Arsenal Contemporary Art

Arsenal Contemporary NY is pleased to present a conversation between Suzy Lake and Laurie Simmons in conjunction with Performance of Protest, Lake’s first solo exhibition in NY. Performance of Protest follows Lake’s five-decade spanning career, capturing her continued investigation of her own image as a means to probe and resist constructions of gender, identity and beauty. Beginning in the late 1960’s, Lake has documented herself while investigating the female body’s relation to larger social forces. The conversation will begin at 7pm on Wednesday December 11th at Arsenal Contemporary NY, located at 214 Bowery. The event is free and open to the public, though RSVP is encouraged.

Suzy Lake was born in Detroit, Michigan and is based in Toronto, Canada. Exhibitions of her work have included: WACK! Art and Feminist Revolution 1965 – 1980, LACMA, Los Angeles 2010-13; Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980, the Art Gallery of Alberta, 2010-13; The Pictures Generation, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and, Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avantgarde in the 1970s, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, 2012. In 2014, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) presented Introducing Suzy Lake, a large-scale retrospective exhibition and major publication. Still touring, Lake is part of The Feminist Avant-garde of the 1970s: Works from the SAMMLUNG VERBUND, Vienna, curated by Gabriele Schor, which opened in 2010 at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy. In 2016, Lake was awarded a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and was the winner of the Scotiabank Photography Award which included a solo exhibition at the Ryerson Imaging Centre and a publication by Steidl. Her work is represented in the collections of numerous institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, USA; the National Gallery of Canada; the Art Gallery of Ontario; and, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

Laurie Simmons has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Long Island City; Artists Space, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Baltimore Museum of Art; San Jose Museum of Art; Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden; Neues Museum, Nuremberg, Germany; The Jewish Museum, New York; and Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. Her work has been featured at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich; New Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and many others. Simmons's retrospective originated in 2018 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in early 2019. Her feature film, ‘My Art’, premiered at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival and had a North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.  

RSVP: lfrancdeferriere@arsenalcontemporary.com