EventsThe New Social Environment#193
A Tribute to Ron Gorchov
Friday, December 11, 2020 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Join us for a tribute to artist Ron Gorchov with Yevgeniya Baras, Lisa Corinne Davis, Susan Crile, Odili Donald Odita, Joachim Pissarro, Ray Smith, Robert Storr. The panel will be moderated by Phong H. Bui. We’ll conclude with a poetry reading from Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola and Vyt Bakaitis..
In this Talk
Ron Gorchov, born in Chicago in 1930, was an American artist who began working with curved surface paintings in 1967. He created his first shaped canvas work in Mark Rothko’s studio. Gorchov was best known for helping to spearhead the shaped canvas movement with his bowed wooden frames, resembling saddles or shields, stretched with linen or canvas and marked with simple shapes of thin paint providing chromatic contrasts. As part of a group of artists in New York in the 1960s and ‘70s including Frank Stella, Richard Tuttle, Blinky Palermo, and Ellsworth Kelly, Gorchov pushed painting to its extreme, defying Greenbergian formalism. Becoming a sort of hybrid between painting and sculpture, the warped edges of Gorchov’s canvases created new dimensions and depth, disorienting the viewer’s perception.
Yevgeniya Baras
Yevgeniya Baras is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited her work in several New York City galleries and internationally. She is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York and the Landing Gallery in Los Angeles. Baras was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2019. She was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner grant and the Chinati Foundation Residency in 2018 and the Yaddo Residency in 2017. She received the Artadia Prize and was selected for the Sharpe-Walentas studio program and the MacDowell Colony residency in 2015. In 2014 she earned the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Prize. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, ArtForum and Art in America.
Lisa Corinne Davis
Based in Brooklyn, Lisa Corinne Davis is a painter exploring the complex relationship between race, culture, classification and contingency. Born in Baltimore, Davis received a BFA from Pratt Institute, and an MFA from Hunter College. Her paintings have been exhibited across the US and are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum and The Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is currently represented by Miles McEnery Gallery, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, and The Mayor Gallery, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, three Artist Fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
Susan Crile
Susan Crile’s paintings move between the poles of beauty and horror. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Hirshhorn Musem & Sculpture Garden, The Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Cleveland Museum of Art She has exhibited at numerous museums in the US and Europe which include, Il Museo di Roma in Trastevere, Il Museo di Palazzo Mocinego in Venice, The Phillips Collection in Washington DC and the St Louis Museum of Art. She has taught at Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College and Barnard College, among others. She is a professor at Hunter College, CUNY where she has been on the faculty since 1982.
Odili Donald Odita
Artist Odili Donald Odita is an abstract painter whose work explores color both in the figurative historical context and in the sociopolitical sense. He is best known for his large-scale canvases with kaleidoscopic patterns and vibrant hues, which he uses to reflect the human condition. For Odita, color in itself has the possibility of mirroring the complexity of the world as much as it has the potential for being distinct.
Joachim Pissarro
Art historian, theoretician, curator, and educator Joachim Pissarro is director of the Hunter College Galleries and Bershad Professor of Art History at Hunter College. He has held positions at the Dallas Museum of Art, Kimbell Art Museum, MoMa, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Royal Academy of London, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Notable exhibitions Pissarro curated include Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne and Pissarro 1865–1885 (2005) and Out of Time: A Contemporary View (2006, with Eva Respini), which have toured internationally. Pissarro has served as the Editorial Director of Wildenstein Publications and is the author of numerous books, most recently, Wild Art, with art critic David Carrier and published by Phaidon Press. Pisarro is Consulting Editor of the Rail.
Ray Smith
Painter and sculptor Ray Smith was born in Brownsville, Texas in 1959, on lands that his family had settled in the early 19th century. He studied fresco painting with traditional craftsmen in Mexico, attended art academies in Mexico and the United States, and settled in Mexico City. Since 1985, he has divided his time between New York and Cuernavaca, Mexico. Smith’s work is characterized by a unique kind of magical realism. He bends, twists, and transplants, creating illogical scenarios that are full of surprises and special effects. The artist often uses dogs and animals as anthropomorphic beings. “They are an entity of the human figure,” says Smith. “They are beasts, but they are directly attached to a blueprint of our own existence.”
Robert Storr
Preeminent art critic, curator, artist, and educator Robert Storr is the former Dean of Yale School of Art and senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has written numerous catalogues, articles, and books on major 20th and 21st-century artists. He was the first American to serve as visual arts director of the Venice Biennale and has been researching and writing on Philip Guston for more than three decades.
Phong H. Bui
Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and Co-Founder and Publisher/Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, Rail Editions, River Rail and Rail Curatorial Projects.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom, Dao Strom reading.
Dao Strom
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.
Dao Strom
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 🌈✨