Image courtesy The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
Connie Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum, will helm a short and insightful discussion about artist, writer and curator Aria Dean during a Lunchtime Art Talk at The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens on Wednesday, April 14.
The Lunchtime Art Talk series, 12:30 to 1:30 p.m., focuses on the exhibition “Made in L.A. 2020: a version,” present in both The Huntington in San Marino and at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
This is an onlive event on Zoom.
Aria Dean was born in 1993 in Los Angeles and raised by parents working in the entertainment industry. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in studio art at Oberlin College and then returned to Los Angeles, taking a position as a social media strategist for the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Dean’s early engagement in the digital sphere of an institution prefigured the questions she posed around Blackness within the emergent internet culture. She has examined the generative and gratuitous workings of online cultural production, from how the circulation of memes maps onto Blackness to the tepid visibility politics of selfies. Many of these ideas find form in her writing for publications such as Real Life Magazine, Texte zur Kunst, e-flux, Artforum, and Art in America, among others.
She was eventually appointed as assistant curator of net art and digital culture at Rhizome, which underscored her renewed interest in art made for the internet. Dean’s artistic practice serves as the impetus for her writing and curating, the two activities offering prescriptive signposts that order how she makes objects in the service of these ideas. As she grapples with these ideas in visual form, her work becomes a material experiment in the repetitive structure within Black cultural forms that welcomes variability.
Dean has shown her works in solo and group exhibitions at Metropolitan Art Centre in Belfast, Ireland; the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond; Het Hem in Amsterdam, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York; the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, and The Sunroom in Richmond, Virginia.
She has presented performance works at Swiss Institute, New York the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva.
To reserve your space for Lunchtime Art Talk, visit https://hammer.ucla.edu/
For more information, call (626) 405-2100 or visit www.huntington.org/events/
