Artist Biographies

Doug Aitken is an artist and filmmaker known for site-specific installations that intervene on the landscape and illuminate how we experience the world. The Geffen Contemporary at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art recently mounted Doug Aitken: Electric Earth, the first North American museum survey of his twenty-year career. The exhibition took its name from a 1999 video installation by the artist, which earned him the International Prize that year at the 48th Venice Biennale. In 2017, Aitken became the inaugural recipient of the Frontier Art Prize, an award that supports an artist in the pursuit of bold projects that challenge the boundaries of knowledge and experience to reimagine the future of humanity.

Since the early 1970s, Lita Albuquerque has created an expansive body of sculpture, poetry, painting, multimedia performances, and site-specific projects. Often associated with the Land Art and Light and Space movements, her practice is unique in its vision and scope. She was the US representative and winner of the top prize at the 6th Cairo Biennale in 1996. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Getty Trust; Whitney Museum of American Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and others.

Jennifer Bolande, who lives and works in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, came of age as an artist in the early 1980s, advancing the ideas of the Pictures Generation artists. Her brand of conceptualism has explored emotional, linguistic, and physical relations to the world through photography, sculpture, assemblage, film, and installation. Landmarks, her thirty-year survey, originated at the Institute of Visual Arts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and Luckman Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles.

Based in Los Angeles, Will Boone was the subject of the recent solo exhibition, Paradise, at Miami’s Rubell Family Collection, where he built an installation with boxing-gym equipment. He has also had solo exhibitions at Jonathan Viner Gallery in London and Karma in New York, and he has participated in group shows at Gagosian in Rome, Peres Projects in Berlin, and Venus Over Manhattan and Gladstone Gallery in New York.

The Berlin-based artist Claudia Comte made her US debut in 2015 at New York’s Gladstone Gallery with an exhibition of architecturally inspired sculptures rendered in different varieties of wood. She has described her practice as a combination of “stringent yet playful geometric abstraction with the emotional punch of large-scale raw materials.” The objects at Gladstone, displayed on her signature, op art-style striped walls and pedestals, recall works by Jean Arp, Constantin Brâncus ‚ i, and Henry Moore. In the past two years, Comte has mounted solo exhibitions in Bern, Lausanne, and Zurich, Switzerland; Toulouse and Rennes, France; London; and New York.

Part Choctaw and part Cherokee, Jeffrey Gibson explores his Native American heritage using a visual vocabulary that permeates his painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance works. His last solo show at Marc Straus in New York featured colorfully embroidered and beaded punching bags with the Everlast label alongside tribal designs, as well as powerful abstract expressionist paintings on rawhide and canvas. Gibson’s mid-career retrospective exhibition opens at Denver Art Museum in 2018.

Sherin Guirguis, who lives and works in Los Angeles, investigates the relationships and frictions between the contemporary and the traditional. Her work often juxtaposes the Western language of minimalism with Middle Eastern ornamentation and explores the relationship between decoration and social structures, cultural identity, and women’s agency. Guirguis recently mounted a solo exhibition, El Biet El Kabeer, at The Third Line Gallery in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Shulamit Nazarian Gallery in Venice, California. She was included in the group shows Islamic Art Now Part 2: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists, both at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and We Must Risk Delight at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

Born on the night Marilyn Monroe died, the Italian artist Luca Forcolini has worked under the name Norma Jeane for almost twenty years. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions worldwide including at MoMA PS1, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Helmhaus, Zurich; Frieze Projects, London; Schirn Hunsthalle, Frankfurt; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Biennale de Lyon; and the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011.

Glenn Kaino, based in Los Angeles, creates largescale installations and site- or situation-specific sculptural works inspired by sociopolitical conditions.

He draws from his diverse background in sculpture, computer science, music, and animation. He has mounted solo exhibitions at Honor Fraser and LAXART in Los Angeles, Creative Time in New York, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He represented the United States at the 13th International Cairo Biennale in 2012.

Los Angeles-based Gabriel Kuri combines organic materials with mass-produced objects and industrial detritus ranging from insulation foam to cigarette butts. He fashions them into sculptural assemblages and installations that assert a conceptual approach to social commentary. Kuri’s solo and group exhibitions span almost thirty years, scores of galleries and museums, and top shows such as the Venice Biennale, where he exhibited in 2003 and 2011. In 2014, he was selected for the Hammer Museum’s acclaimed Made in L.A.

Armando Lerma creates paintings, constructions, and installations reflecting the lives and traditions of the Mexican farmworker community in his hometown of Coachella. He founded the Coachella Walls project in 2011. His work asserts a Chicano pop-art aesthetic with a distinctive iconography and graphic style.

Based in New York, Richard Prince uses mass-media images going back to the 1970s to tweak the ideas of ownership and authorship. He created Nurse, first exhibited in 2003, by scanning the covers of pulp paperbacks, transferring them to canvas, and painting over the prints. An avid collector of American subcultures, Prince has probed the role of racism, sexism, and psychosis in mainstream humor as well as the mythical status of cowboys, bikers, customized cars, and celebrities. He has mounted solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Haus der Kunst / Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich; MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Vienna; Rubell Family Collection in Miami; Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris; and Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria.

Rob Pruitt makes intensely personal and biographical art, primarily in painting, sculpture, and installation, with no prevailing style or default medium. His first Flea Market unfolded in the 1999 Gavin Brown summer show. He invited artist friends to set up tables and sell whatever they wanted, be it their own artwork or junk from their apartment. The gallery became a place to socialize with the artist, creating a feeling of community between makers and sellers. Pruitt has exhibited extensively in New York and internationally. For his conceptual work Art Awards (2009 and 2010), Pruitt presented awards at the Guggenheim Museum in the manner of the Academy Awards. He mounted a mid-career retrospective in 2013 at the Aspen Art Museum.

Julião Sarmento, who studied painting and architecture at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, works across a variety of media, including installation art, and has exhibited extensively since 1979, including at two Documentas (1982 and 1987) and three Venice Biennales (1979, 1997, and 2001). His paintings, sculpture, films, and mixed-media works follow his effort to find his place, and to define himself, in a dramatically changed and unstable world.

After growing up in Southern California’s Coachella Valley, Phillip K. Smith III received his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. From his Palm Desert, CA studio, he creates light-based work that draws upon ideas of space, form, color, light + shadow, environment, and change. Featured in hundreds of online and print publications, Smith is known for creating large-scale temporary installations such as Lucid Stead in Joshua Tree, Reflection Field and Portals at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, ¼ Mile Arc in Laguna Beach, and The Circle of Land and Sky at the inaugural 2017 Desert X exhibition. All these installations are featured in his latest catalog, Five Installations, published by Grand Central Press. His public artworks are sited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Kansas City, Nashville, Oklahoma City, and beyond. The artist was recently commissioned to create permanent, light-based works for the cities of West Hollywood, CA and Bellevue, WA. The artist’s work is also included in the forthcoming exhibition and catalog Unsettled, organized by the Nevada Museum of Art and artist Ed Ruscha.

Tavares Strachan, who lives in New York City, is interested in themes of exploration, displacement, possibility versus impossibility, and the idea of pushing the body’s physical extremes. He has mounted solo exhibitions at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Grand Arts in Kansas City, Missouri; the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania; and the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. In 2013, he represented the Bahamas in the nation’s inaugural pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale.