Talk | Will Rawls in Conversation with Taylor Renee Aldridge

About the Event

Join us for a talk between On Stage: Frictions artist Will Rawls and the current curator of the California African American Museum, Taylor Renee Aldridge, for a wide-ranging conversation on Rawls’s practice, including his current project with the MCA [siccer].

About the Speakers

Will Rawls is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses choreography, dance, video, sculpture, works on paper, and installation. Rawls is best known for his choreographic work that employs repetition to explore the limits of language and gesture as tools for staging performances of Black presence and becoming. Rawls created a solo exhibition for Adams + Ollman Gallery (2022), as well as a multipart installation at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle titled Everlasting Stranger (2021). He has presented work at the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, Performa 15, Danspace Project, The Chocolate Factory Theater, High Line Art, REDCAT, the 10th Berlin Biennale, and the Hessel Museum at Bard College. He has received fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Alpert Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Mellon Foundation, United States Artists, the Rauschenberg Foundation, Creative Capital, New England Foundation for the Arts, National Performance Network, MAP Fund, the MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Movement Research. Rawls recently joined UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance as an Associate Professor of Choreography. In 2016 Rawls cocurated Lost and Found, six weeks of performances at Danspace Project that addressed the intergenerational impact of HIV/AIDS. His writing has been published by the Hammer Museum, MoMA, Museu de Arte de São Paolo, and in publications including the journal Dancing While Black, Brooklyn Rail, and Artforum.

Curator and writer Taylor Renee Aldridge joined the California African American Museum (CAAM) in August 2020. Her first project at CAAM was Enunciated Life, a contemporary art exhibition in which Black spiritual beliefs—as well as the movements, sounds, and other bodily expressions that have engendered communication within and beyond Black churches—operate as a point of departure for considering modes of surrender. Aldridge has organized critically acclaimed exhibitions with the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Artists Market, Cranbrook Art Museum, and The Luminary (St. Louis). In 2015, along with art critic Jessica Lynne, she co-founded ARTS.BLACK, an influential journal of art criticism for Black perspectives. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, The Art Newspaper, Art21, ARTNews, Canadian Art, Contemporary And, Detroit Metro Times, Hyperallergic, and SFMOMA’s Open Space. She is the recipient of the 2016 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short Form Writing and the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for Art Journalism. She holds an MLA from Harvard University with a concentration in Museum Studies and a BA from Howard University with a concentration in Art History.