The New Social Environment#614
Benny Merris: flash!
Featuring Merris and Ksenia Soboleva
to
1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
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Artist Benny Merris joins Rail contributor Ksenia Soboleva for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Peter Burzynski.
In this talk
Visit Benny Merris: flash!, on view at Heroes Gallery through July 30, 2022 →
Benny Merris
Raised in Boise, Idaho, Benny Merris is a New York-based artist with an MFA from Glasgow School of Art. He was a member of the inaugural Paint School cohort run by Shandaken Projects in New York City. Merris has had solo exhibitions at Heroes Gallery, NYC and Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, among others. Merris has participated in numerous group exhibitions including presentations at The American Academy of Arts and Letters, NYC; GRIMM Gallery, NYC; Essex Flowers, NYC; Murray Guy, NYC; Regina Rex, NYC; LAXART, Los Angeles; Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Houston; Boston University Art Gallery, Boston. Merris has been an artist-in-residence at Casa de los Artistas in Malpais, Costa Rica, The Banff Centre, Denniston Hill, and Offshore Residency.
Ksenia M. Soboleva
New York-based writer and art historian Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva specializes in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation titled “Fragments: Art, AIDS, and Lesbian Identity in the United States.” Her writings have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, art-agenda, and various exhibition catalogues. She has curated exhibitions at Candice Madey Gallery, La MaMa Galleria, and Assembly Room. Soboleva was the 2020-2021 Jan and Marica Vilcek Curatorial Fellow at the Guggenheim Museum. She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and LGBTQ+ History at the New York Historical Society, and Adjunct Professor of Art History at NYU.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Peter Burzynski reading.
Peter Burzynski
Peter Buzyński earned a PhD in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He works as the book center manager at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee. Burzyński is the translator of Martyna Buliżańska’s This Is My Earth (New American Press, 2019) and the author of the chapbook A Year Alone inside of Woodland Pattern (Adjunct Press, 2022). In between his studies he has worked as a chef in New York City and Milwaukee. His poetry has appeared in jubilat, The Best American Poetry Blog, Thin Air, Prick of the Spindle, Thrush Poetry Review, MAYDAY, Your Impossible Voice, RHINO, and Forklift Ohio, among others. He is the son of immigrants who call him on the phone every day.
❤️ 🌈 We'd like to thank the The Terra Foundation for American Art for making these daily conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive.