February 18, 2021
7 PM EST
Recognizing what we want to say and how we want to say it is an age old struggle for artists. And we are often wearing a blazer when the time comes to share. How do we demystify the nature of making art? How often do we pull the curtain, shed the blazer, and make public the mess we make while wading in the deep? Eileen Rae Walsh and Efrem Zelony-Mindell are questioners of how art sits in the world. Homecoming can be woven into the fabric of an art practice. How, or more significantly why, we push against things to find our own success is something that lurks in the conversations between these two artists. They are interested in challenging what an artist is: a facilitator, a community organizer, a recognizer. Practicing community in reaction to the self, in reaction to the home, is where Walsh and Zelony-Mindell will start their conversation. Weary and tired of the way the world uses artists to fill holes, the dialog they desire in this space is fluid, expanding, and critical.
Efrem Zelony-Mindell (they/them) is a white non-binaray curator, writer, and artist. Some of their curatorial endeavors include group shows: n e w f l e s h, Are You Loathsome, and This Is Not Here. They have written about art for FOAM, Unseen, DEAR DAVE, Rocket Science Magazine, SPOT, and essays for artists’ monographs. Their first book n e w f l e s h, published by Gnomic Book and shortlisted for the Paris Photo Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award 2020, is available now and is in the collections at MoMA, The MET, the Whitney Museum of American Art, TATE, Art Institute of Chicago, and 35 other libraries and archives around the world. Efrem is currently working on their second book, Primal Sight, due early 2021. They work, write, lecture, and live in New York.
Eileen Rae Walsh b. 1990 (she, they) is an artist currently living on Powhatan Land in Richmond, VA. She received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago and currently teaches in the Photography + Film department at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Slow Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, The Chicago Underground Film Festival, & Iceberg Projects (Chicago, IL), at The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), Union Gallery (Milwaukee, WI), and Re: Art Show 21 (Brooklyn, NY).
Support for Thursday Night Photo Talks is provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Artist fees for the Thursday Night Photo Talks have been underwritten by The Lillian F. and Jerome L. Sindler Fund for Visual Media.
