American Artist

Guest Lecture

January 13, 2020, 6 p.m.
VAF 306 Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

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AMERICAN ARTIST (b. 1989 Altadena, CA, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers the visibility and labor of blackness in the context of networked virtual life. Their practice makes use of video, installation, new media, and writing to reveal historical dynamics embedded within contemporary culture and technology. American Artist’s legal name change serves as the basis of an ambivalent practice—one of declaration: by insisting on blackness as descriptive of an American artist, and erasure: anonymity in virtual spaces where “American Artist” is an anonymous name, unable to be validated by a computer as a person’s name.

Artist is a 2018-2019 recipient of the Queens Museum Jerome Foundation Fellowship. They are a former resident of Abrons Art Center and EYEBEAM and completed the Whitney Independent Study program as an artist in 2017. Recent exhibitions include My Blue Window, Queens Museum, Corona, New York; Dignity Images: Bayview-Hunters Point, Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, California; and I'm Blue (If I Was _____ I Would Die), Koenig & Clinton, Brooklyn, New York. Their work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, ARTnews, and Huffington Post.

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Image: American Artist at the Gowanus E-waste Warehouse, where they often find supplies to make their work. Credit: Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York Times