Art and Architecture: The Brood | Lisa Yuskavage, Christopher Bedford | An Artist Dialogue Series Event

FREE - Auditorium doors open at 5:30 p.m.

On the occasion of the publication of Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood, Paintings 1991–2015, the acclaimed American artist converses with Christopher Bedford, Director of The Rose Art Museum and the curator of The Brood, the museum’s exhibition of the artist’s work, on view this fall.

Created in close collaboration with Yuskavage, this beautifully produced monograph is published in conjunction with the major solo exhibition, spanning twenty-five years of the artist’s work, opening at The Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts (September 12 – December 13, 2015), which will then travel to the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (January 15 – April 3, 2016). Filled with extraordinary color plates and personally selected archival images, this comprehensive book offers a rich overview of more than two decades of her brilliant and controversial paintings, along with interpretive essays by Bedford and leading art historians Suzanne Hudson and Catherine Lord, a text by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and physician Siddhartha Mukherjee, and an interview with the artist by art historian and curator Katy Siegel. The Brood promises to be the definitive publication on this important artist.

Yuskavage’s works are characterized by an ongoing engagement with the history of painting. Her oeuvre bears witness to a re-emergence of the figurative in contemporary painting and takes its point of departure in part in the immediacy and tawdriness of contemporary life spurred by the mass media and the psycho-social realm of the individual. Over the past two decades, she has developed her own genre of the female nude: lavish, erotic, cartoonish, vulgar, angelic young women cast within fantastical landscapes or dramatically lit interiors. They appear to occupy their own realm while narcissistically contemplating themselves and their bodies. Rich, atmospheric skies frequently augment the psychologically charged mood, further adding to the impression of theatricality and creative possibility.

Copies of Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood, Paintings 1991–2015 (Skira Rizzoli, 2015) are available for purchase and signing at the end of the event through David Zwirner Books.

Born in 1962 in Philadelphia, Lisa Yuskavage received her B.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in 1984 and her M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art in 1986. Since 2005, the artist’s work has been represented by David Zwirner in New York. In 2006, two solo exhibitions were concurrently presented at David Zwirner and Zwirner & Wirth, followed by shows at the gallery in 2009, 2011, and 2015. 

Yuskavage’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions worldwide, including The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (organized as part of the Dublin Contemporary 2011); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2006); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2002); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2001); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2000). Museum collections which hold works by the artist include The Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Yuskavage lives and works in New York.

Christopher Bedford is the Henry and Lois Foster Director of The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Since joining The Rose in September of 2012, he has organized exhibitions by Walead Beshty, Mark Bradford, Chris Burden, and Mika Rottenberg, in addition to the new exhibition initiatives Rose Projects and Rose Video. Prior to joining The Rose, Bedford was Chief Curator at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in Columbus. In his almost four years at the Wexner Center, Bedford organized numerous exhibitions including Hard Targets, a multimedia show exploring sports and masculinity, and Mark Bradford, a major mid-career survey of the Los Angeles-based artist. Major monographic exhibitions organized for the Wexner Center include Paula Hayes, Sarah Morris, David Smith, Omer Fast, and Paul Sietsema. For the two years prior to joining the Wexner Center, Bedford was with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) as Assistant Curator in the Department of Contemporary Art. Bedford previously served as a curatorial assistant and then consulting curator in the Department of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Along with co-curators Jennifer Wulffson and Kristina Newhouse, Bedford was the recipient of the 2008 Fellows of Contemporary Art Curators’ Award for the exhibition Superficiality and Superexcrescence. Bedford has published essays, book reviews, editorials, and exhibition reviews in The Burlington Magazine, Artforum, Art in America, frieze, The Art Book, Afterall, and October, as well as numerous essays in anthologies and exhibition catalogues. In addition to completing volumes for Duke University Press and Sculpture Journal, he is currently working on an edited volume for The MIT Press and is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles-based contemporary art journal X-TRA. Bedford holds a B.A. in art history from Oberlin College and an M.A. in art history from Case Western Reserve University. 

Initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni in 2004, Artist Dialogues Series provide an open forum for understanding and appreciation of contemporary art. Artists are paired with critics, curators, gallerists, writers or other artists to converse about art and the potential of exploring new ideas.

Events at The New York Public Library may be photographed or recorded. By attending these events, you consent to the use of your image and voice by the Library for all purposes.

The portrait of Lisa Yuskavage in her studio is by EJ Camp.

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