Expanding the Historical Record: Archives

Thursday, April 9, 6:30 pm
The Brick
518 N. Western Avenue
Free

Photographers Catherine Opie and Kris Graves discuss their work capturing the American landscape in 2020, amidst a national reckoning with Confederate symbols in public space. Moderated by Hamza Walker, Director of The Brick and co-curator of MONUMENTS

Catherine Opie (b. 1961) is one of the most important photographers of her generation. Her subjects have included early seminal portraits of the LGBTQ+ community, the architecture of Los Angeles’ freeway system, mansions in Beverly Hills, Midwestern icehouses, high school football players, California surfers, and abstract landscapes of National Parks, among others. She was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow recipient and the Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography at the American Academy in Rome for 2021. Opie is opening major exhibitions in 2026 at the Fridericianum, Kassel, in February; The National Portrait Gallery, London, in March; Posten Moderne in Trondheim, in June and The National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, in August. Her work is held in over 50 major collections throughout the world. She received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in 1988, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Opie was a professor of photography at UCLA for 25 years.

Kris Graves (b. 1982 New York, NY) is an artist and publisher based in New York and California. Graves creates artwork that deals with societal problems and aims to use art as a means to inform people about cultural issues. Using a mix of conceptual and documentary practices, Graves photographs the subtleties of societal power and its impact on the built environment. He explores how capitalism and power have shaped countries -- and how that can be seen and experienced in everyday life.

Graves received his BFA in Visual Arts from S.U.N.Y. Purchase College and has been published and exhibited globally. Permanent collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Getty Institute, Schomburg Center, Whitney Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Brooklyn Museum; and The Wedge Collection, Toronto.

This program is presented in conjunction with MONUMENTS, an exhibition co-organized and co-presented by The Brick and The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA).