Rena Bransten Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in this year’s PULSE Miami Beach, with a focus on works from Dawoud Bey’s The Birmingham Project and Vik Muniz’ latest series Handmade. The Birmingham Project is a series of black and white photographs completed on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Birmingham Church Bombing in 1963. For this project, Bey photographed Birmingham inhabitants, pairing boys and girls at the age of the murdered children with men and women at the age those children would be today. The diptych format brings into sharp focus the impact of these historical events on past, present, and future generations. The entire series will be on view at Frost Art Museum in Miami January – March, 2018.
Dawoud Bey received a MFA from Yale University. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Walker Art Center, the National Portrait Gallery (London), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. In 1998, he joined the faculty of Columbia College Chicago, where he is currently a professor in the Department of Photography and a former Distinguished College Artist. He was award a 2017 MacArthur Genius Award.
Best known for recreating iconic art historical imagery using unexpected materials (chocolate, garbage, and dirt to name a few) Handmade continues Vik Muniz’ lifelong exploration of cognitive and perceptual analogies, emphasizes his interest in visual games, and celebrates his sense of play. Handmade marks a departure from previous series; these works contain both representations of objects and the objects themselves and the compositions nod to Op Art and geometric abstraction.
Vik Muniz’ work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally with recent solo exhibitions at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA and Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands. His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 2011 for his work with the catadores of Rio de Janeiro, on whom the 2010 documentary Waste Land was based. He recently opened Escola Vidigal, a school in the favela Vidigal in Rio de Janeiro, which offers preschool and afterschool programs in art, design, and technology in promotion of visual literacy for children ages 4-8. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
