Two award-winning artists will be at tbe Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock next month.
Theaster Gates and Nari Ward will be featured in an event at 6 p.m. on Nov. 7 in the museum’s Performing Arts Theater. Tickets are free to the public, with registration recommended on the museum’s website. Museum members and corporate partners are invited to a pre-event Member Mingle event to learn more about the artists.
The museum’s annual “Undivided” talk series pairs contemporary artists together to interview each other, offering audiences a look into the minds of working artists and the ideas that fuel their practices.
Both Gates and Ward see art as a tool for social change, using discarded and repurposed objects in innovative ways to confront issues ranging from value to spiritualism, according to the museum.
Gates, an Artes Mundi 6 prize winner and a recipient of the Légion d’Honneur, has exhibited and performed around the world and is perhaps most widely known for his non-profit Rebuild Foundation (originally called Dorchester Projects). Beginning with a single-family home in 2009, Gates has revived nearly 40 abandoned buildings in a distressed Chicago neighborhood to create artist studios, gallery spaces and affordable housing, the museum said in a news release.
Ward’s most iconic works, Amazing Grace, was produced as part of his 1993 residency at The Studio Museum in Harlem in response to the AIDS crisis and drug epidemic of the early 1990s. The large-scale installation — fire hoses and nearly 300 baby strollers — has since been recreated at the New Museum’s Studio 231 series in 2013, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2019 and in several locations across Europe.
Gates and Ward will join incoming museum Artists-in-Residence Dongyi Wu and Katherine Brimberry in the fall programming lineup of artist-led talks and workshops.
The Artists-in-Residence program at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts supports emerging and established artists by providing studio space, access to the museum Foundation Collection, and experiential interactions with Windgate Art School faculty, local students and museum guests.
Wu is hosting two fashion jewelry workshops at the museum: one for adults on Nov. 9 and a second for teenagers on Nov. 10. Advance registration is required.
Brimberry, co-founder of Flatbed Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Austin, Texas, is leading an intaglio printmaking workshop for adults on Nov. 17 at 1 p.m. Advance registration is required.
The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Circle Society members, Collectors Group members and corporate partners can meet Brimberry and be the first to shop an exclusive selection of contemporary art prints by Flatbed Press artists on Nov. 14, from 6 to 7 p.m. Public sales will occur in the museum’s Amerine/Calhoun Glass Box on Nov. 16, from 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Undivided: Theaster Gates/Nari Ward is supported by the Alice L. Walton Foundation.
The Artists-in-Residence program is supported by the John and Robyn Horn Foundation.
