TODD GRAY

Over the past decade, the work of Los Angeles-based artist Todd Gray (b. 1954) has steadily grown more ambitious in scale, form, and content. His complex photographic assemblages mix images of historic European cultural sites of wealth and splendor (palaces, museums, churches) and locales associated with the slave trade along the West Coast of Africa, interspersed with photographs of African American cultural icons, all drawn from Gray’s archive. The results are tone poems that reflect on African American identity and the rise of Western civilization as both are undergird by and inextricably linked to colonialism.

Presented at The Brick this fall, Todd Gray’s solo exhibition will include three new 30-foot long mural works. Distinguishing this exhibition from recent presentations of Gray’s work will be a significant collection of biographical material. These images and related ephemera document the trajectory of Gray’s personal and professional life as a young Black man growing up in post-war Los Angeles including both his career as a commercial photographer and artist. At sixteen, Gray was attending Fairfax High School by day and by night, photographing the local rock scene with his friend-cum-business partner Neil Zlazower, including bands like The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Cannonball Adderly, and The Doors. He would go on to work as a publicist and music writer; shoot a number of iconic album covers for artists including Gladys Knight, Cheryl Lynn, and Bobby Brown; have feature spreads in Italian Vogue; and serve as the personal photographer for Michael Jackson. Simultaneously, Gray developed his fine arts practice at CalArts at a storied time in the institution’s history in a community of faculty and fellow students including Allan Sekula, Mike Kelley, Allan Kaprow, Carrie Mae Weems, and Daniel Joseph Martinez. Here, Gray’s extraordinary life and career map onto larger historical and cultural events, offering a simultaneously intimate and macroscopic view of Los Angeles and beyond.

The exhibition will also be accompanied by a publication which is comprised of a richly illustrated long form interview between Gray and The Brick’s director Hamza Walker. Gray and Walker’s working relationship dates back to Walker’s 2008 exhibition Black Is, Back Ain’t at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago through Gray’s participation in the 2016 Made in LA Biennial, co-curated by Walker. In addition to discussing the hard facts of Gray’s life - the who, what, when, where - they delve into the expansion of Gray’s racial and political consciousness and how it manifests in his work today.

About the Artist
Todd Gray (b. 1954, Los Angeles, CA) works in photography, performance and sculpture. Gray's work is represented in numerous museum collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Houston Fine Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; among others. He was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency Fellowship in 2016. In 2022 The American Academy in Rome announced Todd Gray as one of the winners of the prestigious 2022–23 Rome Prize and Italian Fellowships. Gray has presented this work in academic conferences at Yale and Harvard University. Gray works between Los Angeles and Ghana, where he explores the diasporic dislocations and cultural connections which link Western hegemony with West Africa.

Support for Todd Gray is provided by Teiger Foundation, the Perenchio Foundation, and the Angeles Art Fund.