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Claremont, Calif., January 16, 2019—The ɫ��ɫ Museum of Art (PCMA) is delighted to announce that it is the recipient of a prestigious grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The $50,000 award will support the Museum’s fall 2019 exhibition, “Todd Gray: Euclidean Gris Gris” and the accompanying program series curated by Dr. Nana Adusei-Poku, “Longing on a Large Scale.” The exhibition will be on view from September 3, 2019 to May 17, 2020. This is the first time ɫ��ɫ has received a program award from the Warhol Foundation, which is a pre-eminent national funder of innovative contemporary art.

The Andy Warhol Foundation awards grants for scholarly exhibitions at museums, curatorial research, visual arts programming at artist-centered organizations, artist residencies and commissions, arts writing, and efforts to promote the health, welfare and first amendment rights of artists. ɫ��ɫ is one of 42 recipients selected from a pool of 273 nonprofit organizations.

“It is an incredible honor to be the recipient of a Warhol Foundation grant,” noted Kathleen Howe, director of the ɫ��ɫ Museum of Art. “The Todd Gray exhibition and related programming are well-suited to our mission as an academic museum, committed to the art of our time and the compelling issues addressed by this artist,” says Howe.

“This is a perfect moment to showcase Todd Gray’s new photographic work,” says McGrew, PCMA senior curator. “The related series conceived by Adusei-Poku aligns Gray’s extraordinary art with our ongoing commitment to engaging our communities with powerful and creative programs.”

ABOUT THE PROJECT

The project—exhibition, programming, and publication—activates the ɫ��ɫ Museum of Art’s largest gallery throughout the 2019/2020 academic year. The exhibition, “Todd Gray: Euclidean Gris Gris,” consists of a site-specific wall drawing and an evolving selection of photographs from Gray’s ongoing artistic examination of the legacies of colonialism in Africa and Europe. A series of monthly programs, “Longing on a Large Scale,” expands the scope of the project. Both are documented in a publication.

Serving as a year-long artist residency, Gray’s project opens the space of his exhibition to introduce other artistic and creative voices. Inspired by Gray’s work, Dr. Nana Adusei-Poku, visiting professor in Art History of the African Diaspora at Cooper Union, New York, is curating the “Longing on a Large Scale” programming. The nine monthly events originate from Gray’s techniques of deconstructing images, rupturing the body/mind and nature/culture binaries, and examining the intimacies of Black sociality. Gray’s work provides the catalyst for the series which explores contemporary creative, social, and artistic issues, including the possibilities of Black Liberation, the relationship between institutional politics and systemic exclusion, and the tension between performativity and performance in relationship to race and gender. “Longing on a Large Scale” invites artists, poets, activists, and thinkers to unpack colonial paradigms and explore strategies of resistance.

Los Angeles-based artist Gray is known for photography, performance, and sculptural works that explore contemporary and historical examinations of power in relationship to the African Diaspora. His work consists primarily of photographs from his own archive juxtaposed with one another, and mounted within found frames as a structuring device. In recent installations, he pairs images of Michael Jackson (Gray was Jackson’s photographer in the 1980s) with photographs of rural scenes in Ghana (where Gray maintains a studio) and formal gardens in Europe.

The exhibition is curated by Rebecca McGrew and is accompanied by a publication designed by Tommy Gear. It includes an introduction by McGrew, new essays by Dr. Nana Adusei-Poku and Dr. Neelika Jayawardane, and other texts.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Todd Gray (b. 1954, Los Angeles) received both his BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Gray’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions internationally. Most recently, in 2018, his work was included in the major group exhibition “Michael Jackson: On the Wall” at London’s National Portrait Gallery, which travels in 2019 to the Grand Palais, Paris; the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; and the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland; and “Public Fiction: The Conscientious Objector” at the MAK Center for Art & Architecture in Los Angeles, where he directed a new durational performance. In 2017, Gray had two solo exhibitions: “My Life in the Bush with MJ and Iggy” at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco and “Pluralities of Being” at Gallery Momo in Johannesburg, South Africa. Gray has presented performance works at the Roy & Edna Disney Cal/Arts Theater, REDCAT, and as part of the 2016 Hammer Museum biennial exhibition “Made in LA: a, the, though, only” in Los Angeles. He is a 2018 John S. Guggenheim Fellow.

ABOUT THE WARHOL FOUNDATION

In accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, the mission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is the advancement of the visual arts. The Foundation manages an innovative and flexible grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogues raissonné projects. To date, the Foundation has given over $200 million in cash grants to over 1,000 arts organizations in 49 states and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide.

ABOUT THE ɫ��ɫ MUSEUM OF ART

The ɫ��ɫ Museum of Art, in Claremont, California, is the primary visual art facility of ɫ��ɫ. By presenting contemporary and historic works of art for exhibition and study, and placing those works in context, the museum engages, instructs and delights visitors from a range of audiences. For more information, call (909) 621-8283 or visit .