Thursday, June 7, 2018
6:30 – 8 pm
Scheuer Auditorium

The Saul and Harriet M. Rothkopf Media Program

Writer and critic John Yau moderates a discussion on Chaim Soutine’s legacy of gestural painting and the still life genre, featuring contemporary artists Angela Dufresne, Josephine Halvorson, and Judith Linhares.

This program has been funded by a generous donation endowment from the Saul and Harriet M. Rothkopf Family Foundation.

About the Panelists:

• Angela Dufresne is a painter originally from Connecticut, raised however in the town in Kansas (Olathe-Suburbs) that Dick and Perry stopped in before they killed the Clutters (In Cold Blood), and now based in Brooklyn. Her work articulates non-paranoid, porous ways of being in a world fraught by fear, power and possession. Through painting, drawing and performative works, she wields heterotopic narratives that are both nonhierarchical and perverse.  She has exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, The National Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, the Kemper Museum in Kansas City, Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, The Cleveland Institute of Art, The Aldridge Museum in Connecticut, and the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts. She is currently Associate Professor of painting at RISD. Awards and honors include 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, residency at Yaddo, a Purchase Award at The National Academy of Arts and Letters, two fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, The Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California, and a Jerome Foundation Fellowship.  

• Josephine Halvorson makes art from observation in relation to a particular object and place. Transcribing her perceptions in real time, Halvorson connects with the world around her through the medium of paint. Through describing the appearance of a subject at-hand, she expresses what is invisible but nonetheless felt: locale, time, history, emotion. Halvorson grew up on Cape Cod and studied at the Cooper Union School of Art (BFA, 2003), Yale Norfolk (2002) and Columbia University (MFA, 2007). She has been granted three yearlong fellowships in Europe: the United States Fulbright to Vienna, Austria, the Harriet Hale Woolley at the Fondation des États-Unis, Paris, France, and was the first American to receive the Rome Prize at the French Academy at the Villa Medici, Rome, Italy. Halvorson has been the recipient of several awards and artist residencies including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2009); a New York Foundation for the Arts award in Painting, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program. Halvorson’s work is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and Peter Freeman, Inc., Paris. Josephine Halvorson has taught at The Cooper Union, Princeton University, the University of Tennessee Knoxville and Columbia University. From 2010 to 2016 she served as Critic and Senior Critic at Yale School of Art's MFA program in Painting. In 2016 Halvorson joined Boston University as Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting. 

• Judith Linhares is known for her exuberant, gestural and colorful narrative images representing figures, animals and sometimes vases of flowers. After being included in Marcia Tucker’s groundbreaking show “Bad Painting” in 1978, Linhares moved from California to New York, where she lives and works. Linhares has received numerous grants the Solomon Guggenheim Fellowship, Joan Mitchell grant and three national endowment grants most recently the Artists Legacy Award in 2017; Her most recent shows “The Way She Goes to Town” at Various Small Fires in Los Angeles and “Out of My Head” at Angim Gilbert Gallery in San Francisco. Linhares is currently represented by PPOW and will have a solo show with the gallery in 2019. She has been widely reviewed and is included in many public and private collections. 

• John Yau has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. His latest poetry publications include a book of poems, Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), and the chapbook, Egyptian Sonnets (Rain Taxi, 2012). His most recent monographs are Catherine Murphy (Rizzoli, 2016), the first book on the artist, and Richard Artschwager: Into the Desert (Black Dog Publishing, 2015). He has also written monographs on A. R. Penck, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. In 1999, he started Black Square Editions, a small press devoted to poetry, fiction, translation, and criticism. He was the Arts Editor for the Brooklyn Rail (2007–2011) before he began writing regularly for Hyperallergic Weekend. He is a Professor of Critical Studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University).

Free with Pay-What-You-Wish Admission; RSVP Recommended