Devin Kenny

Last updated

Devin Kenny
Devin Kenny - 3TmLznmg.jpg
Kenny in 2021 (photo by Jay Tovar)
Born1987 (age 3536)
Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Alma mater Cooper Union
University of California Los Angeles
Website www.devinkenny.info

Devin Kenny (born 1987) is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, writer, and curator who works across music, text, sculpture, painting, videos, photography, garments, and performances. [1] Kenny's work has addressed network technology and the Black Atlantic, gentrification, the prison industrial complex, experimental music, subculture and countercultures, and alternative economies. [2] [3]

Contents

Early life

Kenny was born in Hyde Park, Chicago, and lived shortly afterwards in West Hollywood, California, where his mother Deranne Kenny was pursuing her acting career. He moved often in his early life as a result of his mother passing away from breast cancer when he was a child. He briefly lived with his half-sister who was in the Navy, residing in Silver Spring, Maryland and Jacksonville, North Carolina, and returning to the Hyde Park/Kenwood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, where he would remain until age 18.

Education

Kenny received a Bachelors in Fine Arts from Cooper Union in 2009. In 2008, while at Cooper Union, he completed an exchange program at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.

He participated in Trade School organized by Caroline Woolard and an early iteration of the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, originally a sponsored project from Creative Time. From 2011-2013, he attended the University of California Los Angeles, graduating from the New Genres Department with a Masters in Fine Arts in 2013. [4] [5]

Kenny has participated in multiple residency programs, including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009, Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP) from 2014-2015, SOMA in 2013, the Core Program Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from 2017-2019, Shandaken Projects 2018, and the Rauschenberg Residency #44 in winter/spring 2020.

Teaching

Kenny has taught courses at Rutgers University, Parsons New School of Design, The University of Houston, the Block Program at The Glassell School of Art, and has been a visiting critic at Yale University.

Work

Kenny's artistic works include sculptures, paintings, readymades, music, and sound/audio works, and have been exhibited in solo art exhibitions and group shows. [6]

Regarding the many themes Kenny takes up in his work, a 2019 review of his solo show at MoMA PS1 stated:

Devin Kenny takes an experimental, multidisciplinary approach to analyzing the contemporary Black experience. Exploring surveillance, abuses of institutional power, and gentrification, he balances abstract concepts with material traces of once subcultural but now quite ubiquitous forms of expression such as manga, hip-hop, and internet memes.

Alex Bienstock [7]

Kenny’s work fluctuates between social commentary and dark humor, and have addressed: social death, Black erasure in NYC folk history, Reparations, Ethnomathematics, Hiphop and community activism. [8]

Kenny has performed at international art institutions and programs, including Artists Space, The Hammer Museum, The Kitchen, Performance Space, Artspace Auckland, REDCAT, Kunsthall Stavanger, Julia Stoschek Collection, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Performa.

Performance essays

Kenny is known for multiple types of performance, including “performance essays” or "performance lectures", an experimental presentation format combining original speech, music, and other media, alongside multimedia and digital art, poetry and music. [9]

Music

Kenny has created music under the alias Devin KKenny, “a play on the fact that an unfamous name often can be misspelled” , Lil Resin, Chainz Problematic, and Wieder Care, among others. [10]

His music projects typically are self-released concept albums, and are shown online (such as on the now-defunct Newhive platform) or in art spaces like NYC’s The High Line, and appear on independent radio such as WFMU and KCHUNG, TV stations like KCET, DIY venues, and other music and entertainment spaces.

Kenny's Studio Workout series rap mixtapes project accompanied a long-running Tumblr blog with the same name. His Studio/WRKOUT was an exploration of the tropes of hyper masculinity in rap through Lacanian terms and diagrams, and an unauthorized collaboration with Chuck Inglish production. Some of Kenny's Studio Workout series was showcased in Julia Stoschek Collection Dusseldorf. Alone We Play, an exploration of intersections between internet culture and street life in U.S. cities. The music video for this project was directed by Jarrod Turner and released through MOCATV.

Los Giros De la Siguiente (under the dkyk alias) draws parallels between being a subject of an oppressive state power and being in an abusive relationship. This project was sonically exploring connections between cumbias rebajadas and chopped and screwed hip-hop and was highly-influenced by Kenny’s time in Houston, Texas. Aspects of this work were shown in CAMH Houston, Santiago, Chile (as part of the Crónicas de estar y desaparecer Exhibition organized by MARICRUZ ALARCÓN and MARGARITA SÁNCHEZ, Stavanger, Norway as part of L E A N, Curated by Legacy Russell, Associate Curator, Exhibitions, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Shanghai, China (as part of the More More More exhibition, Berlin (sheet music was featured as part of the Strange Attractors exhibition in the Berlin Biennale 2018 curated by Nomaduma Masilela and Long Island City, Queens, NY as part of the Rootkits Rootwork exhibition. Devin Kenny’s fictional collaboration with Drag Lomax, which grew from research into Black erasure in folk music and early instances of counterculture in New York’s West Village has manifested in music video work shown on NYC’s High Line as part of the Musical Brain Organized by Melanie Kress, High Line Art Associate Curator.

In 2021 Kenny made his first official release with New York-based avant-garde label PTP (also known as Purple Tape Pedigree).

Devin Kenny has performed music for the influential GHE20G0TH1K party, and has collaborations with Chino Amobi aka Diamond Blackhearted Boy avant-garde turntablist Maria Chavez and musician/digital artist Albert Vyle Johnson. He also has created artworks centered around music such as 2Maintain for the Storefront for Art And Architecture which centered around the use of the term ‘maintain’ in 1990s hiphop in relationship to the nationwide rebellions against anti blackness and the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

Selected exhibitions

Solo shows

Group shows

Selected publications

Poetry

Essays

Collections

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amy Sillman</span> American painter

Amy Sillman is a New York-based visual artist, known for process-based paintings that move between abstraction and figuration, and engage nontraditional media including animation, zines and installation. Her work draws upon art historical tropes, particularly postwar American gestural painting, as both influences and foils; she engages feminist critiques of the discourses of mastery, genius and power in order to introduce qualities such as humor, awkwardness, self-deprecation, affect and doubt into her practice. Profiles in The New York Times, ARTnews, Frieze, and Interview, characterize Sillman as championing "the relevance of painting" and "a reinvigorated mode of abstraction reclaiming the potency of active brushwork and visible gestures." Critic Phyllis Tuchman described Sillman as "an inventive abstractionist" whose "messy, multivalent, lively" art "reframes long-held notions regarding the look and emotional character of abstraction."

Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and Co-Founder and Artistic Director of The Brooklyn Rail, a free monthly arts, culture, and politics journal. Bui was named one of the "100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture" by Brooklyn Magazine in 2014. In 2015, The New York Observer called him a "ringmaster" of the "Kings County art world." Bui was the recipient of the 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts. He lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Lucier</span> American artist

Mary Lucier is an American visual artist and pioneer in video art. Concentrating primarily on video and installation since 1973, she has produced numerous multiple- and single-channel pieces that have had a significant impact on the medium.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alanna Heiss</span>

Alanna Heiss is the Founder and Director of Clocktower Productions, a non profit arts organization, online radio station, and program partnership with six cultural institutions in three boroughs in New York. She founded The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Inc. in 1971, an organization focused on using abandoned and underutilized New York City buildings for art exhibitions and artists' studios, of which P.S.1 was a part. She served as the Director of P.S.1 and its later incarnation, the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center from its founding in 1976 until her retirement in 2008. She is recognized as one of the originators of the alternative space movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xaviera Simmons</span> American contemporary artist (born 1974)

Xaviera Simmons is an American contemporary artist. She works in photography, performance, painting, video, sound art, sculpture, and installation. Between 2019 and 2020, Simmons was a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard University. Simmons was a Harvard University Solomon Fellow from 2019-2020. Simmons has stated in her lectures and writings that she is a descendant of Black American enslaved persons, European colonizers and Indigenous persons through the institution of chattel slavery on both sides of her family's lineage.

Tauba Auerbach is a visual artist working in many disciplines including painting, artists' books, sculpture and weaving. They live and work in New York.

Clifford Owens is an African-American mixed media and performance artist, writer and curator. Owens was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1971 and spent his early life in Baltimore. Owens is known for his works which center on the body and often include interactions with the audience and spontaneity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Candida Alvarez</span> American painter

Candida Alvarez is an American artist and professor, known for her paintings and drawings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LaToya Ruby Frazier</span>

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an American artist and professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier began photographing her family and hometown at the age of 16, revising the social documentary traditional of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to imagine documentation from within and by the community, and collaboration between the photographer and her subjects. Inspired by Gordon Parks, who promoted the camera as a weapon for social justice, Frazier uses her tight focus to make apparent the impact of systemic problems, from racism to deindustrialization to environmental degradation, on individual bodies, relationships and spaces. In her work, she is concerned with bringing to light these problems, which she describes as global issues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julia Stoschek</span> German socialite and art collector (born 1975)

Julia Stoschek is a German socialite and art collector.

Kira Lynn Harris is an African-American mixed-media artist who currently lives and teaches in New York City.

Constantina Zavitsanos is a conceptual feminist artist. Their works are organized around themes of planning, contingency, debt, dependency and care. Zavitsanos is a part of disability community as a care provider and recipient. They live in New York City and teach at The New School.

Rachel Rose is an American visual artist known for her video installations. Her work explores how our changing relationship to landscape has shaped storytelling and belief systems. She draws from, and contributes to, a long history of cinematic innovation, and through her subjects—whether investigating cryogenics, 17th century agrarian England, the American Revolutionary War, modernist architecture, or the sensory experience of walking in outer space—she questions what it is that makes us human and the ways we seek to alter and escape that designation.

Kevin Beasley is an American artist working in sculpture, performance art, and sound installation. He lives and works in New York City. Beasley was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial in 2014 and MoMA PS1's Greater New York exhibition in 2015.

Meg Webster is an American artist from San Francisco working primarily in sculpture and installation art. While her works span multiple media, she is most well known for her artworks that feature natural elements. She is closely affiliated with Post-Minimalism and the Land Art movement and has been exhibiting her work since 1980.

Ian Cheng is an American artist known for his live simulations that explore the capacity of living agents to deal with change. His simulations, commonly understood as "virtual ecosystems" are "less about the wonders of new technologies than about the potential for these tools to realize ways of relating to a chaotic existence." His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including MoMA PS1, Serpentine Galleries, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Migros Museum, and other institutions.

Christopher Y. Lew is an American art curator and writer based in New York City. Lew is currently the Nancy and Fred Poses Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Carolyn Lieba Francois Lazard is an American artist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Lazard uses the experience of chronic illness to examine concepts of intimacy and the labor of living involved with chronic illnesses. Lazard expresses their ideas through a variety of mediums including performance, filmmaking, sculpture, writing, photography, sound; as well as environments and installations. Lazard is a 2019 Pew Foundation Fellow and one of the first recipients of The Ford Foundation's 2020 Disability Futures Fellows Awards.

Cameron Rowland is an American conceptual artist whose work has been exhibited internationally and acclaimed for its structural analytic approach to addressing issues of American slavery, mass incarceration, and reparations. Rowland graduated from Wesleyan University in 2011 and they were awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 after several solo and group exhibitions at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Kunsthal Aarhus, and La Biennale de Montreal. Rowland is noted for their distinct method of loaning some works to collectors and institutions rather than selling them outright, an approach meant to mirror the experience of low-income people shopping at rent-to-own stores like Rent-A-Center and disrupt the traditional value structure in the contemporary art market.

WangShui (1986) is an American contemporary artist. They work across a range of media including film, installation art, painting, and sculpture. They are based in New York City.

References

  1. Cohen, Barnett (April 24, 2015). "#studio #visit with #devin #kenny" (PDF). No. 1. Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (CARLA). Retrieved March 1, 2022.
  2. Tao, W (September 2019). "Devin Kenny: rootkits rootwork". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved February 23, 2022.
  3. "Devin Kenny - Interview by Barbara Calderón". Foundwork. 2019. Retrieved March 1, 2022.
  4. "Interview: Devin Kenny & Coleman Collins". UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. December 13, 2021. Retrieved March 1, 2022.
  5. Cowan, Sarah (December 14, 2018). "Can Artists' Organize? The Story of WAGE". The New Yorker. Retrieved February 24, 2022.
  6. Edwards, Adrienne (July 4, 2019). "Spectacle of Concealment". Flash Art. Retrieved March 1, 2022.
  7. Bienstock, Alex (July 23, 2019). "Revolutionary Content: Devin Kenny at MoMA PS1". Art in America.
  8. Cascone, Sarah (August 5, 2019). "Editors' Picks: 19 Things Not to Miss in New York's Art World This Week". Art Net. Retrieved March 1, 2022.
  9. Huurdeman, Emily (2020). "Essaying art: An unmethodological method for artistic research". Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication. 11 (1): 25–42. doi:10.1386/ejpc_00010_1. S2CID   225257793.
  10. "Devin Kenny – Hammer Museum". Hammer Museum. Retrieved August 11, 2022.
  11. "Devin Kenny: Ongoing, Individual Adaptability or How to Quiet Quit 2022". Whitney.org. Whitney Museum of American Art. Retrieved November 21, 2022.
  12. "Devin Kenny: rootkits rootwork, June 9-Sep 2, 2019, MoMA PS1". moma.org. Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved November 21, 2022.
  13. "Devin Kenny: Wrong Window, February 13-April 4, 2015". arancravey.com. Aran Cravey. Retrieved November 21, 2022.
  14. Markbreiter, Charlie (October 11, 2018). "Punk Punishes Pundits with Puns: Devin Kenny's 'Revenge Body Politics' at the Goethe Institut". Artspace. Retrieved March 1, 2022.
  15. "Coop Fund, Amalle Dublon & Constantina Zavitsanos, Devin Kenny, John Neff". artistsspace.org. Artists Space. Retrieved November 21, 2022.
  16. "Participant Inc". participantinc.org. Participant Inc. Retrieved November 21, 2022.
  17. "Then They Form Us: Xavier Cha, Constant Dullaart, Cecile B. Evans, Devin Kenny, Hayal Pozanti, and Julien Previeux". www.mcasantabarbara.org. Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. Retrieved November 21, 2022.
  18. Kenny, Devin. ""CLASSIC MAN" by Devin Kenny with Amethyst Amelia Kelly, Jonathan Shave, Kurtis Mckenzie, John Turner, and Charlotte Aitchison". Poetry Project. Retrieved November 21, 2022.
  19. Kenny, Devin (December 30, 2019). "Devin Kenny's Decade in Internet". Rhizome. Retrieved November 21, 2022.
  20. "Looking Back: BOMB on the Past Decade in Art". Bomb Magazine. December 23, 2019.
  21. Kenny, Devin. "Feasts Under the Bridge". The New Inquiry. Retrieved November 21, 2022.
  22. Kenny, Devin (April 24, 2018). "Altered States". Real Life Magazine. Retrieved November 21, 2022.