Please join us next week at 601Artspace for a special event featuring artists Joseph Liatela and Zachary Fabri in conversation with Sara Reisman, the curator of our current exhibition, Two Grains of Wheat:

On Presence

Saturday, June 17th at 5pm
601Artspace, 88 Eldridge Street, NYC

On Presence is a conversation between Zachary Fabri and Joseph Liatela, whose performance-based projects are featured in Two Grains of Wheat. Each artist engages movement as a form of social repair, and each works with shared spaces as sites where collective memory, absence, grief, and movement inform how we understand ourselves and one another. In To Move is to Remember (2022), Liatela’s devotional objects and prints allude to the spiritual aspects of club culture. Fabri's performance in Mourning Stutter (2017/2022) is a revelatory expression of Blackness within the built environment. In a discussion with curator Sara Reisman, Liatela and Fabri will address the motivations for creating their respective projects, both of which demonstrate the importance of holding space for both grief and joy in times of loss and upheaval.

Bios:

Zachary Fabri is a Brooklyn based interdisciplinary artist engaged in lens-based media and public space. He works across video, drawing, and installation, often complicating the boundaries of studio research and performance. He is the recipient of awards that include The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and the BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize. Fabri’s work has been exhibited at Art in General, The Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, The Walker Art Center, The Brooklyn Museum, Performa, and the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, Hungary. Collaborative projects include the Museum of Modern Art, the Sharjah Biennial, and Pace gallery. Recent solo exhibitions include CUE Art Foundation, The Korn gallery at Drew University, and The Nicholson Project. Currently, Zachary Fabri is the recipient of the 2024 Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome.

Joseph Liatela is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. He is interested in how spaces of gathering shape how we perceive ourselves and one another, how bodies hold and transmute histories, and how absence, loss, and possibility intersect. Using performance, sculpture, and video, he makes work that examines issues of collective movement, trans and queer subjectivities, memorial, and biopolitics. Liatela has a BFA with distinction from California College of the Arts and an MFA in Sculpture from Columbia University. He has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, The Banﬀ Centre, Columbia University, Artist Grant, the Van Lier Fellowship, among others. Recent and upcoming shows include group exhibitions at 601 Artspace, Marian Goodman Gallery, and a solo museum exhibition at George Segal Galleries at Montclair State University. He is currently an artist in residence at Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY).

Images, left to right: Still from Zachary Fabri's Mourning Stutter, 2017-2022, single channel video with sound. Detail from Joseph Liatela's Untitled (For Pulse) Series, 2022 & 2023, lily pollen and pigment on granite tile.