The Society

Reception sponsored by the Society for Contemporary Art

Danh Vo explained, “All of my projects tend to deal with issues that are taking place right around me—my private sphere, my love life, my desires, other people’s projections on me and my identities.” When he was a child, Vo’s family left Vietnam in a boat built by his father. By chance, they were picked up by a Danish freighter and brought to Denmark, where they became citizens. Through performance-based works inspired by his life experiences and historically rich readymade objects, Vo reveals the construction of inherited cultural values, conflicts, and displacement....

The Society for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce an art-filled trip to Brazil, November 9-18, 2012. This will include: four days in São Paulo, one day in Belo Horizonte, and three days in Rio de Janeiro. The trip will start in São Paulo, where we will see the 30th São Paulo Biennial in addition to local artist studios, galleries, and private collections. The group will then fly to Belo Horizonte to tour the 5,000-acre art complex Inhotim. Created by collector Bernardo Paz, Inhotim is regarded as South America’s most spectacular private art collection.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles (American, born 1939) has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007, 1997); P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2007, 1988); Jewish Museum, New York (1986); and Whitney Museum, New York (1985, 1978, 1976). A 1998 solo exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT surveyed her work from 1969 to 1984. She has been included in group exhibitions such as c. 7,500 (1973), Guerilla Girls at the Palladium (1985), Division of Labor: Women’s Work in Contemporary Art (1995), and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007). Ukeles has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1985–86), grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation (1992–93), and several awards from the National Endowment for the Arts....

Esteemed German artist Thomas Bayrle (German, born 1937) will give a lecture entitled Repetition on his diverse body of work of prints, films, and sculptures. Since 1964, Bayrle has produced works composed of hundreds of interlocking micro images that create a single portrait or consumer product. He relates the construction of these “super-forms” to the way single threads make up a woven fabric or individuals form mass culture.

Thomas Bayrle lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany. He taught at Städelschule, Frankfurt 1972 to 2002. He is considered a founding figure of the German Pop movement along with Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. His celebrated career includes solo shows at the Portikus, Frankfurt; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva. He currently has a retrospective exhibition on display at The WIELS Contemporary Art Center, Brussels and new work at The Artist’s Institute, New York. His last major survey was in 2009 at the Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona. He has participated in numerous important group exhibitions such as documenta, Kassel (1964, 1977, and 2012) and the Venice Biennale (2003, 2009)....

Tom Marioni (American, born 1937) is considered an influential figure of the American conceptual art movement because of his pioneering use of social activity as sculpture. He has continued to blur distinctions between sculpture, sound, duration, and performance throughout his four-decade career. The first exhibition of his landmark piece The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art (1970) contained beer bottles, tables, and chairs leftover from a private party he hosted with sixteen friends.

Tom Marioni lives and works in San Francisco. He founded and ran the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco from 1970 to 1984 as “a large-scale social work of art.” In 2006 the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati presented a retrospective of his work. He has shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Kunsthalle, Bern; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago.His work has been included in numerous conceptual art surveys including Reconsidering the Art Object: 1965-1975 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He has received numerous awards such as a Guggenheim Fellowship and multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.He is the author of Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir....

Constance Lewallen is currently an Adjunct Curator at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM), where she previously held positions of as the Matrix curator (1980-1988) and Senior Curator (1998-2007). As Senior Curator, she curated many major exhibitions that toured nationally and internationally, including A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s. Most recently, she was co-curator, with Karen Moss, of the Pacific Standard Time affiliated exhibition “State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970,” a comprehensive survey of conceptual art practice in California that emerged at this pivotal period in contemporary art history. Notedly, “State of Mind” includes Tom Marioni. It was first exhibited in 2011 at the Orange County Museum of Art and then subsequently presented at the UC Berkeley Art Museum in 2012 before touring nationally. Her exhibition, Allen Ruppersberg: You and Me or the Art of Give and Take was presented at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in fall 2009. She is currently West Coast Field Editor for the College Art Association's online review site....

Since the 1980s, Jessica Stockholder has engaged in an ongoing dialogue about the possibilities of painting and the pictorial potential of sculpture with idiosyncratic pairings of found materials, architecture, and broad swaths of paint in vibrant colors.

Jessica Stockholder (American, born 1959) is the chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.  She has had solo exhibitions at Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; and many others. Her survey exhibition Jessica Stockholder, Kissing the Wall: Works 1988-2003 was shown at the Blaffer Art Gallery, University of Houston and the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her work has been featured in important group exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and Whitney Biennial. She has received numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts grant for sculpture and a Guggenheim Fellowship....

Berlin-based painter Monika Baer will give a lecture entitled “The Materials of the Artist and Their Use in Painting.” Her idiosyncratic practice has been characterized as romantic, conceptual, and Surrealist-inflected. Baer moves fluidly through a diverse range of subjects and recurring motifs. She typically works in series that overlap and inform one another including vampire pictures (2007), breast pictures (2007-09), monochromes (2008-10), and works that have been described as “paintings on walls” (2009-12).

Monika Baer (German, born 1964) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (2012 and 2009); Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles (2011 and 2008); and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich (2009). In 2006, the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht organized a retrospective of her work, which later travelled to the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, and the Ausstellungshalle zietgenössische Kunst, Muenster. In 2007 Baer participated in Documenta 12 in Kassel. She will be the subject of a focus exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013....

Oscar Tuazon’s earliest projects directly referenced self-sustaining, low-tech designs made within the context of particular subcultures, such as hippie communes from the 1970s.

Oscar Tuazon (American, born 1975) lives and works in Paris. He studied at the Cooper Union School of Art and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. He has had solo shows at The Power Station, Dallas (2011); Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2010); Kunsthalle Bern (2010); Seattle Art Museum (2008); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007); among others. His work was featured in the MCA Chicago’s 2011 Language of Less group show. His large-scale installations were featured in the Whitney Biennial  (2012) and Venice Biennale (2011). In 2007, he co-founded the artist run collective and gallery, Castillo/corrales....

Lynda Benglis has developed a distinctive and influential sculptural language since her initial rise to prominence during the 1960s and 70s. She uses a range of techniques and materials—including polyurethane foam, beeswax, plaster, bronze, and cast aluminum—to allude to painterly aspects of Abstract Expressionism while addressing issues of Post-Minimalism and feminist art. Many of her works are palpably tied to her body and its potential actions, such as her 1968 Fallen Paintings, which were made by pouring patterns of vibrantly colored latex directly on the floor.

Lynda Benglis (American, born 1941) lives and works between New York, Santa Fe, Kastelorizo, Greece, and Ahmedabad, India. A major retrospective of her work was organized in 2009 by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Le Consortium, Dijon; The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; and the New Museum, New York. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants (1990, 1979); and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1975)....

Oak Park, known for its prairie-style homes by Frank Lloyd Wright, also hosts the studios of several veterans of the Chicago art world: Michelle Grabner, Brad Killam, Judy Ledgerwood, Alison Ruttan, Scott Stack, and Tony Tasset. The Society for Contemporary Art will have the privilege to visit these studios and hear presentations by the artists. In addition, we will visit the alternative art space, The Suburban, run by Grabner and Killam, which will open a new show by Jacci Den Hartog and Mary Heilmann.