Deborah Goodman Davis and Gerald Davis Lecture: Kevin Beasley

The Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago is excited to announce our 2022 Deborah Goodman Davis and Gerald Davis Lecture Series speaker Kevin Beasley.

Established in 2018, through the generosity of Deborah Goodman Davis, the Deborah Goodman Davis and Gerald Davis Lecture Series brings vibrant voices to the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts and the greater university community.

*This event is free and open to the public. For any additional assistance please contact Zespo at: zespouniversity [​at​] uchicago.edu.

About the artist
Kevin Beasley (b. 1985, Lynchburg, VA) lives and works in New York. His practice spans sculpture, photography, sound, and performance, while centering on materials of cultural and personal significance, from raw cotton harvested from his family’s property in Virginia to sounds gathered using contact microphones. Beasley alters, casts, and molds these diverse materials to form a body of works that acknowledge the complex, shared histories of the broader American experience, steeped in generational memories. A selection of recent exhibitions and performances include Fear of Property currently on view at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; A body, revealed, Hill Art Foundation, New York (2022); Prospect.5, New Orleans (2021) for which Beasley realized a multiyear site-specific project in the Lower Ninth Ward; a series of outdoor performances for the Performa 2021 Biennial, New York; The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture and the Sonic Impulse, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2021); Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America at New Museum, New York (2021); a month-long residency and solo exhibition at A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa (2020); and ASSEMBLY, co-organized by Kevin Beasley, Lumi Tan, Tim Griffin, and Nicole Kaack at The Kitchen, New York (2019). In 2018–19, Beasley transformed the eighth floor of The Whitney Museum of American Art for his first solo exhibition in New York, A view of a landscape, in conjunction with a series of performances. Other past exhibitions include Kevin Beasley, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2018); Hammer Projects: Kevin Beasley (2017), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; inHarlem: Kevin Beasley, The Studio Museum in Harlem (2016); and Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015). Beasley’s work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Guggenheim Museum; Dallas Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Tate, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; ICA Boston; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Hammer Museum; Whitney Museum of American Art, and others.