Visual Storytelling, Antigone, and Love: Roxane Gay and Alexandra Grant in Conversation
4619 West Washington Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90016
Saturday, June 29 at 7:00 PM 9:00 PM
Ends Jun 29, 2019
Please join us for a conversation between artist Alexandra Grant and renowned writer Roxane Gay about visual storytelling, Antigone, and love in conjunction with Grant's exhibition Born to Love at Lowell Ryan Projects. Born to Love features large-scale works on paper that combine various forms of abstraction with the proclamation "I was born to love, not to hate" from Sophocles’ play Antigone. Grant and Gay will discuss the power of this stance and how the ancient sentiment resonates today. Seating is limited, RSVP is essential. Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018, Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, Harper’s Bazaar, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and New York Times bestselling Hunger: A Memoir of My Body. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel and the editor of Best American Short Stories 2018. She is currently at work on film and television projects, a book of writing advice, an essay collection about television and culture, and a YA novel entitled The Year I Learned Everything. In 2018, she won a Guggenheim fellowship. Alexandra Grant is a Los Angeles-based artist who through an exploration of the use of text and language in various media–painting, drawing, sculpture, film, and photography–probes ideas of translation, identity, dis/location, and social responsibility. Grant frequently collaborates with other artists, writers and philosophers, often going so far as to have specific texts written as the impetus to her intricate paintings and sculptures. She has collaborated with author Michael Joyce, actor Keanu Reeves, artist Channing Hansen, and the philosopher Hélène Cixous, amongst others. Grant has exhibited widely at galleries including Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Galerie Lelong, New York City; Galerie Gradiva, Paris; and Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York City; and at institutions such as Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, CA; The Broad Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI; the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been written about in the Los Angeles Times, White Hot Magazine, Frieze, Art in America, and Artforum amongst others. Awards include the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Her works are included in museum collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada. Grant is the creator of the grantLOVE project, which has raised funds for arts based non-profits including; Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA), Project Angel Food, Art of Elysium, 18th Street Arts Center, and LAXART. In 2017, Grant cofounded X Artists’ Books, a publishing house for artist-centered books. Publications have included collaborations with Diane di Prima, George Herms and Eve Wood, among others, and are available online and in bookstores throughout Los Angeles, New York and Paris.
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