EventsThe New Social Environment#449

From the Bridge: Alex Katz

Featuring Mark Thomas Gibson, Josephine Halvorson, Chris Martin, and Carter Ratcliff

Monday, December 13, 2021 12 p.m. Eastern / 9 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

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Artists Mark Thomas Gibson, Josephine Halvorson, and Chris Martin join poet and art critic Carter Ratcliffe for a conversation on Alex Katz. We conclude with a poetry reading by Rae Armantrout.

In this Talk

Visit Alex Katz on view at Gladstone Gallery through December 21, 2021

Please note this conversation will be at 12pm ET.

Mark Thomas Gibson

A photo of Mark Thomas Gibson on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Photo by Kathryn Gegenheimer
Artist Mark Thomas Gibson (b. 1980, Miami, FL) received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2002 and his MFA from Yale School of Art in 2013. He is represented by Fredericks & Freiser in New York, M+B in Los Angeles and Loyal in Stockholm. In 2016, he co-curated the traveling exhibition Black Pulp! with William Villalongo. Gibson has released two artist books,_ Some Monsters Loom Large_ (2016) and Early Retirement (2017). In 2021, Gibson was awarded a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage and a Hodder Fellowship from Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University.

Josephine Halvorson

A photo of Josephine Halvorson on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Portrait by Phong H. Bui
Artist Josephine Halvorson makes art that foregrounds firsthand experience and takes the form of painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Born in Brewster, Massachusetts, she studied at The Cooper Union (BFA 2003), Yale Norfolk (2002), and Columbia University (MFA 2007). In 2021, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Halvorson is the recipient of major international residencies and fellowships such as the Harriet Hale Woolley at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris, France (2007-8), and was the first American pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome at the Villa Medici (2014-15). She is a subject of Art21’s documentary series New York Close Up. She is Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University.

Chris Martin

A photo of Chris Martin on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Portrait by Phong H. Bui
Contemporary American abstract painter Chris Martin’s wide range of material and imagery is drawn from Buddhist mandalas, the landscapes of the Catskills, and the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. Martin’s works attempt to deal with the psychological internalizations of spirituality and memory, using formalism in a way similar to both Alfred Jensen and Thomas Nozkowski. The artist regularly incorporates unconventional materials into his work, such as textiles, glitter, and vinyl records, as evidenced in Sweet Dreams (2nd Pillow Painting) (2009), a canvas where six affixed pillows are covered in bright neon paint. Martin lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

    Carter Ratcliff

    A photo of Carter Ratcliff on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
    Portrait by Phong H. Bui
    Critic, poet, and author Carter Ratcliff has written books on Andy Warhol, Alex Katz, Marisol, Gilbert & George, John Singer Sargent, Georgia O’Keeffe, Francis Bacon, and The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art, Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art 1965-1975. His writings on art have appeared in exhibition catalogues, Art in America, Artforum, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, and the Brooklyn Rail. He is a contributing editor of Art in America and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, and the 2013 Annual T-Space Poetry Award.

      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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