Homecoming: Katherine Behar, Oliver Herring, Julia Jacquette, Yashua Klos
Organized by Sarah Watson with Jenn Bratovich
April 8–May 7, 2017
Leubsdorf Gallery
Hunter West Building
132 East 68th Street
New York, NY 10065
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 1–6pm
The Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to announce Homecoming, an exhibition of four Hunter Studio Art MFA alumni: Katherine Behar (MFA 2009), Oliver Herring (MFA 1991), Julia Jacquette (MFA 1992) and Yashua Klos (MFA 2009). The exhibition, scheduled to open in conjunction with Hunter college-wide Alumni Reunion on Saturday, April 8, 2017, will be on view through Sunday, May 7, 2017. The exhibition marks the inauguration of a new initiative, also entitled “Homecoming,” developed in collaboration with the MFA Student Organization, and designed to foster connections between current Hunter MFA students and Hunter MFA alumni in a variety of ways, including an annual exhibition in the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery. This year’s inaugural Homecoming exhibition offers the opportunity to highlight the work of just some of Hunter’s internationally recognized alumni artists, allowing our current students to gain a greater understanding of their practice in advance of the visits, interviews, lectures, and tours that are part of the broader initiative. During this exhibition, the gallery will also collaborate with the alumni artists to organize undergraduate-specific programming.
Homecoming artists: the inaugural year includes the artists Katherine Behar (MFA 2009), Oliver Herring (MFA 1991), Julia Jacquette (MFA 1992) and Yashua Klos (MFA 2009).
Exhibitions in the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery are made possible by the generous support of the Leubsdorf Fund, the David Bershad Family Foundation, the Susan V. Bershad Charitable Fund, Inc., Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg, and Joan and Charles Lazarus.
Katherine Behar (Hunter MFA 2009) explores issues of gender and labor in contemporary digital culture. Her work has been presented at festivals, galleries, and performance spaces throughout North America and Europe. Her survey exhibition and catalog Katherine Behar: Data's Entry | Veri Girişi was presented at the Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2016. A previous solo exhibition and catalog, Katherine Behar: E-Waste, premiered at the University of Kentucky in 2014 and traveled to Boston Cyberarts Gallery, MA. Since 2005 she has collaborated with Marianne M. Kim in the performance art duo Disorientalism. Behar is the editor of Object-Oriented Feminism, published by University of Minnesota Press in 2016. Her publications And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art, coedited with Emmy Mikelson, and Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity were published by punctum books the same year.
She has received fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Colony, the Rubin Museum of Art, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and others. Behar holds an MFA in combined media from Hunter College, an MA in media ecology from New York University, and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is based in New York and is Assistant Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College, CUNY.
Oliver Herring (Hunter MFA 1991) received a BFA from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford, UK and an MFA from Hunter College. Throughout the 1990s, Herring became known for hand-knit Mylar and tape sculptures. Inspired by the death of playwright and drag performer Ethyl Eichelberger, the project lasted ten years, and revolved around marking time through the accumulation of incremental stitched units. In the late 1990s his practice expanded to include improvised stop-motion videos and performances that at first involved friends and eventually strangers on the street. These interactive works were counterpoints to the more stationary and solitary work practice of knitting. A few years later Herring began using volunteers and photography to create elaborately constructed fragmented three-dimensional photo sculptures. Much of his recent work involves human interaction, progressing towards unexpected and/or unpredictable finales.
In 2002, Herring created the improvisatory art event TASK, an ongoing series of events, workshops and parties in which participants of all ages and demographics collectively dream up instructions and carry them out with the materials provided. Increasingly, TASK has become a tool in classrooms and communities to access contemporary art in ways that are experimental, open-ended, and accessible to anyone.
Herring’s work has been exhibited widely. In the United States, his work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Performa 09, New York; the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; The Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; the Blanton Art Museum, Austin, TX; and the Denver Art Museum, CO. Elsewhere, he has exhibited at the Camden Art Center, London, UK; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; The Kyoto Art Center, Japan; the 10th Lyon Biennale, France; Configura II, Erfurt, Germany; and the 2010 Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, Japan. Me Us Them, a fifteen-year survey of Herring's work, was organized in 2009 at the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY.
Julia Jacquette (Hunter MFA 1992) is an American artist based in New York City and Amsterdam. Her work has been shown extensively at galleries and museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and the RISD Museum, Providence, RI, among other institutions. Jacquette’s work was included in the first installment of MoMA PS1's Greater New York exhibition, and was the subject of a retrospective at the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and Princeton University, and is currently on the faculty at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. Jacquette’s work is currently the subject of a major museum retrospective at the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY. Unrequited and Acts of Play comprises paintings, site-specific murals, and a series of gouache drawings.
Yashua Klos (Hunter MFA 2009) was born in 1977 in Chicago, IL. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Klos obtained an MFA at Hunter College, and a BFA at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL. He was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts grant in 2015 and the Joan Mitchell Award in 2014.
Klos’s solo shows include Blank Black, Galerie Anne De Villepoix Paris, FR, 2016; How To Hide in the Wind, Papillion Art, Los Angeles, CA (2016); As Below, So Above, Jack Tilton Gallery, New York (2015); and We Come Undone, Jack Tilton Gallery, New York (2013). Other recent group shows include: Imagine, Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy (2016); Broken English, Tyburn Gallery, London, UK (2015); To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, curated by Hank Willis Thomas, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2015); In Plain Sight, Opa Locka ARC, Florida (2014); Draw 2014 Symposium, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA (2014); and Fore, Studio Museum Harlem in Harlem, New York (2012). Klos has participated in the residency programs at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, TV; and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME.
