About

In conjunction with our current exhibition, Word Up!, co-curated with Sharon Louden, C24 Gallery is honored to present Walking the Walk, a conversation between two of the art world’s most influential women, Karen Finley and Sharon Louden. Artists, educators, curators and advocates, Finley and Louden have been making their marks in contemporary art for decades, helping to shape the role of women at the intersection of culture making and political activism, while impacting the future of the art world at large. Karen Finley is a New York based artist whose raw and transgressive performances have long provoked controversy and debate. She has appeared and exhibited internationally her visual art, performances and plays. Her performances have been presented at Lincoln Center, New York City, The Guthrie, Minneapolis, American Repertory Theatre, The Barbican in London, The Broad and REDCAT in Los Angeles, Harvard University, The Steppenwolf in Chicago and The Bobino in Paris. Her artworks are in numerous collections and museums including the Pompidou in Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and MOMA in NYC. Finley attended the San Francisco Art Institute, receiving an MFA and honorary PHD. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim, two Obies, two Bessies, Ms. Magazine Woman Of The Year, NARAL Person of the Year and NYSCA & NEA Fellowships. She has also posed for a Playboy centerfold. Ms. Finley lectures internationally and is interested in freedom of expression issues and the availability and access of culture in relationship to gender, race, class and identity. She is currently an Arts Professor in Art and Public Policy at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. In her public performances and installations, Finley has taken on subjects ranging from sexism, misogyny, the AIDS crisis, the Iraq War, child victims of WWII concentration camps, sexual politics and political scandals. Finley was one of four artists whose NEA grant applications were vetoed due to content considered “indecent.” Finley, the named plaintiff in NEA vs FINLEY, along with the other three artists denied grants, sued for reinstatement and won the case in 1993 in the ninth circuit court in Los Angeles. The ruling was appealed, and the case went to the Supreme Court and lost, in a decision that allowed the government to place restrictions on funding based on “decency standards.” In her seminal work, Moral History, currently on view at C24 Gallery as part of Word Up!, she takes on the deeply ingrained sexism and misogyny of the traditional art world. The installation is made of an oversized, wooden library table overlayed and entirely covered by numerous art and art history books. The overlapping, opened books form a maze quilt of images of work by infamous white male artists who show misogyny, entitlement and racism in their art and actions through their representations of women via their place in the art cannon and market. Covering the table top is a piece of plate glass placed over the many books, weighing them down flat, so that the reading becomes under glass. Finley then scrawls with red grease pencil on the glass over the imagery with commentary, inscribing graffiti style humorous quips that cut to the heart and breadth of the unfiltered misogyny of art history's beloved white males. Artists such as Gauguin, Picasso, Pollack and Degas are all targeted by Finley’s astute remarks. Sharon Louden is the creator and editor of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life trilogy of books and the Artistic Director of the Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution. She is currently a faculty member in the MFA Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts in New York as well as Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Louden graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Yale University School of Art. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Drawing Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Weisman Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. From 2013 to 2015, Louden went on a 62-stop book tour for the first book in her trilogy, Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists, where she met thousands of artists from all over the US. She continued this momentum, bringing her second book, The Artist as Culture Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life, on an extensive 102-stop conversation/book tour which launched at the Strand Book Store in 2017 and concluded in Fairbanks, Alaska in 2018. This book is now in its second printing, has also sold in 24 countries and has been adopted in many schools all over the US. The last book in the trilogy, Last Artist Standing, will be published in 2021. In addition, Louden has signed a contract to be a Senior Editor of a series of 10 books released over 10 years beginning in 2020, and is also working on a book entitled, The Innovators: Defining Change in the Art World, co-edited with critic, writer and Arts.Black Co-Founder Jessica Lynne. Louden's work is held in major public and private collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Neuberger Museum of Art, Arkansas Arts Center, Yale University Art Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, Art in America, Washington Post, Sculpture Magazine, ARTnews and the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as other publications. She has participated in residencies at Tamarind Institute, Urban Glass, Franconia Sculpture Park, Society of the Four Arts and Art Omi. She also currently serves on boards and committees of various nonprofit arts organizations and actively volunteers her time to artists to further their careers. Join us for what promises to be an enlightening and stimulating conversation between two of the contemporary art world’s most potent agents for change. C24 Gallery 560 W 24th Street New York, New York 10011 RSVP : [email protected]