Tell Me Your Story

KUNSTHAL KAdE in Amersfoort
The Netherlands
Feb 08, 2020 to Aug 30, 2020

For the first time in Europe: 100 years of African American art based on storytelling. From February 8, visitors can explore the visual richness of black culture in Kunsthal KAdE through the works of 50 African American artists. Around 140 works - mainly on loan from the United States - will be exhibited in Amersfoort. Most of the participating artists have never been exhibited in the Netherlands before. Meet the figureheads of African American art and learn about their unique stories.

The exhibition is being curated by guest curator Rob Perrée: 'Black American artists are creating beautiful, profound art and have a great deal to say. They want their voices to be heard, which has not really been possible in the Netherlands until now. This exhibition offers a unique opportunity to find out what we've been missing out on.'

Participating artists: Carl van Vechten (1880-1964), Winold Reiss (1886-1953), James van der Zee (1886-1983), Horace Pippin (1888-1946), Palmer Hayden (1890-1973), Augusta Savage (1892-1962), Aaron Douglas (1898-1979), Hale Woodruff (1900-1980), Richmond Barthé (1901-1989), William H. Johnson (1901-1970), Beauford Delaney (1901-1979), Romare Bearden (1911-1988), Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012), Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), Charles White (1918-1979), John Biggers (1924-2001), Robert Colescott (1925-2009), Betye Saar (1926), Benny Andrews (1930-2006), Gordon Parks (1912-2006), Wadsworth Jarrell (1929), Faith Ringgold (1930), David Driskell (1931), Bob Thompson (1937-1966), Aminah Robinson (1940-2015), Gerald Williams (1941), Emory Douglas (1943), Carrie Mae Weems (1953), Kerry James Marshall (1955), Todd Gray (1955), Alison Saar (1956), Henry Taylor (1958), Whitfield Lovell (1959), Lyle Ashton Harris (1965), Radcliffe Bailey (1968), Kara Walker (1969), Trenton Doyle Hancock (1974), Hank Willis Thomas (1976), Umar Rashid (1976), Kehinde Wiley (1977), Latoya Ruby Frazier (1982), Paul Mpagi Sepuya (1982), Jordan Casteel (1989), Jonathan Lyndon Chase (1989), Dáreece Walker (1989), Devan Shimoyama (1989), Cameron Welch (1990)

Photo LA

2019 Programming
photo l.a.
FOCUS photo l.a.
2019 Programming
Public Dates: Jan 31 - Feb 2, 2020

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2020
11:00AM
Reconsidering the Postmodern Canon: Art Historian Jeanne Dreskin in conversation with artists Harry Gamboa Jr., Todd Gray and Nicole Miller

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, notions of a "postmodern image," located primarily in photography, emerged within American art world discourses. The appropriative practices of artists later associated with the "Pictures Generation" became paradigmatic of what many critics and art historians saw as this theoretically inflected turn in image-making. In their efforts to articulate photographic shifts way from late-modernist tenets, however, preeminent histories largely foreclosed the inclusion of artists whose work remained invested in sociopolitical concerns and imbricated politics of cultural identity introduced during the civil rights era. Positioning a reassessment of these narratives as a point of departure, panelists will consider expanded, intersectional notions of photographic postmodernism and their relevance to each of their practices, which share efforts to problematize the camera's role in both historical and contemporary constructions of identity.

CARLA, Episode 16: Todd Gray

Listen to the interview by following this link: Episode 16: Interview with Todd Gray
in Carla Podcast

Growing up in L.A. — Rock Photography and Photographing Michael Jackson — Feeling Split Between Commercial Work and Art — The Colonized Mind — Finding Balance Between Mind and Body — Make Rules Break Rules

Hosted by Lindsay Preston Zappas

Todd Gray joins Lindsay for an hour long conversation surrounding his work and the influences that life experiences have had on his approach to thinking and making. Gray’s meticulous photographs are framed and then stacked on top of eachother, so certain areas are strategically concealed. Some of his works contain images of Michael Jackson among his other subjects of European gardens and scenes shot in Africa. As a teen, Gray started taking photos at rock concerts, and for a stint became a successful music photographer, working with The Rolling Stones, and doing album art for Jackson Five, Gladys Knight, and Stevie Wonder. He later became Michael Jackson’s personal photographer, and amassed a huge archive of images. Alongside all this, Gray received his MFA from CalArts in 1989 where he studied under photographer Allan Sekula and focused primarily ideas of mental colonialism. These ideas first started around his well-known subject, Michael Jackson, until Gray realized that his own mind had been colonized by his western upbringing and education. Todd and I talk about the split between a western logical thinking, and a more African bodily and intuitive way of thinking—and how much of his practice is an effort to reconcile the two.

Gray’s exhibition, Euclidean Gris Gris, is on view at Pomona College Museum of Art through May 17, 2019.

Photographic Activities: A Salon | Live from the Whitney

This program brings together seven artists in the 2019 Whitney Biennial who work with the medium and activity of photography. Following brief presentations, the artists discuss how and why they continue to use—and reinvent—photography today. They consider different approaches to the medium in light of the proliferation of photographic technologies, the digital and physical spaces in which photographs exist, and how artists make interventions within the field. Speakers include Lucas Blalock, John Edmonds, Todd Gray, Curran Hatleberg, Elle Pérez, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Heji Shin.

Front Row: Michael Jackson’s personal photographer: “He liked control”

Todd Gray was Michael Jackson’s personal photographer for 10 years at the height of the singer’s fame in the 80s. Gray talks to Front Row’s John Wilson about the lengths the reclusive singer took to control his image – lessons in celebrity which he learned from none other than Katherine Hepburn and Jane Fonda. 

Todd Gray’s work is included in Michael Jackson: On the Wall which runs until 21 October 2018 at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Listen to the full interview here

Todd Gray: A Place That Looks Like Home

Light Work

August 29 – October 22, 2016
Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery
Lecture: Friday, October 7, 6pm
Reception: Friday, October 7, 6-8pm

For his exhibition A Place That Looks Like Home, artist Todd Gray re-frames and re-contextualizes images from his personal archive that spans over forty years of his career as a photographer, sculptor and performance artist. Gray describes himself as an artist and activist who primarily focuses on issues of race, class, gender and colonialism.

His unique process of combining and layering a variety of images and fragments of images allows him the opportunity to create his own history and “my own position in the diaspora.” Working with photographs of pop culture, documentary photographs of Ghana (where he keeps a studio), portraits of Michael Jackson, gang members from South Los Angeles and photo documentation from the Hubble telescope, Gray asserts what he refers to as his own polymorphous identity that defies definition. Inspired by the work of cultural theorist Stuart Hall, Gray invites the viewer to participate in an “ever-unfinished conversation about identity and history."

Visit the full article here

Todd Gray and Hamza Walker at the Hammer Museum

For one year, the artist Todd Gray wore the clothes of his friend and mentor the late Ray Manzarek, a founding member of the Doors. An act that went beyond artistic homage or memorial impulse, Gray’s gesture is being restaged for Made in L.A. 2016. In this program, Gray’s readings from letters he wrote to Manzarek’s widow about his desire to bring Ray “into the orbital sphere of the art world” will be followed by a discussion with Hamza Walker, co-curator of Made in L.A. 2016 and associate curator at the Renaissance Society.

Visit the Hammer's page by clicking here

Made in L.A. 2016: Todd Gray’s Letters to Dorothy Manzarek

Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only is the third iteration of the Hammer’s biennial exhibition highlighting the practices of artists working throughout the greater Los Angeles area. As part of an ongoing series, the exhibition addresses Los Angeles as a center of activity inseparable from the global network of art production, revealing how artists move fluidly between contexts and respond to their local conditions. Rather than present a unifying regional aesthetic, sensibility, or identity historically associated with the city, Made in L.A. 2016 focuses on artists from different disciplinary backgrounds, allowing individual projects and bodies of work to shape the overall exhibition. It features condensed monographic surveys, comprehensive displays of multiyear projects, and the premiere of new commissions from emerging artists, while extending into such disciplines as dance, fashion, literature, music, and film. The artist and poet Aram Saroyan was tasked with providing a subtitle for the exhibition. His poem—“a, the, though, only”—has been a guide for thinking about the many different singularities and approaches represented by a venture of this nature. As such, the site of the subtitle becomes an integral part of the exhibition’s ever-expanding reach beyond the museum. Other contributors considered the distribution of the exhibition to the same effect, venturing into territories that meet the needs of their work and creative output as established by their respective practices. Whether in the form of the Internet, public access television, or the social spaces of daily life and the broader expanse of the city, a number of contributions are as dependent upon their physical remove and displacement as they are on the conventions of museum display. Though an exhibition of this variety appears to be interdisciplinary in its scope, the boundaries between disciplines remain duly intact. The modes of self-examination and critical reflexivity that are particular to each are therefore met on their own terms, according to their distinct rules of engagement.

Caliban in the Mirror

Todd Gray and Max King Cap's excerpt of Caliban in the Mirror originally performed for Studio: Spring 2010, REDCAT.