Vivian Crockett

Published by New Museum. Edited by Vivian Crockett, Ian Wallace. Interview by Vivian Crockett.

Developing projects through collaborative community engagement and extensive archival research, Vietnamese artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen (born 1976) utilizes strategies of remembrance to highlight unofficial and suppressed histories. Interweaving fact and fiction and often employing mythologies of otherworldly realms, Nguyen reworks dominant narratives into stories that propose creative forms of healing the intergenerational traumas of colonialism, war and displacement.

Nguyen’s 2023 New Museum presentation is his first US solo museum exhibition, showcasing a new film and two recent video projects, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022) and The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), alongside works from the artist’s sculptural and object-based practice. Drawing together conceptual threads from across the Global South, Nguyen’s exhibition envisions inherited memory and testimony as forms of resistance and empowerment.

Co-curator and editor, catalogue accompanying Wangechi Mutu’s New Museum Survey (March - June 2023).

Wangechi Mutu’s multidisciplinary practice grapples with contemporary realities while proffering new models for a radically changed future informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis. Her work addresses some of today's most critical questions concerning historical violence and its impact on women, together with our inextricable ties toward one another, our ecosystems, and other life forms.

Accompanying a major solo exhibition at the New Museum, this expansive survey traces the entirety of Mutu’s influential career chronologically, from early sculptural works of the late 1990s to her collage works of the early 2000s and more recent video works, large-scale sculptures, and site-specific interventions.

Accompanying an exhibition at the New Museum―which focuses on projects that Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca filmed in Brazil over the past seven years, as well as a new commissioned piece featuring the theater group Coletivo Banzeiros―this volume includes a conversation between the artists and Margot Norton, as well as texts by Vivian Crockett, Bernardo Mosqueira and Wendelien van Oldenborgh.

Organizado pela curadora, escritora e pesquisadora Diane Lima, Negros na piscina: arte contemporânea, curadoria e educação é uma publicação que documenta o momento histórico do debate racial na arte brasileira ao longo dos últimos dez anos. A partir de contribuições ou aproximações acerca do pensamento curatorial, conta com mais de trinta vozes que, ao unir teoria e prática, antecipam estratégias e narram os desafios de produzir cultura no país.

TRANSLATION: Organized by curator, writer and researcher Diane Lima, Negros na Piscina is a publication that documents the historical moment of the racial debate in Brazilian art over the last ten years. Based on contributions and approaches to curatorial thinking, it features more than thirty voices that, by combining theory and practice, discuss strategies and narrate the challenges of producing culture in Brazil.

Contribution: “Estamos tentando não desistir." Conversation between Vivian Crockett and Igor Simões

Afro-Atlantic Histories brings together a selection of more than 400 works and documents by more than 200 artists from the 16th to the 21st centuries that express and analyze the ebbs and flows between Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe. This volume accompanies the U.S. tour of Afro-Atlantic Histories and is the second iteration of the original catalogue produced for the 2018 version of the exhibition, concurrently held at the Museu de arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) and the Instituto Tomie Ohtake. Additional information can be found here.

Hélio Oiticica: Dance in My Experience / Hélio Oiticica: a dança na minha experiência, Museu de arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), São Paulo

Publication accompanying a retrospective of the artist Hélio Oiticica through the framework of dance.

Essay: “War Heroes: Towards a Poethics of Blackness in Hélio Oiticica”

Essay: “Harlem is the Capital of Every Ghetto Town” - Tschabalala Self’s Harlem Scenes

Commissioned essay for the exhibition brochure accompanying MOOD: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2018-19, focusing on the work of Tschabalala Self. The brochure can be downloaded here.

As part of a multi-year partnership between The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1, the Studio Museum’s annual Artist-in-Residence exhibition, MOOD, will be on view at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City from June 9–September 8, 2019. 

MOOD explores site, place, and time as they relate to American identity and popular culture, past and present. Working across a range of media and materials, each artist manifests their perception of the present moment in the United States, while creating passageways to new worlds. MOOD maps out each artist’s psychic landscape, presenting distinct snapshots that travel through and beyond the fabric of digital culture.

Tschabalala Self’s new series, "Street Scenes," pays homage to the energy of the city, from the frenetic visual culture of bodegas to the communal experience of waiting at a bus stop. These large-scale printed, painted, and collage works create a cityscape that brings the vibrancy and energy of Harlem into focus. Growing up nearby and inspired by her return to Harlem through this residency, Self creates fictional figures rooted in daily rhythms and routines in and around the neighborhood.

Image: Tschabalala Self, Red Dog, 2019. Fabric, embroidered patch, newsprint, photo-transfer, gouache, acrylic, flashe and painted canvas on canvas, 96 x 84 in. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery, New York. Photo: Christopher Burke

Publication accompanying the first comprehensive U.S. retrospective of the work of Brazilian artist Lygia Pape (1927-2004), held at the Met Breuer branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York from March to July 2017.

Contribution: A comprehensive chronology of Pape’s personal life and career, along with key moments in Brazilian cultural, artistic and social political history from the 1920s to the early 2000s.

Publication in conjunction with the curatorial project ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS. Featuring an institutional statement from Visual AIDS, a curatorial statement from Vivian Crockett and Erin Christovale, an essay by the Tacoma Action Collective, and artist statements collected by the project curators with assistance from Alex Fialho. Edited by Erin Christovale, Vivian Crockett, and Alex Fialho. Designed by Theresa Chromati.

Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Publication accompanying an exhibition on Judson Dance Theater (Sept 2018 - Feb 2019), curated by Ana Janevski and Thomas J. Lax, with Martha Joseph, Department of Media and Performance Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

Contribution: Research and curatorial assistance, plus various texts on leading Judson artists and featured Concerts of Dance held at Judson Memorial Church. 

Preview the book & purchase here

Publication in conjunction with BOFFO NY’s 2018 Fire Island Residency Program. Interview with Kia LaBeija.

Publication following the recent exhibition commemorating the expansion of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York (Mar - May 2017). In Press. Available March 2019 from University of Chicago Press, in conjunction with Hirmer Publishers.

Featured Essay: Vivian A. Crockett, “Untitled (for those who are not named).” In Press.

“The collecting origins of the Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York—the only museum dedicated to preserving and fostering LGBTQ art—can be traced to 1969, when its founders hosted their first “homosexual art fair” in New York. Evolving from gallery to foundation to museum in five decades, Leslie-Lohman’s collection mirrors shifting histories of LGBTQ social movements in the United States, from the Stonewall riots to the AIDS epidemic, when the founders often rescued the work of dying artists from families who wanted to destroy it.
            This volume presents two hundred objects from the museum’s vast permanent collection, gathers texts that explore history, provenance, genre, and subject matter, and engages in critical conversations about gender and race in the museum’s collection. At once a wide-ranging survey of queer art and a critical glance at contemporary museum collecting practices, Queer Holdings plumbs an institution’s possible futures by revisiting the milestones of its activist past.”

Essay commissioned as part of the Critical Writing Program at Recess, accompanying Recess: Session, Camilo Godoy: Out of Control (November 6 – December 15, 2018).

A dual catalogue and archival exposé that explores the pivotal exhibition, Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art By Women, originally curated by the late artist, Ellen Cantor, in 1993, along with its re-staging in 2016 by curator Pati Hertling and artist Julie Tolentino.

The book also chronicles the unprecedented partnership amongst five New York City institutions. Exhibitions and programming of Cantor’s work were offered by 80WSWE, Maccarone, Foxy Productions, Participant Inc., Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Skowhegan School of Painting, and MoMA.

Featured Essay: Vivian A. Crockett, “Permission to be Amorphous: Reading for Queer of Color Desire”

Co-authored essay for The Queer Commons special issue of GLQ:A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 24.4, October 2018, Duke University Press.

“Sum of All Questions: Returning to the Clit Club.” Available on-line or in print.

The MRC Study Sessions are incubators for new ideas and approaches to key holdings in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. Study session participants include MoMA curators and conservators, the current class of MRC Fellows, faculty members and graduate students from each of the five university partners, and invited guest scholars.

MRC Dossier 4: Performance and The Museum (2017)

What are new ways to make the performative dimensions of artworks cogent and visible in museum displays? The 2017 Study Sessions drew on MoMA’s history of exhibiting and collecting "performance" and performance-related artworks—understood as a diverse range of actions, movements, gestures, and choreography occurring in real time, often later represented through various forms of video, photo, objects, or written documentation—and the broader concept of performativity within the museum context.

Contribution: “On Marta Minujín’s Kidnappening (1973)”

The MRC Study Sessions are incubators for new ideas and approaches to key holdings in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. Study session participants include MoMA curators and conservators, the current class of MRC Fellows, faculty members and graduate students from each of the five university partners, and invited guest scholars.

MRC Dossier 5: Selected Gifts from Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

In 2016, the Museum of Modern Art received a significant gift from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) of 102 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper made between the 1940s and the 1990s primarily by artists from Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The gift complemented a series of gifts given by the CPPC through MoMA’s Latin American and Caribbean Fund.

The 2018 Study Sessions examined how objects from the gifts might frame transnational and transmedia dialogues, emphasizing specific points of convergence and correspondence.

Contribution: “Hélio Oiticica, P16 Parangolé cape 12 “From Adversity We Live” (1965/1992)”

Publication published in conjunction with a solo exhibition of new work by Mev Luna, Far from the distance we see, presented at The Chicago Artists Coalition (on view from May 31 - July 11, 2019).

In line with the exhibition's use of obfuscation and knowledge obtained through non-linear forms, the publication reveals previously hidden works and features a [print] conversation between Vivian Crockett and Mev Luna that places these objects within the context of the show and broader art historical frameworks.

Produced by the Service Bureau at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, The FOLD is an editioned print series drawing from the wealth of Students, Faculty, Staff and Alumni within the SAIC community.

Publication in conjunction with Camilo Godoy’s residency at Coleção Moraes-Barbosa, São Paulo, Brazil. 2018.

Contribution: Interview with artist Carlos Martiel, in Spanish.

Preview of the forthcoming exhibition, Colored People Time (February 1–December 22), at the ICA-Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Curated by Meg Onli.

[Photo: Henrietta Lacks’s “HeLa” cells, date unknown. Photo: Dr. Torsten Wittman/National Institutes of Health/Getty Images.]

Essay in response to Julie Tolentino / Abigail Severance’s video work, evidence, commissioned for Visual AIDS’ 25th Day With(out) Art, December 2014.

Essay accompanying Seung-Min Lee’s print publications, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, 2018.

[Image: Seung-Min Lee, Carnivalore, Silkscreen and Chine Collé, 2018]

Published Roundtable Discussion, Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, Issue 9: Networks, 2016

This roundtable discussion takes up the recent proliferation of exhibitions at prominent Western museums purporting to offer global or transnational perspectives on modernist and avant-garde art. Why are these exhibitions taking place now? What art historical methodologies and curatorial strategies have they relied on? Do they differ from previous attempts to “decolonize” the canon? And what is at stake in “globalizing” Western art historical categories like Pop or Conceptualism?