March 2–August 7, 2016
Opening: March 2, 6–8pm
The Artist Institute
132 E. 65th Street
New York, NY 10065
Hours: Wednesday–Saturday noon–6pm
info [at] theartistsinstitute.org
The Artist’s Institute will open at its new location on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on March 2. This relocation coincides with the Institute’s eleventh season, which is devoted to Hilton Als and will run from March 2 through August 7, 2016.
Als’ season continues the Institute’s mission to open a window onto an artist’s world, making connections between their work and broader interests as creative thinkers. Hilton Als’ practice bridges portraiture, memoir, and criticism, and over the next six months, he is creating an “emotional retrospective” that considers his life among artists in New York and involvement with the visual, literary and performing arts. Als’ installations were first shown in the 1990s at Simon Watson gallery and in the group exhibition The Interrupted Life, New Museum (1991), among others. This is the first time that Als is the subject of a solo institutional exhibition.
One of the most distinctive voices in American letters, Als’ career has been closely associated with the New Yorker since 1989, when he began working as a contributor to the magazine’s column “The Talk of the Town.” He became a staff writer in 1996, the publication’s theatre critic in 2002, and chief theatre critic in 2013. Before coming to The New Yorker, Als worked at the photo desk of the Village Voice and as an editor-at-large at Vibe.
Als edited the catalogue for Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1994. His first book, The Women, a meditation on gender, race, and personal identity, was published in 1996. His most recent book, White Girls, discusses various narratives around race and gender and was nominated for a 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.
In 1997, the New York Association of Black Journalists awarded Als first prize in both Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment. He was awarded a Guggenheim for Creative Writing in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2002–03. In 2009, Als worked with the performer Justin Vivian Bond on Cold Water, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and videos by performers, at La MaMa Gallery. In 2010, he co-curated Self-Consciousness at the Veneklasen Werner Gallery in Berlin with Peter Doig, and published Justin Bond/Jackie Curtis, his second book. He was co-curator of the 2015 exhibition Christopher Knowles: In a Word, at the ICA, Philadelphia.
About The Artist’s Institute
The Artist’s Institute is a non-profit research and exhibition space for contemporary art that dedicates six-month seasons to a single artist whose work prompts a series of public programs with related artists and thinkers.
The Artist’s Institute was founded in 2010 in conjunction with Hunter College and is today led by Director and Curator Jenny Jaskey. In its five-year history the Institute has presented seasons featuring Robert Filliou, Jo Baer, Jimmie Durham, Rosemarie Trockel, Haim Steinbach, Thomas Bayrle, Lucy McKenzie, Pierre Huyghe, Carolee Schneemann and Fia Backström.
Press contact
Milena Sales: milena [at] theartistsinstitute.org / T +1 646 283 5689