Keynote Speakers

Nov 7, 2020, 2-4 pm PST

Carrie Lambert-Beatty

Carrie Lambert-Beatty is a contemporary art historian. She is the author of the award-winning book Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (MIT Press, 2008) and the essay "Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility," among other writings. Her current research is on thirty years of artistic parafiction — that is, fiction presented as fact — and asks: What does this artful play tell us about contemporary ways of knowing? How can contemporary art help develop a progressive epistemic set, able counter the culture of post-truth on the one hand, and an epistemic "return to order" on the other?

Lambert-Beatty holds the rank of Professor at Harvard University, with a joint appointment in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies. Her teaching stresses attention to the modes of spectatorship invited by artists' formal, conceptual, and technical choices, and how these forms of experience in turn relate to new media ecologies, the social effects of neoliberalism, ongoing post-colonial reckonings, and the structural politics of gender and race. 

Ken Gonzales-Day

Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems ranging from lynching photographs to museum displays. His widely exhibited Erased Lynching series (ongoing), along with the publication of  Lynching in the West: 180-1935 (Duke, 2006) transformed the understanding of racialized violence in the United States and specifically raised awareness of the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and African-Americans in California and helped to re-contextualize anti-immigration histories with the larger discussion of racial formation. While works from the Profiled Series have been exhibited internationally and grew out of research into the history of racial depiction found in historic expositions and educational museum displays. In 2017, Gonzales-Day received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography and currently holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Art at Scripps College and is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

Conversation with Made in L.A. 2020 curator Lauren Mackler and artist Umar Rashid

Nov 7, 2020, 12-1 pm PST

Lauren Mackler

Lauren Mackler is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles. In 2010, she founded Public Fiction, a forum for staging exhibitions, performances, and programs by contemporary artists and writers, as well as a print journal with the same mission. Mackler has organized Public Fiction exhibitions and catalogues at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012 and 2016); Artissima LIDO, Turin (2012); the Berkeley Art Museum (2013); Frieze Projects New York (2014); the Hammer Museum (2014); the MAK Center for Art and Architecture’s Schindler House (2018); and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (January 2019). She is currently the managing editor of Sublevel, the literary magazine housed in the CalArts School of Critical Studies, and has been on faculty at the School of Visual Arts in New York, the UCLA Graduate Department of Art, and Otis College of Art and Design. Mackler is a contributor to Artforum and various other publications. In 2015, she was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome.

Umar Rashid

Umar Rashid (also known as Frohawk Two Feathers) was born in 1976 in Chicago. A natural storyteller, he has developed a practice that reinvents the paths of populations often omitted from the historical record. Through writing, illustration, painting, and sculpture, Rashid creates alternative historical narratives—including a what-if story about France and England unifying into a gargantuan empire—that reference a panoply of cultures and collapse geography and time while underlining the intricacies of race, gender, class, and overall power in the colonial world. Rashid steers clear of simplistic dichotomies and instead challenges the viewer to consider the complex feelings and conducts that make up every human. In his tales people are as likely to be heroes as villains no matter their color, which ultimately acknowledges their agency as historical actors. Rashid has invented a complex iconographic language that uses classifying systems, maps, and cosmological diagrams. His work is deeply informed by the hip-hop culture of his youth, using both modern and ancient references and such stylistic sources as Egyptian hieroglyphs, ledger art, Persian miniature painting, and illustrated Spanish colonial manuscripts. His work has appeared in group shows at François Ghebaly Gallery and Jeffrey Deitch, both in Los Angeles (all 2019).

Papers and Partipants

*names listed in alphabetical order