Art Metropole

Stephen Andrews was born in 1956 in Sarnia, Ontario Canada. Over the last twenty five years he has exhibited his work in Canada, the U.S., Brazil, Scotland, France and Japan. He is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Belkin Art Gallery, the Schwartz Collection, Harvard as well as many private collections. His work deals with memory, identity, technology and their representations in various media including drawing, animation and recently painting.

AA Bronson, born Michael Tims, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1946 -.

Bruce LaBruce is a Toronto based filmmaker, writer, director, photographer, and artist. He began his career in the mid eighties making a series of short experimental super 8 films and co-editing a punk fanzine called J.D.s, which begat the queercore movement. He has directed and starred in three feature length movies, No Skin Off My Ass (1991), Super 8 1/2 (1994), and Hustler White (1996). More recently he has directed two art/porn features, Skin Flick(2000)(hardcore version: Skin Gang) and The Raspberry Reich (2004)(hardcore version: The Revolution Is My Boyfriend), and the independent feature Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008). After premiering at Sundance and Berlin, “The Raspberry Reich” took off on the international film festival circuit, playing at over 150 festivals, including the Istanbul, Guadalajara, and Rio de Janeiro International Film Festivals. He was also honoured with retrospectives at the end of ’05 at the Madrid and Hong Kong Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals. Otto; or, Up with Dead People also debuted at Sundance and Berlin and played at over 150 film festivals, culminating in a screening at MoMA in New York City in November of 2008. His new film, L.A. Zombie, starring French star Francois Sagat, premiered in competition at the Locarno International Film Festival in August, 2010. It will have it’s French premier at the L’Etrange Film Festival in Paris and its North American premier at the Toronto International Film Festival in Septemer. 2010. The hardcore version, L.A. Zombie Hardcore, will be released at Halloween, 2010.

LaBruce has written a premature memoir entitled The Reluctant Pornographer, from Gutter Press. The Plug-In Gallery in Winnipeg, Canada published a book on LaBruce’s work, Ride Queer Ride, in 1998. In the past several years, LaBruce has written and directed three theatrical productions. Cheap Blacky (2007) and The Bad Breast; or, The Strange Case of Theda Lange (2009) were both produced at the Hau 2 and featured Susanne Sachsse and Vaginal Davis. Macho Family Romance (2009), commissioned by Theater Neumarkt in Zurich, also featured Ms. Sachsse and Ms. Davis. LaBruce was a contributing editor and frequent writer and photographer for Index magazine, and he has also been a regular contributor to Eye and Exclaim magazines, Dutch, Vice, the National Post, Nerve.com. and Black Book. He was also formerly a frequent photographer for the US porn mags Honcho and Inches, and has recently contributed to Butt, Kink, Jack, Currency, Kaiserin, and Slurp. As a fashion photographer he has contributed stories to such magazines as Dazed and Confused, Bon, Tank, Tetu, Fake, Attitude, Blend, Tokion, Purple Fashion, and the National Post.

LaBruce had his first solo show of photographs presented by the Alleged Gallery in New York in December 1999. He has had subsequent solo exhibits of his photographs at the Pitt Gallery in Vancouver, MC MAGMA in Milano, Italy, Bailey Fine Arts Gallery in Toronto, Peres Projects in San Francisco, and at John Connelly Presents in New York. His show Heterosexuality Is the Opiate of the Masses opened on July 16th/05 at Peres Projects in Los Angeles. In July/06 he mounted Polaroid Rage: A Survey of Polaroids, 2000-2006 at Gallery 1313 in Toronto. He has also participated in numerous group shows. In October of 2006 he was the featured artist at the Barcelona International Erotic Festival. His latest solo shows include Untitled Hardcore Zombie Project, which opened at Peres Projects in Culver City, LA, on May 23rd, 2009, and L.A. Zombie: The Movie That Would Not Die, which premiered at Peres Projects Berlin on January 30th, 2010. LaBruce has also made a number of popular music videos in Canada, two of which won him MuchMusic video awards.

Based in Toronto, James Carl is one of the city’s leading artists. He creates small- and large-scale sculpture, made from a wide range of materials, from cardboard to marble, to venetian blinds. In the early 1990s Carl entered the art scene in Montreal by crafting expensive consumer goods (washing machines, stoves) from inexpensive materials such as found cardboard, only to place the finished sculptures back on the streets where their materials were originally retrieved. In a subsequent body of work, Carl carved replicas of disposable electronics out of marble – a traditional sculptor’s material with connotations of permanence. Most recently, Carl constructs large-scale, amorphous sculptures by intricately weaving brightly coloured venetian blinds in a series titled jalousie.

Carl has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. Most recently, the first major survey of his work, entitled do you know what, was presented at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto, the Cambridge Galleries Queen’s Square and the MacDonald Stewart Art Centre in Guelph. Other recent shows include: jalousie at Galerie Heinz-Martin Weigand in Karlsruhe, Germany; negative spaces at Florence Loewy in Paris; plot at Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery, and bottom feeder at Mercer Union in Toronto. Carl earned his MFA from Rutgers University and has degrees from McGill, the University of Victoria and the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. His work is in public and private collections across North America and Europe. Currently, Carl is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at the University of Guelph.

Born in London, Ontario in 1949, Robert Fones had his first solo exhibition in that city at 20/20 Gallery in 1969 and was also a founding member of Forest City Gallery in London. Since 1976 he has lived and worked in Toronto where he has exhibited regularly. He is represented by Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto. He has also shown work at other artists- run centers, commercial galleries and public institutions. A ten-year survey exhibition of his work was organized by The Power Plant in 1989. Fones has exhibited throughout Canada and internationally in the United States and Germany. His work is in The National Gallery of Canada, The Art Gallery of Ontario and other public and corporate collections.

Robert Fones has worked in a variety of media including sculpture, painting, woodblock printmaking and photography. In his work he has investigated the transition from manual to industrial production; disclosed hidden processes of geological and cultural change; and exploited the innate ambiguities of photographic and painted pictorial space. The latter theme is exemplified by Head Paintings, one of many artists books that Fones has published with Coach House Press and Art Metropole. The book is typeset in Fones-Caslon, a typeface he designed specifically for this publication. A number of his works use type in combination with photographs or pictorial representations.

Robert Fones is an active participant in the Toronto art community. He has served on the board of The Art Gallery of Ontario, C Magazine Foundation and the Acquisitions Committee of the Design Exchange. In 1990 he curated an exhibition for The Power Plant on the work of Toronto furniture designer, Russell Spanner. In 2011, he curated Cutout: Greg Curnoe, Shaped Collages 1965–1968 for Museum London.

Robert Fones has taught at the Ontario College of Art and Design, the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, and in the Art and Art History Program at Sheridan College. He has also published numerous reviews and articles in Vanguard, C Magazine, Parachute and other publications.

General Idea was a collective of three Canadian artists, Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson, who were active from 1967 to 1994. As pioneers of early conceptual and media-based art, their collaboration became a model for artist-initiated activities and continues to be a prominent influence on subsequent generations of artists. Initially working in Toronto, from 1968 through 1993 they divided their time between Toronto and New York before returning to Toronto for the last few months of their time together.

General Idea’s work inhabited and subverted forms of popular and media culture, including beauty pageants, boutiques, television talk shows, trade fair pavilions and mass media. Their work was often presented in unconventional media forms such as postcards, prints, posters, wallpaper, balloons, crests and pins. From 1987 through 1994 their work addressed the AIDS crisis, with work that included some 75 temporary public art projects. Their major installation, One Year of AZT/One Day of AZT, was featured as a project at the Museum of Modern Art and now resides in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. In 2006 the three giant inflatable pills from their 1991 work PLA©EBO were displayed during Toronto’s Nuit blanche.

After publishing FILE magazine for two years and amassing a large collection of artists books and multiples, General Idea founded Art Metropole in 1974, a non-profit space dedicated to contemporary art in multiple format: artists books, multiples, video, audio and electronic media.
Retrospectives of General Idea’s work continue to tour Europe and North America. General Idea Editions: 1967-1995 was featured at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain from 30 January – 1 April 2007, and included a recreation of the installations Magic Bullet and Magic Carpet, as well as the major installation Fin de Siècle. Before that Editions was exhibited at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Munich Kunstverein, Kunstwerke (Berlin), and the Kunsthalle in Zurich, Switzerland. General Idea has been featured in the Paris, Sydney, São Paulo and Venice Biennales, as well as at Documenta 10 in Kassel, Germany.

Both Partz and Zontal died of AIDS in 1994. Bronson continues to work and exhibit as an independent artist, and was the director of Printed Matter, Inc. in New York between 2006 and 2011. The General Idea Archive now resides at the Library of the National Gallery of Canada.

Vera Frenkel, multidisciplinary artist, independent video artist, writer (b at Bratislava, Czech 10 Nov 1938). First recognized internationally as a printmaker and sculptor, Frenkel, since 1974, has been in the forefront of the visual, spatial and narrative uses of video and media-based art. Her first video work, String Games: Improvisations for Inter-City Video (1974), a direct transmission between Toronto and Montréal, investigated questions of language, codes and signs, and the construction of meaning. The video installation Signs of a Plot: A Text, True Story & Work of Art (1978) and a video trilogy, The Secret Life of Cornelia Lumsden: A Remarkable Story (1979), written, directed and performed by the artist, are situated at the boundary between documentary and fiction. The Last Screening Room: A Valentine (1984) and Ruling Fictions (1984) continued her work with the mythic properties of popular culture.

Frenkel’s stand against censorship is the focus of The Business of Frightened Desires: Or the Making of a Pornographer (1985), a slide-sound installation. Attention: Lost Canadian, a computer work for multiple monitors designed for the Canada Pavilion at Expo 86, was later transmitted electronically to the Italian Pavilion at the 1986 Venice Biennale. With Lost Art: A Cargo Cult Romance (1986), a new cycle of work began examining the attribution of meaning, false messiahs and millennial fantasies. These investigations continued with This is your Messiah Speaking (1990-91) presented in Toronto and in Newcastle, Eng, as a single channel video and as a computer animation designed for the Piccadilly Circus Spectacolor Board in London.

Her most recent work, which began with …from the Transit Bar (1992), consists of individual life stories of exile, asylum, immigration, and other cultural and geographical displacements which are recounted on several monitors in a video installation/functional piano bar. This work came to international attention at Documenta IX, the major showcase for contemporary art held every five years in Germany. An extension of this project was exhibited at the Art Gallery of York University (1993). Since then, it has been the basis for exhibitions/installations in Toronto’s Power Plant (1994), the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (1996), and at the Riksutstallningar in Stockholm (1997). This work offered the departure point for Body Missing, a video and website which originated with Frenkel’s research on the cultural policy of the Third Reich, art plunder and the fate of missing objects after WWII.

In addition to a survey of her work at York in 1994, Frenkel has exhibited and lectured in Canada and abroad (England, France, Poland, Japan, Austria, Germany, Hungary and the United States). At the University of Toronto, 1970-72, and York, since 1972, Frenkel has gained a reputation as an innovative teacher and writer of essays, fiction and poetry. Frenkel has been awarded, among other honours, the Canada Council’s Molson Prize for the Arts (1989), The Toronto Arts Foundation’s Visual Arts Award (1991) and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize (1993).

A video artist, filmmaker and writer, John Greyson emerged on the Toronto video art scene in the 1980s. Much of his early video work is concerned with gay rights, AIDS activism and censorship. His unique polemical and witty style have made him a force to be reckoned with by the mainstream, straight society, par­tic­ularly as he creates tales that are unabashedly gay in style and content. Even after moving into feature filmmaking, Greyson remained true to his activist roots.

Greyson studied visual art in London, Ontario, and in 1991, attended the Canadian Film Centre (CFC) in Toronto. At the CFC he directed The Making of Monsters, a satirical Brechtian musical that won best Canadian short at the Festival of Festivals in 1991 as well as the Teddy Award at the Berlin Film Festival.

His first feature, Urinal (1988), which also won the Teddy Award, in 1989, melds narrative and filmic elements, and like many of Greyson’s films, intertwines fictional and historical figures from various periods. His internationally exhibited agitprop musical Zero Patience (1993) features the ghosts of Sir Richard Burton and Gaetan Dugas, the Patient Zero who allegedly spread the AIDS virus in the early days of infection.

Greyson’s adaptation of Michel Marc Bouchard’s play Lilies (1996), a prison drama that deals with guilt, homosexuality, priests and young love, won a Genie for best picture in 1996. Lilies marked Greyson’s move into adaptations, which continued with his film The Law of Enclosures (2000), based on the novel by Dale Peck, for which Brendan Fletcher won a best actor Genie.

Along with his feature narrative work, Greyson continues to produce more overtly polemical work such as Uncut (1997), a playful, yet powerful, interweaving of images of Pierre Trudeau, circumcision and copyright law. Greyson was also a member of the Blah! Blah! Blah! collective and participated in documenting the trade summit in Quebec, producing the video Packin’ (2001). In addition to his film and video work, Greyson has directed numerous television episodes for series such as Made in Canada, Queer as Folk and Drop the Beat.

Through both his filmmaking and writing, Greyson has established himself as a key figure in the queer film and video movement. He is the co-editor (with Martha Gever and Pratibha Parmar) of Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video (Routledge, 1993) and the author of Urinal and Other Stories (Power Plant/Art Metropole, 1993). He has taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia and at the Ontario College of Art, Toronto. He has served on innumerable boards, juries and committees and was awarded the Toronto Arts Award for media arts in 2000.

American performance and video artist, film maker, draughtsman and printmaker. She studied sculpture and art history at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA (1954–8). In 1958 Jonas travelled to Europe before studying sculpture at the Boston Museum School (1959–61) and various subjects at Columbia University (MFA 1964). She was particularly influenced by her experience of the New York art scene in the early to mid-1960s and by the work of John Cage and Claes Oldenberg and their interest in ‘non-linear’ structure. Believing any potential for innovation in sculpture and painting to be exhausted, Jonas turned to the relatively unexplored area of performance art. Her early performances (1968–71), called Mirror Pieces, were held in large spaces and included large and small mirrors, either as a central motif or as props or costume elements. From the early 1970s her works became increasingly symbolic, game-like and ritualistic: in, for example, Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972) Jonas took the role of ‘Organic Honey’, a part-real, part-mythical and part-fantastical woman, who explores the possibilities of female imagery and eroticism, keeping her narcissism in check by scanning her own image in a video monitor. Jonas’s performances, films and videos are characterized by de-synchronized, non-linear, fragmentary features. She also often used drawing as ritual in her performances; the motifs of dogs, the sun and moon, the skull, landscapes and hurricanes, for example, have appeared in her works.

Born in 1960 in Winnipeg. Lives and works in Toronto. Micah Lexier is a Toronto-based multimedia artist whose many-tiered practice includes sculpture, installation, photography and text-based work, as well as curation. Lexier graduated with an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1984. His practice is consonant with the sensibility of that institution, revolving largely around conceptual acts of enumeration and demarcation. A well-known photographic work of Lexier’s, David: Then and Now (2005), reworks his Portrait of David (2004), spanning 10 years, and showing the effects of aging on 75 men named David, each a different age from one to 75. Lexier has had more than 100 solo exhibitions, participated in some 200 group exhibitions and produced numerous permanent public commissions. Recent publications include Call Ampersand Response, a collaborative bookwork made with Michael Dumontier, which was co-published by Artexte and Nieves in 2012, and I’m Thinking of A Number, a 30-year survey of Lexier’s ephemera, published by the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2010.

American sculptor, installation artist and musician. He studied at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in the late 1970s, and whilst on an exchange programme to New York he began presenting performances involving experimental music. His early visual work played on his interest in music: his Record without a Cover, released in 1985 by Recycled Records in New York, was a recording of his music distributed to record shops in the normal manner but bearing the instructions that it should not be placed in any kind of sleeve or cover. The Beatles (1989; see 1998 exh. cat., p. 24) destroys the possibility of sound altogether, consisting as it does of a pillow crocheted from cassette tape of the entire Beatles back catalogue. The relationship between sound and non-sound, and between objects brought together in unexpected combinations, are central concerns in Marclay’s work. Black and White (1992; see 1998 exh. cat., p. 43) is one in a series of composite images made by sewing LP covers together to make hybrid figures, echoing the scratching and sampling of his earlier sound work. In the installation Echo and Narcissus (1992; Jerusalem, Israel Mus.), 14000 CDs cover the gallery floor so that the viewer walks over them, their purpose as music recordings warped into a shiny surface, with the only sound being the viewers’ footsteps. Marclay’s practice purposefully straddles both gallery-based visual art and pop music, exploring ways of disrupting our perceptions of sound and identity using techniques of collage, scratching, misplacement and surprise.

Jonathan Monk was born in Leicester in 1969. Monk received a BFA from Leicester Polytechnic in 1988 and an MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 1991. In his work, Monk adopts the esthetics and practices of 1960s Conceptualism, but infuses the tradition with humor, levity, and autobiographical elements. In 1992 Monk sold paintings of low-budget travel advertisements for the price of the vacation package itself. In 1994 he mocked the artist’s gesture and persona by writing his name in urine on a beach in. And in 1995 and 1997 he took on the role of a driver awaiting various arriving passengers—Marcel Duchamp, Elizabeth Taylor, Jeff Koons, Kate Moss, Mom—in the Copenhagen airport terminal. While he was living in Los Angeles, Monk created None of the Buildings on Sunset Strip (1997–99) in reaction to Ed Ruscha’s famed photographic artist book. Monk produced two highly personal slide projections; In Search of Gregory Peck (1997) shows found photographs of the artist’s father as a tourist in Europe in the 1950s and The Gap Between My Mother and My Sister (1998) chronicles the trip between the homes of his mother and sister. Monk’s ongoing series Meetings (begun in 1999) proposes future dates and locations as hypothetical invitations to congregate, playing off of the text-based work of Lawrence Weiner and On Kawara. In 2002 Monk passed time as 50 nearly-identical photographs of the artist were developed in 50 different one-hour labs. For the ongoing project Day & Night (begun in 2002), Monk sends postcards to institutions rather than friends or family. For Keep Still (2002–04) the artist places white block letters atop the head of each figure in found group photographs spelling words or phrases like “today,” “a cube,” and “buzz. The slide show Big Ben (2003) projects postcards showing the London monument at the same time of day as the gallery. Monk mocked the display stipulations that often accompany contemporary art as well as the curatorial process in works like This painting should ideally be kept in storage (2004), This painting should ideally be hung near a Sol Lewitt (2004), and This painting should ideally be hung slightly too close to a Douglas Huebler (2005). Monk has created several works in neon; perhaps the best known are several from 2005 which display the hours that the hosting gallery is open to the public, a work that is turned on during opening hours and switched off at closing time. Also in 2005 Monk translated several of the neon innovations of his artistic predecessors into opaque painted aluminum in Corner Piece (for Bruce Nauman) and Corner Piece (for Dan Flavin). In 2009 Monk exhibited five stainless-steel sculptures that offer deflated versions of Jeff Koon’s signature balloon bunny.

Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized by Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow (1992 and 1994), Centre d’Art Contemporain in Neuchatel (1997), Museum Kunst Palast in Dusseldorf (2003), Institute of Contemporary Art in London (2005), Kunstverein Hannover (2006), Palais de Tokyo + Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris (2008), and Artpace in San Antonio (2009). His work has also been included in group exhibitions such as Taipei Biennial (2000), Berlin Biennale (2001), Venice Biennale (2003), Whitney Biennial (2006), Prague Biennale (2007), and Panama Bienniale (2008). Monk lives and works in Berlin.

Michael Snow was born in Toronto not so long ago, and lives there now – but has also lived in Montreal, Chicoutimi and New York.

He is a musician (piano and other instruments) who has performed solo as well as with various ensembles (most often with the CCMC of Toronto) in Canada, USA, Europe and Japan. Numerous recordings of his music have been released.

His films have been presented at festivals in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Korea, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Turkey, United Kingdom and USA, and are in the collections of several film archives, including Anthology Film Archives in New York City, the Royal Belgian Film Archives (Brussels), and the Österreichische Film Museum (Vienna).

He has been a painter and sculptor, though since 1962, much of his gallery work has been photo-based or holographic. Work in all these media is represented in private and public collections world-wide, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (Vienna), Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), and both the Musée des beaux-arts and Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal.

Since 1970 he has done video, film, slide and sound installations, and made such bookworks as Michael Snow/A Survey (1970), Cover to Cover (1975), 56 Tree Poems (1999), and BIOGRAPHIE of the Walking Woman 1961-1967 (2004), as well as magazine works for Impulse (1975), Photo-Communique (1986), and C magazine (1993).

Retrospectives of his painting, sculpture, photoworks and holography have been presented at the Hara Museum (Tokyo), of his films at the Cinémathèque Française and Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), Anthology Film Archives and Museum of Modern Art (New York) and L’Institut Lumière (Lyon) and of his work in all media simultaneously in 1994 at the Power Plant and the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto). A retrospective of his photoworks 1962-99 called Panoramique was presented in 1999 at the Palais des Beaux Arts (Brussels), touring the following year to Centre national de la photographie (Paris), MAMCO (Geneva), and Centre pour l’image contemporaine Saint-Gervais (Geneva). Additional retrospective exhibitions have been mounted at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

Solo and group shows of his visual art works have been presented at museums and galleries in Amsterdam, Atlanta, Berlin, Bonn, Boston, Brussels, Kassel, Lima, Los Angeles, Lucerne, Lyons, Minneapolis, Montreux, Munich, New York, Ottawa, Paris, Pittsburgh, Quebec City, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Toronto and elsewhere.

Michael Snow has executed several public sculpture commissions, the best known being Flight Stop at Eaton Centre (1979) and The Audience (1988-1989)at Skydome (now Rogers Centre), both in Toronto. His installation The Windows Suite was opened in September 2006 at the Pantages Hotel and Condominium complex on Victoria Street, Toronto.

He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972) the Order of Canada (Officer, 1982; Companion, 2007), and the first Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2000) for cinema. Snow was made a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres, France (1995) and in 2004 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Université de Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne.

(from Fondation Langlois website)

Lawrence Weiner has exhibited at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain (2013), the Jewish Museum, New York (2012), the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2000), the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (1995), the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1994), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1990), and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (1990). An important traveling retrospective of his work was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the K21 Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007-2008). He has participated in Documenta V (1972), VI (1977), VII (1982), and XIII (2012) the Venice Biennale (2013, 2003, 1984, and 1972) as well as the Biennale Sao Paolo in 2006. Among his many honors are the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1976 and 1983), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1994), Wolfgang Hahn Prize (1995), and a Skowhegan Medal for Painting/Conceptual Art (1999). In 2013 he was awarded the Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Growing up in Baltimore in the 1950s, John Waters was not like other children; he was obsessed by violence and gore, both real and on the screen. With his weird counter-culture friends as his cast, he began making silent 8mm and 16mm films in the mid-‘60s; he screened these in rented Baltimore church halls to underground audiences drawn by word of mouth and street leafleting campaigns. As his filmmaking grew more polished and his subject matter more shocking, his audiences grew bigger, and his write-ups in the Baltimore papers more outraged. By the early 1970s he was making features, which he managed to get shown in midnight screenings in art cinemas by sheer perseverance. Success came when Pink Flamingos (1972) – a deliberate exercise in ultra-bad taste – took off in 1973, helped no doubt by lead actor Divine’s infamous dog-crap eating scene.

Waters continued to make low-budget shocking movies with his Dreamland repertory company until Hollywood crossover success came with Hairspray (1988), and although his movies nowadays might now appear cleaned up and professional, they retain Waters’ playfulness, and reflect his lifelong obsessions.

Christopher Wool (born 1955, Chicago) is an American artist residing in New York City. Since the 1980s, Wool’s studio practice has incorporated issues surrounding post-conceptual ideas.

In his abstract paintings Wool brings together figures and the disfigured, drawing and painting, spontaneous impulses and well thought-out ideas. He draws lines on the canvas with a spray gun and then, directly after, wipes them out again with a rag drenched in solvent to give a new picture in which clear lines have to stand their own against smeared surfaces.

Writing in 2000, in The New York Times, Ken Johnson highlighted Wool’s response to an observation made on the street as significant, “in the 1980s, Christopher Wool was doing a Neo-Pop sort of painting using commercial rollers to apply decorative patterns to white panels. One day he saw a new white truck violated by the spray-painted words ‘sex’ and ‘luv.’ Mr. Wool made his own painting using those words and went on to make paintings with big, black stenciled letters saying things like ‘Run Dog Run’ or ‘Sell the House, Sell the Car, Sell the Kids.’ The paintings captured the scary, euphoric mood of a high-flying period not unlike our own.”

In 1998, a retrospective of Wool’s work was mounted at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, an exhibition which then traveled to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland. In 2009 he had an exhibition at the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig in Koln, Germany and in 2012 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Wool is married to fellow artist Charline von Heyl.

(from wikipedia)