Interview

William Wegman was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1943 and received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston and an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His work has been exhibited extensively in both the United States and abroad, including solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1982); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1988); Whitney Museum of American Art (1992); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2001); and The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2002). The retrospective “William Wegman: Funney/Strange” was held at the Brooklyn Museum, and traveled to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover; and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2006-07).

Since his first exhibition at Sperone Westwater in 1990, Wegman has exhibited regularly at the gallery (1992, 2003, 2006, 2012, 2016, 2017 and 2022). 

The book William Wegman: Writing by Artist was edited by Andrew Lampert and published in April 2022 by Primary Information. The first collection to focus on Wegman’s lengthy and deeply funny relationship to language, the book is filled with over 300 previously unknown and wildly entertaining texts, drawings, and early photographs spanning the early 1970s to the present. 

Vivienne Griffin (they/them) is an multi-disciplinary artist who uses sound, sculpture, drawing and text in various forms. Griffin works with the voice through digital post-processing and in a workshop format called Synthetic Voices. They work with sound alongside sculptures and installations. More recently they have used generative sound in videos of virtual worlds. Their current work looks at the opaque boundaries of human-computer relations; where does the mind end and the machine begin?

Born in Dublin, Ireland and living in London, Griffin studied fine art at Hunter City University New York supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. They completed one year DPhil in visual art at the Royal College of Art, where they are now a visiting lecturer. They moved their research to the Sonic Arts Research Center, Queen’s University, Belfast to pursue a PhD in Music with a focus on sound in an art context, noise, and the voice. Recent shows include Manchester International Festival, 2021, the AGM in Somerset House, 2021, for Montez Press Radio in NYC, Condo in London. They are represented by Bureau, in NYC. They won an Oram Award in 2021, they are a resident at Somerset House Studios, London.

Mercy from Vivienne Griffin on Vimeo.

Since the beginning of his artistic practice, Erik Lindman’s incorporation of anonymous found surfaces as compositional elements in painting has occupied a central place in his work.

Reinterpreting and repurposing cast-aside materials such as shards of steel or canvas webbing, he combines a variation of surfaces in a cascade of decisions with a focus on scale and negative space. Lindman lays down and builds up marks and gestures, ultimately articulating value and attention while asserting the materiality and tactile nature of each painterly composition. His topographical surfaces become the final result of what is buried beneath them, and upon closer inspection, layers of paint reveal further color and traces of discarded elements. As Lindman states, his practice and methods are the most efficient means he has discovered to create a space of reflection and contemplation for viewers to generate their own meanings. His practice with its inherent content and subject matter intends to add to the complex discourse of abstract painting for his own generation and time. Lindman pursues a new mediation of abstract traditions, both original and eclectic, while instilling subjective importance into his multifaceted process.

Erik Lindman (b. 1985, New York) lives and works in New York. He earned his BA from Columbia College, Columbia University in 2007 and received a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship in 2006. Lindman was honored at the Hirshhorn Museum’s Artist x Artist Gala in 2019. He has also received The Louis Sudler Prize for Excellence in the Arts from Columbia University in 2007, and has also received an Ellen B. Stoeckel Fellowship for Yale Norfolk School of Art in 2006. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Kunstalle in Freiburg, Switzerland, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, White Columns in New York, le 109 in Nice, France, Kaviar Factory in Henningsvær, Norway, and Foundation Hippocrène in Paris among others.

Erica Baum lives and works in New York. She is well known for her varied photographic series capturing text and image in found printed material, from paperback books to library indexes and sewing patterns. She received her MFA from Yale University in 1994 and her BA in Anthropology from Barnard in 1984.

Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Sparkassen Stiftung Collection, Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf; MAMCO, Geneva; Albright‐Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; FRAC Ile de France, Paris; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.