Richard Kennedy: Acey-Deucey

The Jeonnam Museum of Art will hold Richard Kennedy’s solo exhibition Acey-Deucey to showcase the forefront of contemporary art trends to the audience in 2023. Encompassing many genres, including painting, sculpture, installation, music, and performance, Kennedy’s work reveals the world’s stereotypes and breaks down its boundaries. The exhibition is an intervention into dichotomous value systems: black/white, male/female, physical/spiritual, winner/loser, teacher/pupil, high culture/popular culture, instantaneous/permanence. These binaries are dissolved in Kennedy’s work, and as such, the work presents an alternative path that does not belong to anyone. Finding a new freedom to fail within the space of their recent painting practice has led them to produce large-scale weavings, transforming their failures into triumphs, while simultaneously giving form to the process of weaving that runs throughout their practice. Richard Kennedy’s intuitive and bold artistic approach is also evident in this exhibition, Acey-Deucey. Wielding their brush with grand gestures, Kennedy leaves queer traces on the canvas, whiting out the concrete and veiling previous assumptions of the non-coastal African-American queer experience. The show is divided into three rooms featuring over 20 works and live performances, including a new video, Miracle W.I.P.

Artist biography
Richard Kennedy (b. Long Beach, California 1985) was born an artist. From an early age, they began creating performances, writing music, and designing costumes for plays in their living room in Middletown, Ohio. Kennedy was “discovered” during Mrs. Markel’s music class in the first grade after dancing to The Nutcracker Suite, and was later introduced to Phyllis DeWeese, who would become their dance teacher, lifelong mentor, best friend, and first art patron.

With a talent for music, writing, visual art, and dance, Kennedy soon rose to prominence in the local art community in Middletown, receiving a scholarship to study ballet and opera at The Academy of Dance Arts with Noelle Banks-Sparks. Unlike many students studying performance, they came from humble beginnings: working at McDonald’s, Applebee’s, and Wendy’s to pay for their training. After graduating from high school in 2003, Kennedy attended Point Park University on a theatre and dance scholarship, only to drop out after one year to appear in Fosse. They subsequently moved to New York City, where they performed in West Side Story and Wicked, before leaving the commercial theatre in order to amplify their individual voice.

Kennedy began exploring nightlife photography as a medium. This was a deviation from their formal education in “high” culture that led to profound self-discovery, and an era of experimentation, curation, and spiritual elevation. As a multi-disciplinary artist both performing and curating in art spaces and queer nightlife venues, like The Spectrum in downtown Manhattan, they began to develop an embodied, experimental, and revolutionary art practice that defied boundary and genre. Opera became the foundation of their work. The Latin origin of opera is “opus,” which means “the result of hard labor.” For Kennedy, opera acts as a metaphor and container for marginalized existence. Kennedy premiered their first opera, Black Rage, at Signal Gallery in 2016. Their operatic oeuvre includes Black Rage, HIR, Fubu Fuku, Touch of Elegance, EVAR, Dread/Rest and Zeferina.

In the spring of 2019, Kennedy received their MFA from the Milton Avery School / Bard College. In the fall of 2019 the artist moved to Berlin, where they began formal experiments with new art forms. Addressing the impermanence of performance, they began to synthesize the diverse experiences of their life into paintings, sculpture, and video, presenting works at MoMA, The Shed, The Kitchen, Palais de Tokyo, Kunsthalle Winterthur, MoMA PS1, The Dream House, and the ICA at Virginia Common Wealth University.

Events
March 16, 3pm: Opening Performance—milk and cookies
March 17, 2pm: Artist talk

Curator
Sora Kim