Office/Studio
Visual Arts Facility 411
Website
www.paulsepuya.com
Biography
Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) is an artist working in photography whose projects weave together histories and possibilities of portraiture, queer and homoerotic networks of production and collaboration, and the material and conceptual potential of blackness at the heart of the medium. The sites of production have been an equally important subject of his works, especially the artist-photographer’s studio as a center for production, accumulation and play. His interests also include queer literary modernism, questions of artistic responsibility and care regarding representation and refusal.
Sepuya received an MFA in photography at UCLA in 2016. From 2000 - 2014 Sepuya lived and worked in New York City, receiving a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2004. Sepuya became known for his 2005 - 2007 zine series “SHOOT” and body of work, “Beloved Object & Amorous Subject, Revisited” (2005-8), along with participation and collaborations in the re-emergence of queer zines culture of the 2000s. He went on to participate in Artist-in-Residence programs at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Studio Museum in Harlem and Fire Island Artist Residency. He was a recipient of the 2019 Rauschenberg Residency. Sepuya’s work has been covered and published in ARTFORUM, Aperture, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Art Review, Frieze, Art in America, Monocle, Osmos, The Nation, and The Guardian among others.
Sepuya’s work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MOCA Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Getty Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the ICA Boston, the International Center for Photography, Stedelijk Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum and Tate Modern, among others. Solo museum exhibitions include Fotomuseum Amsterdam (2018), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2020), Deichtorhallen PHOXXI in Hamburg (2022), and museum surveys at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2019), Nottingham Contemporary (2024) and a twenty-year survey of his practice at Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland and Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany.
Past museum exhibitions also include a project for the 2019 Whitney Biennial, “Being: New Photography 2018” at the Museum of Modern Art, “Trigger” at the New Museum New York City, and group exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, the Guggenheim Museum, the Getty Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His recent hybrid monograph-artist book “Dark Room A - Z” was published by Aperture in the Fall of 2024.