Brooklyn Museum
First Saturday: Best of the Borough
Book Talk: Elia Alba’s The Supper Club
Saturday, December 7, 2019
6 to 7pm
Location: Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Forum, 4th Floor
200 Eastern Pkwy, Brooklyn, NY 11238
[Image Description: To the left is the front cover of the book Elia Alba: The Supper Club, which features six of Alba’s portraits of Saya Woolfalk, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Derrick Adams, Firelei Baez, Simone Leigh, and Shinique Smith. To the right is a photo of artist Elia Alba, who has black, curly long hair and is wearing a black dress against a light teal background.]
This book launch for Elia Alba: The Supper Club coincided with the closing weekend of Brooklyn Museum’s Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall and brought together artists and activists to reflect on issues faced by the LGBTQ community surrounding access, healthcare, and representation. Moderated by the Foundation’s Executive and Artistic Director Sara Reisman, editor of Elia Alba: The Supper Club, the conversation featured Elia Alba, Jack Waters, Sur Rodney Sur, and LJ Roberts, all participants in the August 2017 Supper Club dinner What Would an HIV Doula Do?, which focused on the topic of HIV/AIDS, its history, current conditions, and the realities of under-recognized communities affected by the epidemic.
Bios
Elia Alba was born in Brooklyn, New York. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Hunter College in 1994 and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001. She has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. Those include The Rhode Island School of Design Museum; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Science Museum, London; ITAU Cultural Institute, Sao Paolo; National Museum of Art, Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the 10th Havana Biennial. She is a recipient of numerous awards and residencies for example, Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in Residence Program in 1999; New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, Crafts 2002 and Photography 2008; Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant, 2002; Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant 2002 and 2008; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Workspace Program, 2009, and Recess Analog, 2012. Her work is in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, and Lowe Art Museum to name a few. For the past 6 years, she has been working on a project titled The Supper Club. The project brings together artists, scholars and performers of diasporic cultures, through photography, food and dialogue to examine race and culture in the United States. A book on The Supper Club, produced by The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and published by Hirmer was released in Spring 2019. She is currently Artist-in-Residence at The Andrew Freeman Home in the Bronx.
LJ Roberts is a visual artist who creates large-scale textile installations, embroideries, artist books, and collages. Their work investigates overlaps of queer and trans politics, activism, protest, and craft. Roberts’ work has been shown in exhibitions at The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, The 8th Floor, Museum of Arts and Design, Vox Populi, Smack Mellon, The Orange County Museum of Art, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, The Powerhouse Museum, The Museum of the City of New York, The Oakland Museum of California, The DePaul Art Museum, The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at The University of Southern California, The Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art where their work is in the permanent collection.
Roberts also maintains a critical writing practice that bridges craft and queer theory. Their writing can be found in the anthologies Extra/Ordinary: Craft Culture in Contemporary Art published by Duke University Press and Craftivism: The Art of Craft and Activism on Arsenal Pulp Press. They have contributed writing to publications such as Studio Potter, Hyphen Magazine, and Art Practical. Most recently Roberts wrote the introduction to DUETS: Dean Daderko and Elaine Reichek on the late Nicolas A. Moufarrege published by Visual AIDS.
They has been the past recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Fountainhead Fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University, and residencies at IASPIS (International Artists' Studio Program in Sweden--Stockholm), Ox-Bow School of Art, ACRE, The Textile Arts Center, and The Bag Factory in Johannesburg, South Africa. They are a 2019-2020 Artist-in-Residence at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY. In 2015, Roberts was one of nine recipients of The White House Champions of Change Award for LGBTQI artists. They also received the 2019 President's Award for Art and Activism from the Women's Caucus for Art. They live and work in Brooklyn, NY and teaches at Parsons School of Design.
Sur Rodney (Sur) is a writer, artist, archivist and activist. A fixture on the East Village art scene, Sur was co-director, with business partner Gracie Mansion, of the celebrated Gracie Mansion Gallery (1983–88), which helped establish the international reputations of many young and emerging artists. In the late 1980s, Sur shifted his practice to work with artists affected by the growing AIDS crisis, leading to his involvement with Visual AIDS and the Frank Moore Archive Project. He also began to collaborate on curatorial projects with his longtime partner Geoffrey Hendricks, organizing a series of exhibitions related to art and AIDS.
Sur often works collaboratively, drawing variously on performance, poetry, community archives, and activism. Free Advice July 6, 2008 (2008) was created in collaboration with Hope Sandrow. In the work, Sur set up a roadside counseling business along a two-lane rural highway with a sign reading “Free Advice.” His office was comprised of a wooden table with two chairs—one for him and one for a guest. Intrigued, passersby stopped to take a seat and ask him about issues in their lives, to which he offered carefully considered responses. Since its debut, Sur has reprised the performance many times, often along rural highways in the Northeast. He also recreated it at the opening reception for Radical Presence at the Grey Art Gallery on September 9, 2013.
Jack Waters is a founding member of NYOBS, the alternative experimental free association queer skinned “kitchen“ band born at NYC’s Punk Island Festival. Among NYOBS’ recent highlights was their spectacular August 2019 show at NYC’s premiere music venue Mercury Lounge. NYOBS’ hybrid musical reading for Memories That Smell Like Gasoline at the Visual AIDS tribute to David Wojnarovicz was seen (and heard) at the artist’s 2018 Whitney Museum retrospective.
Lauded for the co-writing and performance of the title role in the acclaimed and controversial 2015 film, Jason And Shirley, Waters also composed and choreographed Jason Holliday’s musical sequence.
With lifetime partner and collaborator Peter Cramer, Jack was honored at Performance Space New York’s 2019 Spring Gala for being among the galvanizing voices in the fight against AIDS. Waters and Cramer co-established Allied Productions Inc., a non profit arts umbrella In 1981. They served as directors of the alternative art collective ABC No Rio from 1983-1990 and founded Le Petit Versailles in 1996. LPV is a community garden based in New York City. Their residencies include the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy, NYC’s Harvestworks, and Yaddo. They are recipients of a 2014 Kathy Acker Award. Their films, preserved with support from the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS and the National Film Preservation Fund, are in the collections of MoMa, Lincoln Center’s Donnell Film Collection, the Fales Downtown Collection, and Allied Productions’ moving image archives. Waters and Cramer’s performance output is archived by Franklin Furnace and the Lincoln Center Library’s Performing Arts Collections.
NYOBS’ sonic bursts and musical composition will drive part 1 of the 3 part cycle Pestilence, the 3 part multi-media musical opus that Waters conceived, wrote, and directs. Pestilence begins previews at La Mama from February 27 through March 1, 2020.