Attractive People Doing Attractive Things in Attractive Places: Samantha Nye

Painter, video, and installation artist Samantha Nye lives in Philadelphia. For the first decade of her life, she was a relatively unsuccessful child model. She learned early about performance, identity, and class aspiration. Her work reframes seduction through reenactments of 1960s pop culture. Her paintings, videos, and installations highlight aging bodies, celebrate queer kinship, and facilitate an intergenerational dialogue about sexuality, leisure, and pleasure. Her recent solo show, My Heart’s In A Whirl at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was written about in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. She has a painting in the collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston which is on display in the group show, New Light: Encounters and Connections.

Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva is a New York based art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation on art, AIDS, and lesbian identity in the United States. Soboleva is currently working on a book project titled Friendship as a Way of Art: Queer Identity and Visual Citation, and co-editing (with Svetlana Kitto) the first major publication on the lesbian gallery Trial Balloon. Her writings have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, Ursula Magazine, as well as various exhibition catalogues and artist monographs. She teaches at the New School and NYU.