Panel Discussion: 6:30-8:00 PM
Moderated by Dexter Wimberly, with panelists Michael Berube, Kevin Sampson, and Cara Zimmerman.
Party: 8:30-10:30 PM
About the panel discussion:
Explore the art and legacy of Ronald Lockett (1965–1998, Bessemer, Alabama) at the American Folk Art Museum, with a panel of contemporary artists and arts professionals discussing Lockett’s remarkable life and work and its resonance within today’s art and society. Presented by Young Folk, the young patrons of the American Folk Art Museum. Organized by Emily Counihan and Donnamarie Baptiste.
About the exhibition:
Curated by Bernard L. Herman, Fever Within: The Art of Ronald Lockett is a groundbreaking retrospective of a brilliant and little-understood figure in twentieth-century American art. The first solo exhibition of Ronald Lockett’s art, Fever Within emphasizes the powerful themes explored over the course of his career through approximately fifty of his works of art. Also on view at the American Folk Art Museum is Once Something Has Lived It Can Never Really Die, curated by Valérie Rousseau, which pairs ten of Lockett’s artworks with more than eighty small works by artists from various eras and geographical regions, each relating to the most pervasive themes in Lockett’s art: mortality, eschatology, and vulnerability.
Reveling in these side-by-side exhibitions, “Speaking of Gold and Rust” will bring together contemporary artists and arts professionals for a candid discussion of themes in their work and Lockett’s.
Moderator:
Dexter Wimberly is an independent curator based in New York. A passionate collector and supporter of the arts, Wimberly has exhibited the work of hundreds of artists in the United States and abroad. Wimberly maintains a critical dialogue with artists throughout the world by way of his exhibitions, public programs, and talks at galleries and public art spaces. Wimberly is the former director of strategic planning at Independent Curators International (ICI). He is currently the visiting curator at Aljira: A Center for Contemporary Art, and serves on the board of The Laundromat Project. Wimberly has organized exhibitions and programs for Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh; Driscoll Babcock Galleries; 101/EXHIBIT; Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art; bitforms gallery; Koki Arts, Tokyo; the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA); and The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, among others.
Panelists:
Michael Berube is an artist, curator, and educator. A singer and performance artist in New York’s Lower East Side in the 1980s, Berube’s practice shifted to visual art after his diagnosis with HIV/AIDS. He received his BFA summa cum laude from Hunter College in 2007 and his MFA in 2010 also from Hunter College. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Tom Woods Award, The Sommerville Art Prize, The David & Sadie Klau Fellowship, and was the 2010 nominee of Hunter College for the Joan Mitchell Graduate Studies Award. He is currently an adjunct assistant professor at Hunter College and the senior curator for the NYC-based artists’ collective, Openings. The focus of his current work explores issues of camp, aging, the body, identity, and beauty through the application of a contemporary baroque aesthetic.
Kevin Sampson was raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, as the son of a civil rights leader. He served as a police officer/detective in the Scotch Plains Police Department for nineteen years, ten as a police sketch artist. A series of family tragedies eventually propelled him to heal through making art. Sampson uses found objects—including cement, bones, tiles, and fabric—and various painting mediums to form a conceptual vocabulary of impermanence and memory charged with political, religious, and racial apprehension. His subjects are the people whom he has known, people who have been part of this world, and people who have lived lives that he thought ought to be remembered. By constructing sculptures of physical memory inspired by Caribbean and American Southern styles, he builds works that are about family in all forms. Sampson’s work has been exhibited internationally, most recently in Modern Heroics: 75 Years of African American Expressionism at the Newark Museum. Sampson will participate as a Joan Mitchell Foundation NOLA Artist-in-Residence in the fall of 2016.
Cara Zimmerman joined Christie’s in 2014 as their specialist in folk and outsider art. Since then, she has been involved with and developed multiple major sales, including the unprecedented January 2016 sale of William Edmondson’s Boxer, which set a world auction record for a piece of outsider art. Zimmerman previously worked for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she coordinated the critically acclaimed exhibition Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, and she served as executive director for the Foundation for Self-Taught Artists in Philadelphia. She has edited and written for catalogs published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; San Jose State University; and the University of Delaware University Museums; and is a contributor to Raw Vision magazine. She has lectured at museums and universities throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.