Performance by Kalup Linzy
Thursday, May 4, 2017
6 to 8pm
Kalup Linzy, A Lullaby A Job and An Ass To Hope For, Performance, VASD, RMCAD, October 27, 2015. [Image Description: To the right artist Kalup Linzy closes their eyes as they hold a microphone and wear a dark red, sequin dress and a black, long-haired wig during a performance. Behind him is an image projected onto a wall of his face. He wears a wig and stares right into the camera.]
Set within a soap opera of his own making, artist Kalup Linzy’s performance and video works explore cultural stereotypes based on sexuality, race and gender. Using parody and drag personae, he pushes the boundaries of gender and identity, manipulating pre-recorded voices through video editing to play with accents and dialects that inform our perception of status. On May 4, Linzy performed a selection of songs at The 8th Floor.
Bio
Kalup Linzy is a video and performance artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Born in Stuckey, Florida. Linzy received his MFA from the University of South Florida. He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Linzy has been the recipient of numerous awards including a grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, Creative Capital Foundation grant, a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, an Art Matters Grant, The Headlands Center for the Arts Alumni Awards Residency, and most recently a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Film and Video.
Linzy's best-known work is a series of politically charged videos that satirize the conventions of the television soap opera. His work has been included in exhibitions Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Prospect.1 New Orleans, 30 Americans at the Rubell Family Collection, Greater New York at MoMA PS1, and At Home/Not At Home: Works from the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College. His work is in the public collections at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In summer 2010, Linzy appeared on the long running ABC soap opera General Hospital alongside James Franco in a story line that incorporated performance art. Recently, he completed his installation Queen Rose Family, which consists of 83 mixed media collages, two videos, and occasionally, a pepper's ghost. The project was featured in the group exhibition Family Affair at the University of South Florida Contemporary Museum of Art in Tampa, Florida, the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, and the Atlanta Biennial. Along with his new comedy short series Ozara and Katessa with James Franco, the installation will be included in the two-person exhibition entitled James Franco and Kalup Linzy: Collaborations on view April 7th-June 3, 2017 at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida Southwestern State College.
Linzy is currently on the faculty at the School of Visual Arts.