The New Social Environment#193
A Tribute to Ron Gorchov
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1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
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Join us for a tribute to artist Ron Gorchov with Yevgeniya Baras, Lisa Corinne Davis, Susan Crile, Odili Donald Odita, Joachim Pissarro, Ray Smith, Robert Storr. The panel will be moderated by Phong H. Bui. We’ll conclude with a poetry reading from Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola and Vyt Bakaitis..
In this talk
Ron Gorchov, born in Chicago in 1930, was an American artist who began working with curved surface paintings in 1967. He created his first shaped canvas work in Mark Rothko’s studio. Gorchov was best known for helping to spearhead the shaped canvas movement with his bowed wooden frames, resembling saddles or shields, stretched with linen or canvas and marked with simple shapes of thin paint providing chromatic contrasts. As part of a group of artists in New York in the 1960s and ‘70s including Frank Stella, Richard Tuttle, Blinky Palermo, and Ellsworth Kelly, Gorchov pushed painting to its extreme, defying Greenbergian formalism. Becoming a sort of hybrid between painting and sculpture, the warped edges of Gorchov’s canvases created new dimensions and depth, disorienting the viewer’s perception.
Yevgeniya Baras
Yevgeniya Baras is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited her work in several New York City galleries and internationally. She is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York and the Landing Gallery in Los Angeles. Baras was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2019. She was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner grant and the Chinati Foundation Residency in 2018 and the Yaddo Residency in 2017. She received the Artadia Prize and was selected for the Sharpe-Walentas studio program and the MacDowell Colony residency in 2015. In 2014 she earned the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Prize. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, ArtForum and Art in America.
Lisa Corinne Davis
Lisa Corinne Davis is an abstract painter exploring themes of racial, social and psychological identity. Born in Baltimore, MD, currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY, Davis received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 1980, and her MFA from Hunter College in 1983. Her paintings have been exhibited across the United States and in Europe, including one person shows at the June Kelly Gallery (New York), Gerald Peters Gallery (New York), Zolla/Lieberman Gallery (Chicago), and The Mayor Gallery (London). Her work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Susan Crile
Susan Crile’s paintings move between the poles of beauty and horror. Her work is in the collections of many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York NY, The Hirshhorn Musem & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., The Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH. She has exhibited at numerous museums in the US and Europe which include, Il Museo di Roma in Trastevere, Il Museo di Palazzo Mocinego in Venice, The phillips Collection in Washington DC and the St Louis Museum of Art. She has had over 50 one person exhibitions. Crile has received two National Endowment for the Arts awards, and Residency grants to The Bellagio Study and Conference Center, at The Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy and to The American Academy in Rome. She has lectured in the United States and Europe, and has taught at Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College and Barnard College, among others. She is a professor at Hunter College, CUNY where she has been on the faculty since 1982.
Odili Donald Odita
Odili Donald Odita (b. Engu, Nigeria in 1966; lives and works in Philadelphia, PA) is an abstract painter whose work explores color both in the figurative historical context and in the sociopolitical sense. He is best known for his large-scale canvases with kaleidoscopic patterns and vibrant hues, which he uses to reflect the human condition.For Odita, color in itself has the possibility of mirroring the complexity of the world as much as it has the potential for being distinct. In his paintings, we see color interwoven and mixed, becoming an active agent in representing the essential power that light has in identifying the entirety of our world. He thinks of his colors as agents to express thoughts, ideas, and transformational change. Much of his color selection is based on personal memories and created intuitively by hand-mixing, so that no two shades are ever repeated.
Joachim Pissarro
Joachim Pissarro is the Bershad Professor of Art History and Director of the Hunter College Galleries, Hunter College, CUNY/City University of New York. He was a Curator at MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture. His recent curatorial projects include Alberto Giacometti | Yves Klein: In Search of the Absolute at Gagosian Gallery London (2016); Pissarro à Eragny at the Musée du Luxembourg (2017); Olga Picasso, Musée National Picasso, Paris (2017), Museo Picasso, Málaga (2019), and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (2019). His latest book Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained (2018, Penn State University Press) is co-authored with David Carrier, following Wild Art (Phaidon, 2016). Joachim is also a Consulting Editor of the Brooklyn Rail.
Ray Smith
Painter and sculptor Ray Smith was born in Brownsville, Texas in 1959, on lands that his family had settled in the early 19th century. He studied fresco painting with traditional craftsmen in Mexico, attended art academies in Mexico and the United States, and settled in Mexico City. Since 1985, he has divided his time between New York and Cuernavaca, Mexico. Smith’s work is characterized by a unique kind of magical realism. He bends, twists, and transplants, creating illogical scenarios that are full of surprises and special effects. The artist often uses dogs and animals as anthropomorphic beings. “They are an entity of the human figure,” says Smith. “They are beasts, but they are directly attached to a blueprint of our own existence.”
Robert Storr
Robert Storr, preeminent art critic, curator, artist, and educator, is the former Dean of Yale School of Art and senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has written numerous catalogues, articles, and books on major 20th and 21st-century artists. He was the first American to serve as visual arts director of the Venice Biennale and has been researching and writing on Philip Guston for more than three decades.
Phong H. Bui
Phong Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, Publisher and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, the River Rail, Rail Editions, and Rail Curatorial Projects. From 2007 to 2010 he served as Curatorial Advisor at MoMA PS1. His recent projects include Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, an ongoing curatorial project that was exhibited in 2019 as an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale and at Colby Museum in Waterville, Maine. He is a trustee of Studio in a School, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Anthology Film Archives, the Third Rail, the Miami Rail, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Second Shift Studio Space of Saint Paul, AICA (2007-2020), and is co-founder of the Monira Foundation, a non-profit which aims to curate ongoing exhibitions and public programming at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City and beyond. Forthcoming projects include the Detroit Rail, the first U.S. retrospective of Jonas Mekas, and Occupy Industry City: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, Year 3.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, and Vyt Bakaitis reading.
Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola
Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola is an interdisciplinary artist & writer whose time-based practice results in a corpus of text-based, visual and sound pieces. She’s the artistic director of diSONARE, and recently co-founded Rizoma, a series of performance workshops for imprisoned women.
Vyt Bakaitis
Vyt Bakaitis lives and works in Brooklyn. Refuge & Occasion, a book of his poems, is due to be published by Station Hill Press. He has just finished Transcience, a book with some new poems and the bulk of translations Vyt has done over the past 50 years.
❤️ 🌈 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.