Big City Forum #20

Big City Forum #20
Saturday, Oct. 2nd, 2010
5 – 7 pm

Honor Fraser Gallery
2622 S La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
(310) 837-0191

A gathering of four curators that are impacting and changing the future of the practice at the institutional and non-traditional context.

Featuring:
Andrew Berardini
Shamim Momim
Pilar Tompkins Rivas
Franklin Sirmans

Andrew Berardini is a writer living in Los Angeles. He's contributed in the past to Rolling Stone, LA Weekly, Art Review, and frieze. Recent curatorial efforts include original projects with Bruce Nauman, Dave Muller, Yoshua Okon and Raymond Pettibon. Currently he holds the positions of Los Angeles editor for Mousse and Senior Editor for Artslant, and has previously worked with Semiotext(e) Press as an editor and the Armory Center for the Arts as a curator. He recently penned a monograph on the work of Richard Jackson, published by the Rennie Collection in Vancouver.

Shamim M. Momin, former contemporary curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is based in New York and Los Angeles, where she is the Director, Curator, and co-founder of the recently formed Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), a non-profit public art organization. Her most recent projects include The Secret (Still) Knows (2010), a reinterpretation of a group exhibition presented in Austin, TX entitled The Secret Knows (2010), LAND’s VIA/Stage 1 (2010), a suite of temporary public projects in and around Los Angeles that featured new commissions by Mexico-based artists Artemio, José León Cerrillo, Gonzalo Lebrija, and Moris. Other recent projects include PavilioM at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), Nothingness and Being at the Fundación Jumex (2009), a commissioned exhibition and performance by Yoshua Okón and Barry Johnston at Not to Be Reproduced (NTBR), Los Angeles (2009), and an independent group exhibition, The Station (2008), which took place in approximately 14,000 square feet of unoccupied raw space in a mid-town Miami development during ArtBasel 2008. As Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum, she co-curated both the 2008 and 2004 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, as well as solo exhibitions of Alex Bag (2009), Terence Koh (2007), Mark Grotjahn (2006), Raymond Pettibon (2005-06), and Banks Violette: Untitled (2005). As Branch Director and Curator of the former Whitney Museum at Altria since 2000, she was responsible for organizing exhibitions and commissioning more than fifty new projects by emerging artists for both solo and thematic presentations. Notable Altria projects have featured artists such as Andrea Zittel, Rob Fischer, Sue de Beer, Luis Gispert, Katie Grinnan, Mark Bradford, Dario Robleto, Ellen Harvey, Do-Ho Suh, and E.V. Day.
In addition to her Whitney exhibition catalogues, Momin has contributed to numerous other publications, including artist monographs, exhibition catalogues, and art periodicals. She participates regularly on juries and panels in the US and abroad and is a recent recipient of ArtTable’s New Leadership Award. Momin was also Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Art for Williams College for the 2007 and 2008 Semester in New York program.

Pilar Tompkins Rivas is an independent curator in Los Angeles, and director of the Latin American branch of the Artist Pension Trust, APT: Mexico City. Additionally, she is former curator of the Claremont Museum of Art (CMA). Ms. Tompkins Rivas is currently curating multiple exhibitions for the Getty Foundation's Pacific Standard Time initiative including the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs' institutional histories of the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery and the Watts Towers Arts Center, and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center’s suite of exhibitions L.A. Xicano to be held at UCLA’s Fowler Museum, LACMA and the Autry Museum. Ms. Tompkins Rivas’ current projects also include the exhibition Bas Jan Ader: Suspended Between Laughter and Tears at Pitzer College, and Citizen, Particiant at Darb 1718 in Cairo, Egypt. Recent exhibitions include: Post American L.A., Multiverse, The Passerby Museum and Vexing: Female Voices from East L.A. Punk which represented the City of Los Angeles at the 2009 Guadalajara International Book Fair. In 2006, she was a founding director and curator of The MexiCali Biennial, a bi-national art exhibition and music event transcending the constraints of the US/Mexico border.

Franklin Sirmans is the Terri and Michael Smooke Department Head and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. From 2006 to 2010, he was the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Menil Collection in Houston, TX, where he organized several exhibitions including NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith, Maurizio Cattelan, Steve Wolfe: On Paper and Contemporary Conversations: John Chamberlain.

Sirmans has written essays for several exhibition catalogues and articles and reviews in publications such as The New York Times, Time Out New York, Essence, and Grand Street. He is the cocurator of the forthcoming exhibition Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, (The Menil Collection and Los Angeles County Museum of Art), travels to LACMA, winter 2011.
He was the 2007 recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize awarded by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta and in 2009 was an inaugural honoree of the Gold Rush Awards by Rush Philanthropic Art Foundation.