Installation view of Carrie Yamaoka’s "seeing is forgetting and remembering and forgetting again," 2023. Photo by Dario Lasagni.

Artist in Conversation: Carrie Yamaoka and Claire Grace

Tuesday, February 27, 2024 at 4:30pm
Zilkha Uncommons Reading Room, South Gallery, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery

FREE!

Artist Carrie Yamaoka ’79 and Claire Grace, Associate Professor of Art History and American Studies, and Program Director of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at Wesleyan University, will be in conversation on the occasion of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery’s current anniversary exhibition Always Being Relation: 50 Years of the Gallery at the CFA, and Yamaoka’s most recent solo exhibition in the gallery, seeing is forgetting and remembering and forgetting again, which was presented in 2023.

Read "CFA Exhibit Celebrates 50 Years of History" in The Wesleyan Connection.

Claire Grace is an Associate Professor of Art History at Wesleyan University. Her first book, Art Demonstration: Group Material’s 1980s, offers an art historical analysis of a seminal New York-based collective that has become foundational to debates in art and activism. In 2009, Grace co-curated with Helen Molesworth the landmark traveling exhibition “ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993,” which featured the collective 'fierce pussy,' of which Yamaoka is a founding member.

Read "Open-Ended Questions: New Exhibit at the Zilkha Gallery" in The Wesleyan Connection.

Carrie Yamaoka ’79 is a New York-based visual artist whose work traverses the disciplines of painting, photography, and sculpture. She is interested in the topography of surfaces, materiality, and process, the tactility of the barely visible, and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of the object. Her work engages the viewer at the intersection between records of chemical action/reaction and the desire to apprehend a picture emerging in fleeting and unstable states of transformation. Exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), MoMA/PS1 (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Fondation Ricard (Paris), the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), Artists Space (New York), the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Writing about her work has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, Hyperallergic, Interview, and Bomb. Her work is included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, Henry Art Gallery, and Centre Pompidou. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and an Anonymous Was A Woman award. Yamaoka is represented by Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles) and Ulterior (New York City). She is a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy.

The exhibition will be on display through Sunday, March 3, 2024.

For more information about the exhibition Always Being Relation: Fifty Years of the Gallery at the CFA, please visit the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery website.

Image: Installation view of Carrie Yamaoka, Stump x 2, 2024, Chiffon, Dimensions variable.
Courtesy of the artist, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, and Ulterior, New York.