Dia Talks
A Conversation between Jessica Bell Brown and Eric N. Mack on Sam Gilliam
Saturday, November 23, 2019, 2 pm, Dia Beacon
Event Details
Saturday, November 23, 2019, 2 pm
Dia:Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York
Free with museum admission. Space is limited and offered on a first-come, first-served basis.
Jessica Bell Brown is a writer, curator, and an art historian based in New York. She is currently the consulting curator for Gracie Mansion Conservancy, New York, where she organized She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New York, 1919–2019 (2019). Bell Brown is a PhD candidate in modern and contemporary art in the department of art and archaeology at Princeton University. Her research explores American painting and identity in the post-civil-rights decade. Before pursuing graduate study, she worked in programming capacities at Creative Time and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. From 2016 to 2017, Bell Brown was the museum research consortium fellow in the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As a writer and critic, she has penned critical essays on contemporary artists Sam Gilliam, Eric N. Mack, Kerry James Marshall, Senga Nengudi, Jennifer Packer, Charles Ray, and Wilmer Wilson IV, among others. Her writing and art criticism has appeared in Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail, Flash Art, and Hyperallergic, in addition to catalogues and publications for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Lévy Gorvy, Museum of Modern Art, and Studio Museum in Harlem.
Eric N. Mack was born in 1987 in Columbia, Maryland, and lives and works in New York City. He received his BFA from Cooper Union, New York, in 2010, and his MFA from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, in 2012. Recent solo presentations of his work include Dye Lens at Scrap Metal Gallery in Toronto (2019–20); In austerity, stripped from its support and worn as a sarong at Power Station in Dallas (2019); Lemme walk across the room at the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2019); and Vogue Fabrics, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2017). Mack’s work was included in the 2019 biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Major group exhibitions include In the Abstract, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams (2017–18); Ungestalt, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2017); Blue Black, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Saint Louis, Missouri (2017); Making & Unmaking, Camden Arts Centre, London (2016); and Greater New York, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (2015).