Lee Ann Norman
Lee Ann Norman is a writer and editor based in New York City.
In Conversation
Baseera Khan with Lee Ann Norman
Baseera Khan works across media from painting and photography to installation, performance, and sculpture to explore the tensions inherent in living in a capitalist society. Through explorations of material—including their own body—Khan makes plain how notions of economy, labor, goods and services, and art itself often serve as rich sites for exploring our accumulated histories, experiences, and individual and collective traumas. Their current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum invites us to imagine alternate sites that allow us to refuse empire and resist domination, so we might discover a feeling of liberation instead of exploitation.
In Conversation
Adriana Varejão with Lee Ann Norman
Lee Ann Norman speaks with Adriana Varejão about her career, artistic influences, and her relationship to the azulejo.
In Conversation
Christina Quarles with Lee Ann Norman
Christina Quarles’s work revels in spaces filled with sensuous ambiguity and disorienting complexity. She complicates the figure through abstract gestures and patterns, forcing a longer look when reading her visual language. For Quarles, identity is three-dimensional, comprising what is seen, heard, and felt. Often in her paintings a mess of limbs, torsos, breasts, and buttocks meld and morph into and around each other, resulting in the feeling of stumbling upon someone’s private moments.
Gordon Matta-Clark & Pope.L: Impossible Failures
By Lee Ann NormanIn Impossible Failures, director Ebony L. Haynes focuses on works by Gordon Matta-Clark and Pope.L that explore the social conditions of space and how creative experimentation might help us to dream of a world that can hold the tension inherent in such social relationships.
Barkley L. Hendricks: In the Paint
By Lee Ann NormanThough a small selection of works, In the Paint aptly demonstrates the foundation for Hendricks’s explorations of aesthetic sensibility and racial identity that would predominate his decades-long career.
Ellie Ga’s Square Octagon Circle
By Lee Ann NormanFrom classifying sidewalk stains to the story of a beachcomber finding a bottled message at sea, Ga focuses our attention on the ambiguity and indeterminacy of exploration, and the human desire to rationalize and order the world.
Paul Gauguin's Intimate Journals
By Lee Ann NormanIn his final days, post-impressionist artist Paul Gauguin undertook one last significant endeavor: to reflect on his life through personal journals, to be published only after his death.
Accra Shepp’s Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice
By Lee Ann NormanThe book brings together photographic portraits of people protesting in Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement in Lower Manhattan in 2011 and the racial justice protests across New York City throughout the summer of 2020, filling critical gaps in the narrative around the haves and have-nots.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Photostats
By Lee Ann NormanMade as the AIDS crisis in the United States was at its peak, the photostats—a series of fixed works with white serif text on black fields that are framed behind glass—reflect the contradictions inherent within human beings; a timeless social commentary on the difficult and ongoing work that lies ahead to create a more just world.
Pacifico Silano’s I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine
By Lee Ann NormanA 22-panel accordion book, images of fragmented bodies and reframed scenes ground then disorient us in a past that is elusive yet somehow familiar and within reach. The title references a song by the 1960s girl group the Ronettes, and continues the artist’s exploration of loss, loneliness, theatricality, and queer melancholy.
Aldrin Valdez’s ESL or You Weren’t Here
By Lee Ann NormanIn their debut collection of poems, Pinoy writer and visual artist Aldrin Valdez conjures a constellation of identity through the remnants. Memories, photographs, letters, transcriptions, artworks, and pop culture references cleave to reconcile the joy and trauma inherent in a duplicitous, multi-hyphenate world.
A.I.R. Gallery
By Lee Ann NormanArtists in Residence Gallery (A.I.R.) emerged during a worldwide political and social awakening, when all kinds of people were demanding their rights to equal access to resources. Its seeds were planted in the 1960s, as empires fell and globally, people sought to assert their own values, eschewing those of capitalists, colonizers, and imperialists in nearly every aspect of society, including art and culture.
