EventsThe New Social Environment#614
Benny Merris: flash!
Featuring Merris and Ksenia Soboleva
Friday, July 29, 2022 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Artist Benny Merris joins Rail contributor Ksenia Soboleva for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Peter Burzynski.
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
Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva is a New York based writer and art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Her writings have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Ursula Magazine, Cultured, Artforum, frieze, Hyperallergic, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues and artist monographs. Soboleva practices an autobiographical approach to art history, and an art historical approach to autobiography. She is currently completing her book manuscript What Happens After: Art, AIDS, and Lesbian Histories. Soboleva teaches at NYU.
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 🌈✨