Necessary Obstacles: Ron Nagle

Artist Ron Nagle was born in San Francisco, where he currently lives and works. His first one-person exhibition took place in 1968, and since then he has had exhibitions at numerous museums, including the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Secession in Vienna, the Fridericianum in Kassel, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Nagle is known for his intimately scaled sculptures made of ceramic elements that are slip-cast, fired, and embellished with epoxy and other synthetic materials that allow him to expand his forms beyond the limits of clay. Some are glazed to a hot-rod finish, others textured like stucco and then airbrushed.

New York-based curator, art writer and educator Dan Cameron launched his career in 1982 with Extended Sensibilities at the New Museum, the first institutional effort in the US to examine gay & lesbian identity in art. For over forty years, Cameron has held senior curatorial positions at the New Museum, Orange County Museum of Art and CAC New Orleans, and organized more than a hundred museum exhibitions, including surveys of Martin Wong, David Wojnarowicz, Faith Ringgold, and others. In 2007, Dan founded Prospect New Orleans, the contemporary art triennial to benefit the city after Hurricane Katrina, and organized the first two editions. More recently, his book on Nicole Eisenman’s paintings was published in 2021 by Lund Humphries.