Past Event
A.L. Steiner + Friends on Jenny Holzer
Dia Chelsea
Jenny Holzer, Laments, 1989. © Jenny Holzer/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York
In the grips of the Covid-19 pandemic, A.L. Steiner will present on Laments (1989–90), Jenny Holzer’s exhibition and text, alongside writers, artists, and activists Morgan Bassichis, Riel Bellow, Gregg Bordowitz, Alexander Chee, Malik Gaines, Guadalupe Maravilla + Mishell Guillen, Lucas Michael, Eileen Myles, and Pamela Sneed. In 1989, with the HIV/AIDS crisis worsening and deaths mounting, Holzer identified her thirteen texts and sarcophagi as “voices of the dead.” Steiner has organized an evening to revisit this monumental work with the voices of the living, as we lament the crises of today.
Free. Register for the event here.
Participants
Morgan Bassichis is a comedic performer living in New York, currently working on an anti-Zionist bat mitzvah album. Morgan is the author of The Odd Years (2020), and editor of Nightboat Books’s 2019 edition of The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions.
Riel Bellow is a Métis and Scottish artist and writer raised between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Chiapas, Mexico. She holds an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, New York.
Gregg Bordowitz is an artist and writer living in New York. A retrospective of his work is currently on view at MoMA PS1, New York. He is a professor and director of the low-residency MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Alexander Chee is a novelist and essayist living in New York. His op-ed on the echoes of the AIDS crisis during the COVID-19 pandemic was published in the New York Times in 2020. He is associate professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.
Malik Gaines is an artist and writer, co-artistic director of the Industry, Los Angeles, and a member of the performance group My Barbarian—whose twenty-year survey is opening this fall at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gaines is the author of Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left (2017) and associate professor of performance studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York.
Guadalupe Maravilla + Mishell Guillen
Guadalupe Maravilla and Mishell Guillen are artists, performers, and writers living in New York. Drawing on ancestral, Indigenous, and ritual practices of healing, Maravilla’s work is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Lucas Michael is an artist living in New York. His work questions issues of identity, gender, and sexuality through video, photography, drawing, sculpture, and installation.
Eileen Myles is a writer living in New York and Marfa, Texas. Their twenty-two books include For Now (2020), evolution (2018), Afterglow (2017), I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975–2014 (2015), and Chelsea Girls (1994).
Pamela Sneed is a poet, writer, and performer living in New York. She is the author of numerous books, including the recent Funeral Diva (2020). Sneed teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
A.L. Steiner is an artist living in New York. She is co-curator, with artist Nicole Eisenman, of Ridykeulous, and cofounder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.). Steiner is senior critic and assistant dean at Yale University’s School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut.