TRACEY EMIN, MY BED, 1998
First created in 1998, it was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1999 as one of the shortlisted works for the Turner Prize. It consisted of her bed with bedroom objects in a dishevelled state, and gained much media attention…
WHERE I’M FROM POEM
“Where I'm From” grew out of my response to a poem from Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet (Orchard Books, 1989; Theater Communications Group, 1991) by my friend, Tennessee writer Jo Carson. All of the People Pieces, as Jo calls them, are based on things folks actually said, and number 22 begins, “I want to know when you get to be from a place…
MIKE BOUCHET, UNTITLED VIDEO, 2011
It’s the first untitled work I’ve made. It’s composited from 10,000 porno videos that were downloaded off the Internet and 10,000 porno videos playing simultaneously in a big mosaic…
LORNA SIMPSON, SHE, 1992
Simpson focuses on challenging the construct of gender and questions society’s idea of femininity and how society thinks there is a direct link between codes of dress and femininity…
NONA FAUSTINE, WHITE SHOES, 2021
White Shoes is a collection of self-portraits taken in locations around New York that were central to the city’s once pivotal – and now largely obscured and unacknowledged – involvement in the slave trade…
WILLIAM E JONES, THE FALL OF COMMUNISM AS SEEN IN GAY PORNOGRAPHY, 1988
The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998) is an important video from a moment in Jones’s career when he was beginning to leave behind the world of independent documentary cinema for a more free-wheeling practice that existed – and continues to exist – at the margins between several disciplines…
DREAD SCOTT, WHAT IS THE PROPER WAY TO DISPLAY A US FLAG?,1988
In 1989, while on display at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, What is the Proper Way…? became the center of national controversy over its use of the American flag. President Bush Sr. declared What is the Proper Way…
CAROLEE SCHNEEMAN, INTERIOR SCROLL, 1975/77
The message I read for Interior Scroll is from the feminist texts in Kitch's Last Meal. The image occurred as a drawing; this image seemed to have to do with the power and possession of naming-the movement from interior thought to external signification, and the reference to an uncoiling serpent, to actual information (like ticker tape, rainbow, Torah in the Ark, chalice, choir loft, plumb line, bell tower, the umbilicus, and tongue)…
LEIGH LEDARE, PERSONAL COMMISSIONS, 2008
For the project Personal Commissions Ledare answered Women Seeking Men personal advertisements posted in various New York City newspapers. While primarily serving as a vehicle for seeking out companionship, these ads often referenced phrases such as “tribute”, which only thinly disguised the subjects’ participation within an underground economy of intimacy, sexual gratification and material validation…
GILLIAN WEARING, ALBUM, 2003
The mask occupies a central place in the videos and photographs of Gillian Wearing. Wearing has employed various kinds of masks—from literal disguises to voice dubbing—to conceal the physical identities of her subjects and allow them to reveal their innermost secrets…
HANK WILLIS THOMAS - UNBRANDED: REFLECTIONS IN BLACK BY CORPORATE AMERICA, 2005-2008
Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America explores fifty years of print advertising targeted towards African-Americans—from 1968, a year of heightened social and political protest that saw the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., until 2008, the year of the election of the first African American president…
THE ROOM OF SILENCE, ELOISE SHERRID, 2016
“The Room of Silence,” is a short documentary about race, identity and marginalization at the Rhode Island School of Design. Based on interviews conducted by myself and the campus organization Black Artists and Designers, this film contains well under a third of the stories we collected in March 2016, and an unknown fraction of the stories belonging to students we didn’t have a chance to meet with…
LARRY SULTAN, THE VALLEY
The cast and crew have gathered in the front yard of a ranch-style house, a few blocks from where I went to high school in the San Fernando Valley. Women in six-inch heels sink into the lawn; men push around camera equipment, anxious about losing the light…
ROBERT ANDY COOMBS, CRIPFAG
The title of the series embraces and reclaims two epithets “crip” and “fag.” In this suite of photographs, Coombs reimagines these words, producing a new context in which personal and revealing moments are carefully and sensitively laid bare. Challenging preconceptions of disability while revealing an autobiographical narrative filled with both joy and the banal, Coombs brings visitors along to relate and revel in his journey….
GARRETT BRADLEY, AMERICA, 2019
According to the Library of Congress, around 70 percent of all feature-length films made in the US between 1912 and 1929 no longer exist. In America (2019), artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley imagines Black figures from the early decades of the 20th century whose lives have been lost to history…
MARIKEN WESSELS: TAKING OFF. HENRY MY NEIGHBOR, 2015
Taking Off is a real picture story of a failed marriage, of sexual frustration and voyeurism. An extraordinary amount of photographs and cut-up collages comprise an archival vertigo of amateur nude art…
SUSAN MEISELAS, CARNIVAL STRIPPERS, 1972-1975.
From 1972 to 1975, I spent my summers photographing and interviewing women who performed striptease for small town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. As I followed the girl shows from town to town, I photographed the dancers' public performances as well as their private lives…
YO MY CRACKA, M. LAMAR, 2017
Yo My Cracka, was composed as a part of Surveillance Punishment and the Black Psyche which has been presented as an evening length multimedia performance for voice and piano as well as an album…
BRUCE NAUMAN, GOOD BOY BAD BOY, 1985
In Good Boy Bad Boy, two monitors are displayed at head height on pedestals. The head and shoulders of a young black man appear on one; on the other is an older white woman. They both speak the same one hundred phrases, which are the repeated conjugation of the verb 'to be' linked with the term 'good boy'…
APRIL DAWN ALISON, POLAROIDS
April Dawn Alison, the private persona of an Oakland-based commercial photographer known to family, friends, and neighbors as Alan Schaefer (1941–2008). Approximately 9,200 Polaroids were made over the course of more than thirty years, and discovered upon the artist’s death…