Virtual Book Club: Gregg Bordowitz, Arnold Kemp & Lynne Tillman

View Arnold Kemp FALSE HYDRAS exhibition

Please join us for a virtual Book Club on Sunday, May 23 at 2pm PST with Gregg Bordowitz, Arnold Kemp & Lynne Tillman on the book Eat of Me: I am the Savior (1972).  This book, by an author who shares the same name as the artist, appears in the sculpture, Mr. Kemp: Yellowing, Drying, Scorching included in Kemp’s exhibition.

Since the late 1980s, writer, artist, and activist Gregg Bordowitz (b. 1964, Brooklyn, NY) has made diverse works—essays, poems, performances, drawings, sculpture, and videos—that explore his Jewish, gay, and bisexual identities within the context of the ongoing AIDS crisis. Bordowitz was an early participant in New York’s ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), where he cofounded various video collectives, including Testing the Limits, an advocacy group within ACT UP, and DIVA (Damn Interfering Video Activists). While developing a visual language capable of communicating harm-reduction models to a broad public in his collaborative works, he made his own videos and television broadcasts that juxtaposed performance documentation, archival footage, role play, and recordings of protest demonstrations, drawing influence from feminist conceptual art. In recent years Bordowitz has increasingly introduced poetry and performance as art events, exploring histories of music and televised stand-up comedy.

Arnold J. Kemp’s works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, and the Portland Art Museum among others. Kemp is the recipient of  awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the San Francisco Art Institute, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, among others. Recent exhibitions include “WHEN THE SICK RULE THE WORLD”, (Biquini Wax, Mexico City); “THE STUPIDITY OF BELIEF”, (Iceberg Projects, Chicago); and “THE BIG DARK” w/ artist Kristan Kennedy, (Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR). Kemp’s work has also been shown recently at the Drawing Center, New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and his work is featured in Nia DaCosta’s film  “Candyman” (Monkeypaw Productions, 2020). Kemp lives and works in Chicago, and until recently was dean of graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lynne Tillman writes novels, short stories, and essays. Her novels are: Haunted Houses (1987); Motion Sickness (1991); Cast in Doubt (1992); No Lease on Life (finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, 1998), American Genius, A Comedy (2006), and Men and Apparitions (2018). Her short fiction collections: The Madame Realism Complex (1992); This Is Not It (2002); Someday This Will Be Funny (2011), and The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories (2016). Tillman’s books of nonfiction: The Broad Picture (1992); The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory (1995); Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co. (1998), and What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, 2014). Her stories and essays appear frequently in artists’ books/museum catalogues, including those of Cindy Sherman, Raymond Pettibon, Barbara Kruger, Stephen Shore, On Kawara, Peter Dreher, Anne Collier, Laurie Simmons et al. She contributes writing to Frieze art magazine, Artforum, and Aperture. Tillman received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), and a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation grant for arts writing (2014). In Fall (2019), Tillman was the Visiting Distinguished Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History at Williams College. In 2022, her autobiographical book-length essay MOTHERCARE, will be published by Soft Skull Press.