Barbara London in conversation with Bang Geul Han, Erica Baum, and Kay Rosen
Thursday, May 18, 2023
6-8pm
The 8th Floor
17 W 17th Street, NYC
Discussion Transcript
Images courtesy of (left to right) Barbara London, Bang Geul Han, Kay Rosen, Erica Baum.
Curator and writer Barbara London will moderate a talk featuring artists Bang Geul Han, Erica Baum, and Kay Rosen, focusing on the conceptual underpinnings of their respective text-based practices. This multi-generational discussion is in concert with Han’s current exhibition Land of Tenderness at The 8th Floor. Each conducts aesthetic interrogations in text: Han examines the impact of legislative texts on marginalized bodies, Rosen finds new meanings in words by transforming their typography and exploding their distribution in space, while Baum’s background in linguistics informs her poetic photographic practice.
Land of Tenderness will be on view the day of the discussion from 11am, and partially on view during the event. All of our events are free and open to the public. For information about visiting and accessing our space, navigate here. Email us with any questions.
Erica Baum lives and works in New York. She is well known for her varied photographic series capturing text and image in found printed material, from paperback books to library indexes and sewing patterns. She received her MFA from Yale University in 1994 and her BA in Anthropology from Barnard in 1984. She is a 2008 NYFA Photography Fellow. Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco, „Sparkassen Stiftung“,Museum Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf, MAMCO, Geneva; Albright‐ Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; FRAC Ile de France, Paris; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.
Born and raised in Seoul, Korea in 1978 and based in the US since 2003, Bang Geul Han’s work has been shown in venues including The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Queens Museum, NURTUREart, A.I.R. Gallery, Cuchifritos Gallery in New York City, and Centro Internazionale per l’Arte Contemporanea in Rome. She is a recipient of a number of artist residencies and fellowships including Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program, A.I.R. Fellowship, MacDowell Fellowship, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia, PA. Han received her MFA (2005) in Electronic Integrated Arts from NYSCC at Alfred University in Alfred, NY and BFA (2002) in Painting from Seoul National University in Korea.
Barbara London is a New York-based curator and writer, who founded the video-media exhibition and collection programs at The Museum of Modern Art, where she worked between 1973 and 2013. Her recent projects include the podcast series Barbara London Calling, the book Video Art/The First Fifty Years (Phaidon: 2020), and the exhibition “Seeing Sound” (Independent Curators International), 2021-2026. London was the first to integrate the Internet as part of curatorial practice, with Stir-fry (1994); Internyet (1998); and dot.jp. (1999). She organized one-person shows with such media mavericks as Laurie Anderson, Peter Campus, Teiji Furuhashi, Gary Hill, Joan Jonas, Shigeko Kubota, Nam June Paik, Song Dong, Steina Vasulka, Bill Viola, and Zhang Peili. Her thematic exhibitions at MoMA included Soundings: A Contemporary Score (2013); Looking at Music (2009); Video Spaces (1995); Music Video: The Industry and Its Fringes (1985); and Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto (1979). London’s writing has appeared in many catalogs and publications, including Artforum, Flash Art, Yishu, Leonardo, Art Asia Pacific, Art in America, Millennium, Modern Painter, and the Guardian.
Kay Rosen’s investigation into the visual possibilities of language has been her primary focus since 1969 when she traded the academic study of languages for language-based art. Through paintings, drawings, murals, prints, collages, and videos, Rosen has sought to generate new meaning from everyday speech by substituting scale, color, materials, composition, and typography for the printed page. Her work has been described as sculpture, poetry, architecture, and performance. Roberta Smith once called her a “writer’s sculptor,” and Eileen Myles called her the “poet of the art world.” Rosen’s work has been the subject of numerous articles, reviews, projects, and exhibitions, most recently at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas which just permanently installed her wall painting HI, and at the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, in Bremen, Germany which will host her solo show “Now and Then” in the fall. Rosen grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, and is based in New York City and Gary, Indiana. She taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for twenty-four years.
Image description: Four headshots, left to right: a white woman with blonde hair smiling, a Korean woman with long black hair and wearing a black top, a white woman with short gray hair and glasses smiling, a white woman with long light brown hair wearing a beanie and glasses smiling.