EventsCommon Ground
Solidarity with Ukraine: Part II
Dissident Artists in Conversation, featuring Matvey Levenstein, Taras Lewyckyj, Phong H. Bui, and Lisa Yuskavage
Thursday, March 24, 2022 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Artists Matvey Levenstein and Taras Lewyckyj join Phong H. Bui and Lisa Yuskavage for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Neeli Cherkovski.
In this Talk
As part of an ongoing series of conversations in solidarity with Ukraine, you can watch Part I here.
Matvey Levenstein
Born in 1960 in Moscow, U.S.S.R., Matvey Levenstein lives and works in New York City and Orient, NY. His delicate and exquisitely rendered paintings explore themes of history and representation. Levenstein teaches at the School of Visual Art, New York, NY. He is included in the recent publication Landscape Painting Now by Todd Bradway. Levenstein has been the recipient of several prestigious awards, honors and residencies, including the Rome Prize, American Academy in Rome, Rome (2003); the Penny McCall Foundation Award, New York (2002); the Katherine J. Horwitch Grant, Jewish Foundation (1985-1987); and many more.
Taras Lewyckyj
As artistic director of Philadelphia’s Voloshky Ukrainian Dance Ensemble, Taras Lewyckyj oversees performances that combine Ukrainian and American dance aesthetics, culled from folkloric traditions and contemporary styles. In his recent Center-funded project, Lewyckyj recovered, restaged, and documented lost works of acclaimed Ukrainian dance artist Anatoly Kryvochyzha. The finished film of this project by Henry Nevison includes interviews with folk art specialists Anthony Shay and Toni Shapiro-Phim.
Lisa Yuskavage
For more than thirty years, Lisa Yuskavage’s highly original approach to figurative painting has challenged conventional understandings of the genre. She has been represented by David Zwirner since 2005. Yuskavage’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions worldwide, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2000) and many others. The 2018 two-part exhibition at David Zwirner marked her sixth gallery solo show. In 2020, The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Aspen Art Museum co-organized a solo presentation of the artist’s work, Wilderness. Yuskavage’s work is held at the Art Institute of Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and many other renowned institutions around the world. Yuskavage lives and works in New York.
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 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.
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 🌈✨