Left to right: Kalia Brooks courtesy of John Dennis, Todd Gray courtesy of the artist.
On Saturday, February 24 from 1-3pm in celebration of the opening weekend of Reality Reframed: Recent Works by Todd Gray, the artist will be in conversation with Kalia Brooks, Director of Programs and Exhibitions at NXTHVN. Please RSVP for this discussion expanding from Gray’s recent photo assemblages exploring belief systems and colonial histories on view at The 8th Floor in relation to Brooks’ research on African American, trans-Atlantic, and diasporic cultures.
The gallery will be open for normal public hours on the day of the program from 11am-6pm, with select works potentially obstructed 12-3pm due to the event setup. Info on accessing our space can be found here. Email us with any questions.
Kalia Brooks, PhD, is the Director of Programs and Exhibitions at NXTHVN. She is responsible for the design and delivery of curatorial exhibitions, public programs, artist projects, community engagement initiatives and the learning environment for the fellowship and apprenticeship programs. She is a curator, arts administrator and educator. Her academic research covers art from the nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on emergent technologies and African American, trans-Atlantic and diasporic cultures of the Americas. Brooks holds a PhD in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA). She is co editor of Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History (Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, UK, 2019 and 2022). She has served as a consulting curator with the City of New York through the Department of Cultural Affairs and was an ex-officio trustee on the Board of the Museum of the City of New York during the de Blasio administration.
Todd Gray (b. 1954, Los Angeles, CA, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Akwidaa, Ghana) is a photo-based artist whose work aims to destabilize assumptions about the veracity of photography and provoke reconsiderations of long-accepted norms and beliefs surrounding the medium, including the role of the viewer in constructing meaning. Gray received both his B.F.A and M.F.A from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA in 1979 and 1989, respectively. Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized at Lehmann Maupin, London, U.K. (2023); Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI (2021); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2021); David Lewis, New York, NY (2021); Pomona College Museum of Art, Pomona, CA (2019); Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA (2018); Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles, CA (2018); Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2017). He is the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the Rome Prize Fellowship, Visual Arts, American Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy (2022-23); John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts (2018); Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship, The Rockefeller Foundation (2016); and the Hermitage Artist Retreat Fellowship, Englewood, FL (2015). In 2007, Gray was commissioned to create a public artwork for the Los Angeles International Airport. For a full biography, navigate here.
Image description: Two headshots. On the left, a Black woman with medium-length hair faces the camera with arms crossed. She wears glasses, a scarf with historical imagery printed on it, and a solid light yellow top and bottom. On the right, a Black man is seated leaning on a table surface, looking calmly at the camera, fingers interlocked. He is bald with a light goatee, wearing simple all black clothes.