Lari Pittman: Sparkling Cities With Egg Monuments
Artist Lari Pittman joins Rail Editor-at-Large Dan Cameron for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Oliver Tompkins Ray.
The New Social Environment #893
Recorded on Monday, September 11, 2023 at 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
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In this talk:
🚩 Lari Pittman -- Over the course of his decades-long career, Lari Pittman has developed a unique visual aesthetic that has established him as one of the most significant painters of his generation. Pittman’s signature, densely-layered painting style includes a lexicon of signs and symbols (such as bells, eggs, animals, and ropes), a compilation of varied painting techniques, and a clear homage to the handmade, craft, and the decorative. While Pittman’s early works were informed by the socio-political struggle resulting from the peak of the AIDS epidemic, racial discord, and LGBTQ+ civil rights struggles that defined the last two decades of the 20th century, his later paintings evince a shift in focus towards interior spaces, including domestic and psychological subjects.
🚩 Dan Cameron -- New York-based curator, art writer and educator Dan Cameron launched his career in 1982 with Extended Sensibilities at the New Museum, the first institutional effort in the US to examine gay & lesbian identity in art. For over forty years, Cameron has held senior curatorial positions at the New Museum, Orange County Museum of Art and CAC New Orleans, and organized more than a hundred museum exhibitions, including surveys of Martin Wong, David Wojnarowicz, Faith Ringgold, and others. In 2007, Dan founded Prospect New Orleans, the contemporary art triennial to benefit the city after Hurricane Katrina, and organized the first two editions. More recently, his book on Nicole Eisenman’s paintings was published in 2021 by Lund Humphries.
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The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poem, and on this day we were fortunate to have Oliver Tompkins Ray:
🚩 Oliver Tompkins Ray -- Oliver Tompkins Ray is a writer and songwriter from NYC. He played in Patti Smith’s band 1995-2005. He’s released two albums of solo material, Things As They Are, under the name Saint Maybe, (Fort Lowell Records, 2012); and Out Passed Nowhere, under his own name,(Royal Oakie Records, 2019); his new album, Beingone, will be released in 2024. His poems and writing have appeared in Nest, The Woodstock Journal, Love Love, and the Brooklyn Rail. He lives in Tucson with his dog.
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We'd like to thank the The Terra Foundation for American Art for making our daily conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive.
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