PLATFORM CSU ConSortiUm Spring 2021 Speakers
Slide1
Primitive Games - performance, 1 hr. at Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, 6/21/18. Photo by Paula Court
Slide2
Howardena Pindell, Night Flight (detail), mixed media on canvas, 2015-2016. 63 x 77". Image Credit: Philip Holzer, Germany.
Slide3
People's Kitchen Collective Free Breakfast Program at Life is Living. Photograph by Brooke AndersonJanuary 11, 2021
About the CSU ConSortiUm
The newly formed ConSortiUm, a collaborative project of art museums and galleries from the California State University (CSU) system, is pleased to announce a virtual event series that actively engages students, faculty, staff, and communities through visual arts-based dialogue. The inaugural program, PLATFORM, was launched in September 2020 and includes six live virtual conversations with contemporary artists, collectives, and curators whose work is critical to current re-imaginings of the art world and the world at large.
All events will be presented live via Zoom with access for all CSU campuses. These events are free and also open to the public.
Spring 2021 Events
February 11
Thursday at 5:30pm
Artist Shaun Leonardo
Hosted by San Jose State,
San Diego State,
and Sacramento State
Event Closed
March 11
Thursday at 5:30pm
Valerie Cassel Oliver, Curator of Modern
and Contemporary Art at the Virginia
Museum of Fine Arts in conversation
with Artist Howardena Pindell
Hosted by Grand Central Art Center,
CSU Fullerton, Begovich Gallery,
CSU Fullerton, and CSU Dominguez Hills
Event Closed
April 29
Thursday at 5:30pm
Artist Collaborative
People's Kitchen Collective
Hosted by San Jose State,
San Francisco State, Sonoma State,
and CSU San Bernardino
Artist Shaun Leonardo
The first event for Spring 2021 will take place Thursday, February 11 at 5:30pm featuring a presentation by artist Shaun Leonardo. Leonardo’s multidisciplinary work negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding black and brown masculinities, along with notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. His performance practice, anchored by his work in Assembly—a diversion program for court-involved youth at the Brooklyn-based, non-profit Recess—is participatory and invested in a process of embodiment.
Image: Primitive Games - performance, 1 hr. at Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, 6/21/18. Photo credit: Paula Court.
Valerie Cassel Oliver, Curator in conversation with Artist Howardena Pindell
The second event, on Thursday, March 11 at 5:30pm will spotlight Valerie Cassel Oliver, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in conversation with artist Howardena Pindell.
Image: Howardena Pindell, Night Flight (detail), 2015–2016, mixed media on canvas , 63 x 77".
Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to her position at the VMFA, she was Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston where she worked from 2000 - 2017. In 2000, she was one of six curators selected to organize the Biennial for the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her 2018 debut exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was a 50-year survey of work by Howardena Pindell entitled Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen. The exhibition co-organized with Naomi Beckwith, the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, was named one of the most influential of the decade.
Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Howardena Pindell studied painting at Boston University and Yale University. The artist often employs lengthy, metaphorical processes of destruction/reconstruction in her work. She cuts canvases in strips and sews them back together, building up surfaces in elaborate stages. The artist’s fascination with gridded, serialized imagery, along with surface texture appears throughout her oeuvre. Even in her later, more politically charged work, Pindell reverts to these thematic focuses in order to address social issues of homelessness, AIDs, war, genocide, sexism, xenophobia, and apartheid. Pindell is a full professor at State University of New York, Stony Brook. Throughout her career, she has exhibited extensively with notable solo exhibitions at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and The Shed, New York; among many others. Pindell was the subject of the 2018 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago titled Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen, which traveled to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2018) and the Rose Art Museum (2019).
People’s Kitchen Collective
The final event on Thursday, April 29 at 5:30pm will feature People’s Kitchen Collective. People's Kitchen Collective (PKC) works at the intersection of art and activism as a food-centered political education project. Based in Oakland, California, their creative practices reflect the diverse histories and backgrounds of co-founders Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik, Jocelyn Jackson, and Saqib Keval. PKC creates immersive experiences that honor the shared struggles of our peoples, using family recipes as a map to reveal migrations and stories of resilience. PKC’s social practice-based work is one of radical hospitality.
Image: People's Kitchen Collective To the Streets! 500 person free community meal. West Oakland, California, 2018. Photo Credit: Brooke Anderson.
Press Contact: Kelly Lindner
Galleries & Collections Curator
University Galleries, Sacramento State
kelly.lindner@csus.edu
CPP Campus Contact: Michele Cairella Fillmore
Galleries & Collections Curator
University Art Galleries & Collections, Cal Poly Pomona
michelec@cpp.edu
