October 1: A Conversation on Bruce Conner & Jay DeFeo

Friday, October 1st, 2021 at 1 pm Eastern / 10 am Pacific

With Stuart Comer, Rachel Federman, Laura Hoptman, and Constance Lewallen

As part of The New Social Environment, the Brooklyn Rail’s ongoing series of conversations between artists, writers, critics, and poets, Stuart Comer, Rachel Federman, and Laura Hoptman joined Constance Lewallen for a conversation on Bruce Conner and Jay DeFeo. The conversation coincided with the two-person exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery.

Curator Stuart Comer is The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He also leads The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, the Museum’s new space dedicated to performance, music, sound, spoken word, and expanded approaches to the moving image. He organized the exhibition BRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE (2016), as well exhibitions by Pope.L, Tania Bruguera, Steve McQueen, Charles Atlas, Juliana Huxtable, and Simone Forti. He organized Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?, a major commission that opened September 2021 at the Museum of Modern Art, and he is co-curating the forthcoming exhibition, Signals: The Politics of Video.

Curator Rachel Federman is Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at The Morgan Library & Museum. Before joining The Morgan in 2016, she was Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA, where she helped organize the retrospective BRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE. She also curated the museum’s inaugural galleries of California art. Since arriving at The Morgan, she has curated By Any Means: Contemporary Drawings from The Morgan (2019) and Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak’s Designs for Opera and Ballet (2019). She has published essays on Bruce Conner, Richard Diebenkorn, Paul McCarthy, Allen Ruppersberg, and Andy Warhol, among others. Rachel holds a PhD in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Executive Director of the Drawing Center in New York Laura Hoptman has been a curator of contemporary art and a leading participant in the international art conversation for three decades. She joined the Drawing Center after eight years as a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she began her career in the 1990s as a curator with a specialty in drawing. Among the dozens of exhibitions that Hoptman has curated are Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (2002) as well as The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World (2014). Hoptman has also curated several retrospectives by artists including Bruce Conner, Yayoi Kusama, Isa Genzken, Henry Taylor, and Elizabeth Peyton.

Curator and writer Constance Lewallen is Adjunct Curator at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where she has curated many contemporary art exhibitions, including Ant Farm (1968-1978), 2004 (co-curated with Steve Seid), A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, 2007, and most recently co-curated Stephen Kaltenbach: The Beginning and the End for the Manetti Shrem Museum at UC Davis. She is the author of 500 Capp Street: David Ireland’s House and co-author with Dore Bowen of Bruce Nauman: Spatial Encounters, both published by UC Press. She is an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.