The New Social Environment#233

Hugo McCloud with Lyle Rexer

 

1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

Artist Hugo McCloud joins critic, curator, and writer Lyle Rexer for a conversation. We’ll conclude with a poetry reading from Nicole Wallace.

In this talk

Hugo McCloud

Hugo McCloud
Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery
Born in Palo Alto California in 1980, Hugo McCloud is one of the most prolific young artists working today. Self-taught with a background in industrial design, McCloud’s practice is unrestricted by classical, academic tenets. Drawing inspiration from the rawness and decay of the urban landscape, McCloud creates rich, large-scale abstract paintings and sculptural objects by fusing unconventional industrial materials — tar, bitumen, aluminum sheeting and oxidized steel plates — with traditional pigment and woodblock printing techniques. His approach is instinctive and physical, often working on the floor, sanding, hammering and torching his materials until a total metamorphosis takes place. Hugo McCloud lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Tulum, Mexico.

Lyle Rexer

Lyle Rexer
Photo by Jerry Spagnoli
Independent critic, curator, and writer Lyle Rexer is the author of The Critical Eye: 15 Pictures to Understand Photography (Intellect Ltd 2019), The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (Aperture 2009), and Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes, (Harry N. Abrams 2002) and others. He has published hundreds of catalog essays and articles on art, architecture, and photography and contributed to such publications as The New York Times, Harper’s, Art in America, among others. He has lectured at many institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale University, among others, and he teaches in both the graduate and undergraduate programs at SVA.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Nicole Wallace reading.

Nicole Wallace

Nicole Wallace
Courtesy of Nicole Wallace
The author of WAASAMOWIN (IMP, 2019), a member of the Indigenous Kinship Collective, and Managing Director of The Poetry Project. Nicole was a June/July 2020 poetry micro-resident at Running Dog and a 2019 Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow. Recent work can be read in print in Survivance: Indigenous Poesis Vol. IV Zine and online at Running Dog, A Perfect Vacuum, and LitHub. Originally from Gakaabikaang, located in Minnesota, Nicole is of mixed settler/European ancestry and is a descendent of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Ojibwe).

❤️ 🌈 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.