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Artists Ericka Beckman, Mark Bradford and Sharon Lockhart to be Featured in the Broad’s Un-Private Collection Conversations in August
Clockwise from top left: Ericka Beckman, courtesy of the artist; Matt Mullican, courtesy of the artist; Katy Siegel, courtesy Stony Brook University; Mark Bradford, courtesy John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Sharon Lockhart, courtesy of the artist.
LOS ANGELES, June 28, 2017—The Broad announced today that collection artists Ericka Beckman, Mark Bradford and Sharon Lockhart will be featured in the museum’s popular Un-Private Collection series in August. The Broad launched The Un-Private Collection series in September 2013, before the museum opened, to present public conversations with cultural leaders and influential contemporary artists in the Broad collection.
The next program, taking place in the Oculus Hall at The Broad on Thursday, August 3, pairs Ericka Beckman with visual artist Matt Mullican. Both Beckman and Mullican attended California Institute for the Arts (CalArts) in the 1970s and consider Los Angeles to be important to the development of their art practice, and in particular, their years at CalArts. Their conversation will touch upon CalArts in the 1970s—a period that produced many pioneering artists who played a vital role in shaping an identity for Southern California art and artists—and its place in the evolution of Beckman’s practice as they discuss her innovative video and installation works, in particular the work You The Better (1983/2015), currently on view in The Broad’s collection installation, Oracle. Tickets for this program are $12 and will be available beginning Thursday, June 29 at noon PT at thebroad.org.
On Wednesday, August 16, Los Angeles-based artists Sharon Lockhart and Mark Bradford, both featured in this year’s Venice Biennale, come together at the Orpheum Theatre downtown to discuss their creative practices and their focus on social justice through work with communities. Lockhart explores the human subjects of her artwork through workshops, film and photographs, and Bradford through the found materiality of his painting and activism. Through their respective practices, both seek to enrich the communities they engage in their processes. This conversation with curator, critic and art historian Katy Siegel will explore their work now at the Venice Biennale, in the American and Polish pavilions, and their related social activism projects. Bradford’s Across 110th St (2008) and Boreas (2007), and Lockhart’s Manioc Production: Elenilde Correa, Eliane Correa, Neide Correa, Mariana Correa, Denize Correa & Maria Correa, Santa Rita Community, River Aripuana, Brazil (1999) are currently on view in The Broad’s collection installation, Oracle. Tickets for this program are $15 and will be available beginning Thursday, June 29 at noon PT at thebroad.org.
About Ericka Beckman
Ericka Beckman’s film work has been exhibited at festivals, museums and galleries around the world. Her work has been exhibited in “Film I Samtidskonsten” (Film and Contemporary Art), Stockholm; MAMCO, Geneva; Raven Row, London; Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland; the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Tate and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; and Le Magasin, Grenoble, France. Beckman has an upcoming solo exhibition at Secession in Vienna, and she has been included in four Biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
About Matt Mullican
Matt Mullican is an American visual artist whose work deals with systems of knowledge, meaning and language through drawing, collage, video, sculpture, performance and installation. Born in 1951 in Santa Monica, California, Mullican received his BFA from CalArts in 1974 and rose to prominence as a member of the Pictures generation. Matt Mullican’s works have been shown at venues including the 55th Venice Biennale; Haus der Kunst, Munich; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Biennale São Paulo; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Museion, Bolzano, Italy; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Lentos Museum, Linz, Austria. He has exhibited in several editions of Documenta. Matt Mullican lives and works in New York and Berlin.
About Mark Bradford
Mark Bradford is representing the U.S. at the American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, (curated by Christopher Bedford and Katy Siegel) where his installation “Tomorrow is Another Day” has gained wide recognition. Consistent with Bradford’s artistic practice in Los Angeles, he is supporting Rio Terà dei Pensieri, a nonprofit social cooperative that provides opportunities for work placement and social reintegration to men and women within Venice’s prisons.
Bradford was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, where he lives and works. He received a BFA (1995) and MFA (1997) from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Best known for his large-scale abstract paintings that examine the class-, race-, and gender-based economies that structure urban society in the United States, Bradford’s richly layered and collaged canvases represent a connection to the social world through materials. Bradford uses fragments of found posters, billboards, newsprint, and custom-printed paper to simultaneously engage with and advance the formal traditions of abstract painting. In tandem with his studio practice, Bradford founded Art+Practice in Leimert Park, a nonprofit that encourages education and culture by providing support services to foster youth predominantly living in South Los Angeles as well as offering access to free, museum-quality art exhibitions and moderated art lectures to the community of Leimert Park.
About Sharon Lockhart
Sharon Lockhart (b. 1964) is an American artist living and creating in Los Angeles and Poland. Her “The Little Review” is featured in this year’s Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Since the beginning of her career, Lockhart has offered subtle and carefully made imagery that both conceals and reveals its subjects. In her signature method, Lockhart stages a photograph, casting and setting each image as if it were a film. She focuses on every detail making up the whole. Distinct parts are meticulously presented, but without the intent of leading the viewer in any particular direction.
Lockhart works with small communities that speak in their own voice through her art. Her project for the Venice Biennale, “The Little Review,” was developed with a group of young women—teenagers with the Youth Center for Sociotherapy, a group home in Rudzienko, just outside Warsaw. The installation consists of a new film, a series of photographs, publications and educational workshops. The main inspiration for the project was the creation and practice of Janusz Korczak (1878-1942), a progressive educator, writer and promoter of children’s rights. Analogous to Korczak, Lockhart’s aim is to create a forum for the voices of children—both past and present.
The title “The Little Review” was borrowed from a newspaper for children and youth, invented and edited by Korczak, which appeared from 1926-1939 as a supplement to the Jewish newspaper “Our Review.” The paper consisted entirely of texts and correspondence by children and adolescents. These few supplemental pages, which placed young people in the context of mass newspapers, were an unprecedented format that enabled them to tell their stories in their own language, expressing opinions about politics and everyday life. Lockhart paraphrases “The Little Review” by translating it into a film through a series of workshops with young women ranging in age from 14 to 18 years at the Youth Center in Rudzienko.
About Katy Siegel
Katy Siegel is the Senior Curator for Research and Programming at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the inaugural Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Endowed Chair in Modern American Art at Stony Brook University. She is co-curator of the American Pavilion at the current Venice Biennale. Among her curated exhibitions are Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965, with Okwui Enwezor and Ulrich Wilmes at the Haus der Kunst, Munich; Light Years: Jack Whitten, 1971-1974; High Times Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967-75, which toured internationally; Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975, co-curated with Christopher Wool; and many other shows at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, where she was Curator at Large. Her books include “’The heroine Paint’: After Frankenthaler”; “Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art”; and Abstract Expressionism. Siegel is also a contributing editor at Artforum. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Oberlin College, and her M.A and Ph.D. in art history from the University of Texas at Austin.
About The Un-Private Collection series
The Un-Private Collection is an ongoing series of conversations with artists in the Broad collection that reveal the stories behind the artworks and the artists. Since launching the program in 2013, The Broad has brought together a variety of collection artists in conversation with other cultural leaders, including Shirin Neshat with Christy MacLear, Jeff Koons with John Waters, Takashi Murakami with Pico Iyer, Eric Fischl with Steve Martin, John Currin with James Cuno, Kara Walker with Ava DuVernay, David Salle with Hilton Als and architect Elizabeth Diller with Eli Broad, Joanne Heyler and Paul Goldberger. Events have been held at venues throughout Los Angeles, making the programming available to audiences across the city. Conversations are livestreamed and full videos of past events are available online. The Un-Private Collection series is part of the Broad collection’s 30-year mission to make contemporary art accessible to the public, and is made possible by leading partner East West Bank.
About The Broad
The Broad is a contemporary art museum founded by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, the museum offers free general admission. The Broad is home to the 2,000 works of art in the Broad collection, which is among the most prominent holdings of postwar and contemporary art worldwide, and has launched an active program of rotating temporary exhibitions and innovative audience engagement. The 120,000-square-foot building features two floors of gallery space and is the headquarters of The Broad Art Foundation’s worldwide lending library, which has actively loaned collection works to museums around the world since 1984. Since opening in September 2015, The Broad has welcomed more than 1.2 million visitors. For more information on The Broad and to sign up for updates, please visit thebroad.org.
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