Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Charles Gaines Will Participate in ARTISTS TALK at The Broad Stage

The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage, Santa Monica, and Sotheby's Institute of Art, Los Angeles, a partnership with Claremont Graduate University, will present internationally acclaimed, Los Angeles-based artists Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Charles Gaines in conversation with Anne Ellegood, Senior Curator, Hammer Museum on Monday, May 21 at The Broad Stage at the Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center. ARTISTS TALK: A Conversation with L.A. Artists is the second program in a series of talks with influential California-based artists, established to explore the living legacy of Los Angeles' vibrant contemporary art scene. Executive producer of the Artists Talk series is William Turner.

ARTISTS TALK: A Conversation with L.A. Artists Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Charles Gaines

Moderated by Anne Ellegood, Senior Curator, Hammer Museum

Monday, May 21, 2018
6:30pm Reception | 7:30pm On-Stage Conversation
The Broad Stage at the Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center
1310 11th Street, Santa Monica, CA 90401

Tickets start at $35 and are now on sale at www.thebroadstage.org and by calling 310-434-3200. Box office sales at 1310 11th St. Santa Monica CA 90401 begin three hours prior to performance.

The artists will speak to their work, process, histories, and lives, addressing the significance and specificity of L.A. as a creative context for their work. Moderated by Ellegood, an avid supporter and exponent of both artists, the event joins these tangentially related though distinct voices for the first time in a public forum.

"I am truly excited for this opportunity to bring these two important artists together in conversation," said Anne Ellegood, Senior Curator, Hammer Museum. "While each has chosen to make Los Angeles their home and contribute greatly to the cultural life of our city, they are internationally recognized artists who meaningfully explore the relationship of the local to the global. While distinct in many ways-from different generations and nationalities, one working predominantly figuratively with a colorful and richly layered visual language and the other with a longstanding commitment to employing rules-based systems to generate imagery, one having lived in Los Angeles since the late 1980s and the other a relatively recent transplant-both their practices explore fundamental questions about representation, how histories are embedded in imagery, and the role of the artist in society. I am a great admirer of both artists and honored to share the stage with them."

Both Gaines and Crosby, though working through distinct practices, address themes of cultural meaning and hybridity, critically challenging how significance is attributed and defined or, for that matter, disavowed.

The Artists Talk series was forged in the spirit of L.A's unique interdisciplinary fluidity, a shifting dynamic the city has fostered across cultural and institutional boundaries that continues to set it apart as a vital and relevant center for art production. Part of a new, multi-year collaborative arts initiative between The Broad Stage and Sotheby's Institute of Art, this series brings the living history of Southern California's art to the stage while providing educational and career opportunities for arts management students and the public alike.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1983 and lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Hammer Museum, and the Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach). In 2017 she was named a MacArthur Fellow. In January 2018 Akunyili Crosby became the second artist to create an outdoor mural for LA MOCA Grand Avenue, on view until 31 December. This year her work will be included in the Hayward Gallery Billboard Project and in Michael Jackson: On the Wall 28 June - 21 October 2018, National Portrait Gallery, London. In September she undertakes the first commission at Brixton station in London as part of Art on the Underground's year-long program of women artists.

Los Angeles-based artist Charles Gaines (American, b. 1944), highly regarded as both a leading practitioner of conceptualism and an influential educator at the California Institute of the Arts, is celebrated for his works on paper and acrylic glass, photographs, drawings, musical compositions, and installations that investigate how rule-based procedures influence representation and construct meaning. He has had over 80 one person shows and several hundred group exhibitions in the US and abroad including the 2007 and 2015 Bienale di Venezia. In 2015, he presented a critically acclaimed retrospective exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Hammer Museum. Gaines' work is collected internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Los Angeles County Museum. He is represented by The Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles and Max Hetzler, Berlin and Paris. His compositions created by translating revolutionary texts into musical notation have been widely performed, most recently in Australia at the 2017 Melbourne Festival, at the Brooklyn Museum in 2016, and at the 56th Biennale di Venezia, Venice. In 1977, Gaines received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, in 2007 a United States Artists Fellowship Award, the 2013 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the 2015 CAA Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work, and is the 2018 honored recipient of the REDCAT award.

Anne Ellegood, Senior Curator, Hammer Museum
Since 2009 Anne Ellegood has been the Senior Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where she has organized numerous exhibitions. Prior to joining the Hammer she was Curator of Contemporary Art at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. and from 1998-2003 she was the Associate Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. She recently organized the first North American retrospective of the work of Jimmie Durham, which opened at the Hammer in January 2017, traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, and is currently at its final venue, the Remai Modern in Saskatoon. Other recent solo shows include those with Sam Falls, Kevin Beasley, Charles Gaines, John Outterbridge, Pedro Reyes, Frances Upritchard, Lily van der Stokker, and Judith Hopf. At the Hammer, she has also organized the group exhibitions Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology (2014) and All of this and nothing (2011). In 2011, she was selected by the Australian Council for the Arts to curate Sydney-based artist Hany Armanious's exhibition for the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Ellegood is currently co-curating the Hammer's biennial of Los Angeles-based artists, Made in LA, with Erin Christovale, which opens onJune 2. She received her Master's of Art from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and has taught at Bard's CCS, Rhode Island School of Design, School of the Visual Arts, and George Washington University.

Photo credit: Katie Miller