EJ Hill | |
---|---|
Born | 1985 (age 38–39) Los Angeles California |
Nationality | American |
Education | Columbia College Chicago, UCLA |
Known for | Performance art, painting, sculpture, installation art |
Notable work | A Monumental Offering of Potential Energy |
EJ Hill (born Ernest Joseph Hill; in 1985) is a contemporary American artist from Los Angeles who works in durational performance, installation, painting, and collage.
EJ Hill was born in Los Angeles, California in 1985. As a child, Hill lived in South Central until he was eight years old. He then moved to Carson, and to Torrance at 15 years old. At the age of 22, Hill started attending Columbia College Chicago, where he would be greatly influenced by the work of Chris Burden and Industry of the Ordinary. After graduating, Hill returned to Los Angeles and studied at UCLA with Andrea Fraser and Jennifer Bolande. [1] [2]
EJ Hill is known for his durational performances in which he performs a simple gesture for prolonged periods, often to the point of physical exhaustion. [3] In 2016 the artist created "A Monumental Offer of Potential Energy" at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The work included a large wooden model roller coaster that Hill lay on at all times the museum was open during the three-month exhibition. In 2017 Hill was included in the Underground Museum's exhibition "Artists of Color". [4] [5] [6] [7]
In October 2022, Hill's exhibit "Brake Run Helix" at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art opened, including a functional, human-carrying roller coaster created specifically for the museum. The roller coaster was fabricated by Skyline Attractions and is on show for two years alongside amusement park photography. [8] [9]
EJ Hill also works in collage, painting, writing and sculpture. [10] [11]
In 2014 Hill received a Fellowship for Visual Artists, from the California Community Foundation in Los Angeles and the Teaching Artist Fellowship at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. In 2015 Hill was an Artist-in-Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem in New York, was awarded the Fellowship for Visual Artists from the California Community Foundation in Los Angeles, and was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist grant in Los Angeles. [12] [13] In 2016, Hill received the William H. Johnson Prize from the William H. Johnson Foundation for the Arts in Los Angeles. In 2017 Hill became the Artist-in-Residence at Praxis Studio at California State University in Dominguez Hills and has been shortlisted for the 2017 Future Generation Art Prize from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kyiv. [14] Hill received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2018).
Alison Saar is a Los Angeles-based sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist. Her artwork focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity and is influenced by African, Caribbean, and Latin American folk art and spirituality. Saar is well known for "transforming found objects to reflect themes of cultural and social identity, history, and religion." Saar credits her parents, collagist and assemblage artist Betye Saar and painter and art conservator Richard Saar, for her early exposure to are and to these metaphysical and spiritual practices. Saar followed in her parents footsteps along with her sisters, Lezley Saar and Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh who are also artists. Saar has been a practicing artist for many years, exhibiting in galleries around the world as well as installing public art works in New York City. She has received achievement awards from institutions including the New York City Art Commission as well as the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
Elliot Reed is an American dancer and performance artist. Their projects span dance, video, performance, and sculpture and explores the relationship between physicality, time, and systems. Reed has shown internationally at venues like MoMA PS 1, New York, Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland, and The Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Reed is a 2019 danceWEB scholar, 2019–20 Artist in Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and recipient of the 2019 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant.
George Herms is an American artist best known for creating assemblages out of discarded, often rusty, dirty or broken every-day objects, and juxtaposing those objects so as to infuse them with poetry, humor and meaning. He is also known for his works on paper, including works with ink, collage, drawing, paint and poetry. The prolific Herms has also created theater pieces, about which he has said, "I treat it as a Joseph Cornell box big enough that you can walk around in. It's just a continuation of my sculpture, one year at a time." Legendary curator Walter Hopps, who met Herms in 1956, "placed Herms on a dazzling continuum of assemblage artists that includes Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell, as well as California luminaries Wallace Berman and Edward Kienholz." Often called a member of the West Coast Beat movement, Herms said that Wallace Berman taught him that "any object, even a mundane cast-off, could be of great interest if contextualized properly." "That’s my whole thing," Herms says. "I turn shit into gold. I just really want to see something I've never seen before." George Herms lives and works in Los Angeles.
Cassils is a visual and performance artist, body builder, and personal trainer from Montreal, Quebec, Canada now based in Los Angeles, California, United States. Their work uses the body in a sculptural fashion, integrating feminism, body art, and gay male aesthetics. Cassils is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant, a United States Artists Fellowship, a California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship (2012), several Canada Council for the Arts grants, and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship. Cassils is gender non-conforming, transmasculine, and goes by singular they pronouns.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby is a Nigerian-born visual artist working in Los Angeles, California. Through her art, Akunyili Crosby "negotiates the cultural terrain between her adopted home in America and her native Nigeria, creating collage and photo transfer-based paintings that expose the challenges of occupying these two worlds". In 2017, Akunyili Crosby was awarded the prestigious Genius Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Jina Valentine is a contemporary American visual artist whose work is informed by the techniques and strategies of American folk artists. She uses a variety of media to weave histories—including drawing, papermaking, found-object collage, and radical archiving.
Danielle Dean is a British-American visual artist. She works in drawing, installation, performance and video. She has exhibited in London and in the United States; her work was included in an exhibition at the Hammer Museum focusing on new or under-recognized artists working in Los Angeles.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an American writer, educator, and artist from East Palo Alto, California. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts known for her work in installations, book arts, immersive text-based installations, large-scale public text pieces, publications, collage, and audio recordings. Rasheed's art explores memory, ritual, discursive regimes, historiography, and archival practices through the use of fragments and historical residue. Based in Brooklyn, NY, she is currently the Arts Editor for SPOOK magazine. In 2021 her work was featured in an Art 21 documentary, "The Edge of Legibility."
Jordan Casteel is an American figurative painter. She typically paints portraits of friends and family members as well as neighbors and strangers in Harlem and New York. Casteel lives and works in New York City.
Janiva Ellis is an American painter based in Brooklyn, NY and Los Angeles, CA. Ellis creates figurative paintings that explore the African-American female experience, while incorporating her journey of self-identity within the Black community.
Carmen Argote is a Los Angeles-based artist. She hails from Guadalajara. She is known for performance art and sculpture. Her work has been included in exhibitions and museum collections, including the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Orange County Museum of Art and the National Museum of Mexican Art. She was a recipient of the Artadia Award in 2019, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation YoYoYo Grant in 2015, and a California Community Foundation Emerging Artist Grant in 2013. In 2016, the LA Weekly named Argote their "Best Up and Coming Artist".
Beatriz Cortez is a Los Angeles–based artist and scholar from El Salvador. In 2017, Cortez was featured in a science fiction-themed exhibit at University of California, Riverside, and in 2018, her work was shown in the Made in L.A. group artist exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She holds a Ph.D in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She also earned an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. Cortez currently teaches in the Central American Studies department at California State University, Northridge. According to Cortez, her work explores "simultaneity, life in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration". Cortez has received the 2018 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists, the 2017 Artist Community Engagement Grant, and the 2016 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists. Beatriz Cortez is represented by Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.
Eric National Mack is an American painter, multi-media installation artist, and sculptor, based in New York City.
Lisa Diane Wedgeworth is an African-American visual artist, curator, and writer. Her work encompasses abstract painting, video, and performance works. She has been a teaching artist at several Los Angeles-area museums, including the California African American Museum, the Craft and Folk Art Museum, and LACMA. She earned her B.A. in studio art from California State University, Los Angeles, in 2002, and her M.F.A. in Studio Art from the same institution in 2014. In an interview with the magazine Curator in 2018, Wedgeworth cited childhood visits to the Barnsdall Art Park in the 1970s and 80s, and the Candice Bergen-narrated commercials for the Norton Simon Museum, as early influences. She also cites Lezley Saar, daughter of Betye Saar, as well as painter Suzanne Jackson and "outsider/self-taught artists." Wedgeworth's work is in the permanent collection of the California African American Museum.
Jeanine Oleson is an American interdisciplinary artist working with images, materials and language that she forms into complex and humorous objects, performance, film, video, sound, and installation. Oleson's work explores themes including audience, language, land/site, music, and late Capitalist alienation
Lauren Halsey is a contemporary American artist. Halsey uses architecture and installation art to demonstrate the realities of urban neighborhoods like South Central, Los Angeles.
Caitlin Cherry is an African-American painter, sculptor, and educator.
Rashaad Newsome is an American artist working at the intersection of technology, collage, sculpture, video, music, and performance. Newsome's work celebrates and abstracts Black and Queer contributions to the art canon, resulting in innovative and inclusive forms of culture and media. He lives and works in Oakland, California, and Brooklyn, New York.
Deborah Roberts is an American contemporary artist. Roberts is a mixed media collage artist whose figurative works depict the complexity of Black subjecthood and explores themes of race, identity, and gender politics taking on the subject of otherness as understood against the backdrop of existing societal norms of race and beauty. Roberts was named 2023 Texas Medal of Arts Award Honoree for the Visual Arts. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Laeh Glenn is an American visual artist. She is based in Sebastopol, California. Her work addresses the digital life of an image; namely, how repetition and sharing influence image quality and how painting has the ability to converse with damaged images.