Social Environment#398

BRUCE CONNER & JAY DEFEO: ("we are not what we seem")

Featuring Stuart Comer, Rachel Federman, Laura Hoptman, and Constance Lewallen

Friday, October 1, 2021 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

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Curators Stuart Comer, Rachel Federman, and Laura Hoptman join Rail Editor-at-Large Constance Lewallen for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Rail Poetry Editor Anselm Berrigan.

Stuart Comer

A photo of Stuart Comer on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Stuart Comer. © 2023 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Peter Ross
Stuart Comer is MoMA’s Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance. He oversees the collection and diverse program of exhibitions, events, and acquisitions for the Department of Media and Performance. He also leads the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, the Museum’s space dedicated to performance, music, sound, spoken word, and expanded approaches to the moving image. Some of his recent projects at MoMA have included Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? (2021), and member: Pope.L, 1978–2001 (2019), among others. He is co-curator of Signals: Video and Electronic Democracy. Comer was co-curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2014 Biennial and he served as the first Curator of Film at Tate Modern, London, from 2004 to 2013.

Rachel Federman

A photo of Rachel Federman on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Curator Rachel Federman is Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at The Morgan Library & Museum. Before joining The Morgan in 2016, she was Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA, where she helped organize the retrospective BRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE. She also curated the museum’s inaugural galleries of California art. Since arriving at The Morgan, she has curated By Any Means: Contemporary Drawings from The Morgan (2019) and Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak’s Designs for Opera and Ballet (2019). She has published essays on Bruce Conner, Richard Diebenkorn, Paul McCarthy, Allen Ruppersberg, and Andy Warhol, among others. Rachel holds a PhD in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Laura Hoptman

A photo of Laura Hoptman on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment

Laura Hoptman is the Executive Director of The Drawing Center, a post she has held since 2018. She came to The Drawing Center after eight years as a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, an institution where she also began her career in the 1990s as a curator with a specialty in drawing.

Constance Lewallen

A photo of Constance Lewallen on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Curator and writer Constance Lewallen (1939-2022) was Adjunct Curator at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where she curated many contemporary art exhibitions, including Ant Farm (1968-1978), 2004 (co-curated with Steve Seid), A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, 2007, and co-curated Stephen Kaltenbach: The Beginning and the End for the Manetti Shrem Museum at UC Davis. She is the author of 500 Capp Street: David Ireland’s House and co-author with Dore Bowen of Bruce Nauman: Spatial Encounters, both published by UC Press. She was an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.

    The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

    Dao Strom

    A photo of Dao Strom on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
    Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

    We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨

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