Events
Lecture
New York Studio School Evening Lecture Series
Nathaniel Mary Quinn: Work Ethic and Faith
Tuesday, March 12, 2024, 6:30pm
New York Studio School
nyss.org
Nathaniel Mary Quinn will be a guest speaker at the New York Studio School as part of their Evening Lecture Series, a platform for diverse perspectives and spirited conversations among artists, scholars, students, and the general public. The in-person and online event is free to attend and will include a question-and-answer session.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Photo: Ike Edeani
In Conversation
The Un-Private Collection
Nathaniel Mary Quinn and Donna Augustin-Quinn
Saturday, November 20, 2021, 2pm
The Broad, Los Angeles
www.thebroad.org
As part of the Un-Private Collection, an ongoing series of public programs organized by the Broad, Los Angeles, Nathaniel Mary Quinn will be joined by actress, director, writer, and producer Donna Augustin-Quinn. The pair will discuss Quinn’s work in the Broad’s collection, as well as the artist’s practice at large. The talk is being held in conjunction with the exhibition Since Unveiling: Selected Acquisitions of a Decade, on view at the Broad through April 3, 2022. To attend the event, purchase tickets at ticketing.thebroad.org.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Photo: Kyle Dorosz
Support
Show Me the Signs
November 10–30, 2020
Show Me the Signs is an online benefit auction hosted by Artfizz to support the families of Black women killed by the police. Over a hundred artists have created pieces in the form of protest signs for the auction, with 100 percent of the proceeds going to the African American Policy Forum’s #SayHerName Mothers Network. Work by Louise Bonnet, Piero Golia, Meleko Mokgosi, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Nancy Rubins is included. To register to bid, visit artfizz.com.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Breonna Taylor, 2020 © Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Support
Cecily Brown, Giuseppe Penone, and Nathaniel Mary Quinn in
100 Drawings from Now
October 7, 2020–January 17, 2021
Drawing Center, New York
drawingcenter.org
The benefit exhibition 100 Drawings from Now features drawings made by an international group of artists since early 2020, providing a snapshot of artistic production during the period of profound global unrest that has resulted from the ongoing health and economic crises, as well as the surge of activism in response to systemic racism, social injustice, and police brutality in the United States. Together, the donated works spotlight the urgency, intimacy, and universality of drawing during moments of upheaval and isolation. Proceeds from the sales will support the Drawing Center and the artists. Work by Cecily Brown, Giuseppe Penone, and Nathaniel Mary Quinn is included.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Treasure Hunt #2, 2020 © Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Tour
Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Hollow and Cut
Saturday, September 14, 2019, 1pm
Gagosian, Beverly Hills
Gagosian director Ashley Stewart will lead a tour of the exhibition Nathaniel Mary Quinn: Hollow and Cut at Gagosian, Beverly Hills. The show features new composite portraits by the artist that explore the relationship between perception and memory. The paintings and works on paper probe deeply embedded experiences and emotions that are not often discussed in public by illuminating the subconscious aspects of the human psyche. To attend the free event, RSVP to bhtours@gagosian.com. Space is limited.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, How Come Not Me, 2019 © Nathaniel Mary Quinn
In Conversation
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Eric N. Mack, Lorraine O’Grady
Thursday, May 30, 2019, 7–9pm
Brooklyn Museum, New York
brooklynmuseum.org
In a series of rapid-fire talks with Brooklyn Museum curators, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Eric N. Mack, and Lorraine O’Grady will discuss their unique artistic practices, historical inspirations, and how their work expands the Western art-historical canon. The discussion is titled “Breaking the Canon.” To attend the event, purchase tickets at www.brooklynmuseum.org.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Big Rabbit, Little Rabbit, 2017 © Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Announcements
Video
Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Dominique Clayton
Nathaniel Mary Quinn speaks with Dominique Clayton from the Broad, Los Angeles, about his approach to figuration and the central role that empathy and vulnerability play within his studio practice. He discusses how social distancing has reinforced his perspective on the important role of art and explains how the writings of Henry David Thoreau, which he has been reading while practicing social distancing, have inspired him.
Photo: Kyle Dorosz
New Representation
Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Gagosian is pleased to announce the representation of Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Collecting imagery that he tears, cuts, and overlaps on the walls of his studio, Quinn uses oil paint, charcoal, gouache, oil stick, and pastels to render facial features and details from sources both personal and found, covering parts of the canvas as he goes. Fragments of images taken from online searches, fashion magazines, and family photographs come together to form hybrid faces and figures that are at once neo-Dada and adamantly realist, evoking the intimacy and intensity of a face-to-face encounter with an alien other. By adapting the medium of collage and translating it into cohesive two-dimensionality, Quinn suggests that multiplicity is a perennial rather than fleeting state.
Download the full press release (PDF)
Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Photo: Kyle Dorosz
Honor
Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Nathaniel Mary Quinn will be honored at the Drawing Center Annual Benefit Gala on April 24, 2019 in New York.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Photo: Kyle Dorosz
Museum Exhibitions
Opening this Week
Revolutions
Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960
March 22, 2024–April 20, 2025
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
hirshhorn.si.edu
Revolutions is a major survey of 270 artworks by 126 artists from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s permanent collection. Celebrating the museum’s fiftieth anniversary, the exhibition aims to capture the shifting cultural landscapes of a century defined by new currents in science and philosophy and ever-increasing mechanization. Shown alongside these historic works are contributions from nineteen contemporary artists whose practices demonstrate how many revolutionary ideas from a hundred years ago remain critical today. Work by Francis Bacon, Amoako Boafo, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Rick Lowe, Sally Mann, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Cy Twombly is included.
Rick Lowe, Fire #4: This Time Athens, 2023, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC © Rick Lowe Studio
On View
El eco de Picasso
Through March 31, 2024
Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain
museopicassomalaga.org
Organized as part of Picasso Celebration 1973–2023, a series of international exhibitions and events commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, The Echo of Picasso focuses on his influence on twentieth-century art. The exhibition places Picasso’s practice in dialogue with work by more than fifty artists, including Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willem de Kooning, Thomas Houseago, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Cy Twombly, Tom Wesselmann, and Franz West.
Installation view, El eco de Picasso, Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain, October 2, 2023–March 31, 2024. Artwork, left to right: © Rebecca Warren, © Richard Prince. Photo: Pablo Asenjo, courtesy Museo Picasso Málaga
On View
The Time Is Always Now
Artists Reframe the Black Figure
Through May 19, 2024
National Portrait Gallery, London
www.npg.org.uk
The Time Is Always Now showcases the work of contemporary artists from the African diaspora and highlights their use of figures to illuminate the richness and complexity of Black life. The exhibition examines both the presence and the absence of Black figures in Western art history and the social, psychological, and cultural contexts in which they were produced. Work by Titus Kaphar and Nathaniel Mary Quinn is included.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Father Stretch My Hands, 2021 © Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Photo: Rob McKeever
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Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Split Face
October 7, 2023–March 11, 2024
Museo Novecento and Museo Stefano Bardini, Florence, Italy
www.museonovecento.it
Split Face is Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s first monographic exhibition in Italy and is held across two locations in Florence: Museo Novecento and Museo Stefano Bardini. A selection of Quinn’s paintings, many of which have never been seen before, is presented alongside the works of Renaissance artists and twentieth-century masters including Donatello, Luca della Robbia, Felice Casorati, Virgilio Guidi, Carlo Levi, and many others.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, After Pontormo’s Portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici, 2023 © Nathaniel Mary Quinn
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Ecstatic
Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection
June 10–August 27, 2023
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
hammer.ucla.edu
Presented in conjunction with the unveiling of the Hammer’s building expansion, Ecstatic highlights acquisitions made since 2005—the year the institution began collecting contemporary art. The exhibition is organized around two distinct installations of sculpture and works on paper that emphasize the role each medium plays within the scope of the museum’s collection. Work by Mark Grotjahn, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Jim Shaw is included.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Someday, 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles © Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Photo: Jeff McLane
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Black American Portraits
February 8–June 30, 2023
Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta
museum.spelman.edu
Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, guest curated by David Driskell at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976, Black American Portraits reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces. Spanning more than two centuries from circa 1800 to the present day, this selection of approximately 140 works draws primarily from LACMA’s permanent collection and chronicles the ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves in their own eyes. Countering a visual culture that often demonizes Blackness and fetishizes the spectacle of Black pain, these images center love, abundance, family, community, and exuberance. This exhibition has traveled from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Work by Lauren Halsey, Titus Kaphar and Nathaniel Mary Quinn is included.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Uncle Dope, 2017 © Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Photo: Michael Tropea
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X
A Decade of Collecting, 2012–2022
January 27–May 26, 2023
Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
sheldonartmuseum.org
X: A Decade of Collecting, 2012–2022 is a survey of artworks acquired for the Sheldon Museum of Art’s collection over the past decade. The chosen works demonstrate the breadth of collecting efforts and are a modest representation of the approximately 1,875 pieces that have entered the museum’s holdings since 2012. The exhibition seeks to present a snapshot of how the collection continues to evolve. Work by Richard Avedon, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Andy Warhol, and Stanley Whitney is included.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Big Bertha, 2015 © Nathaniel Mary Quinn
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Nathaniel Mary Quinn
February 4–May 22, 2022
Le Consortium, Dijon, France
www.leconsortium.fr
This first solo exhibition in France of work by Nathaniel Mary Quinn, curated by Le Consortium’s codirector Eric Troncy, brings together fifteen paintings unfolding around The Director (2019), which was gifted to the museum’s collection. Quinn’s striking composite portraits draw on both memory and fragments of found images sourced from magazines, personal photographs, and the Internet.
Installation view, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Le Consortium, Dijon, France, February 4–May 22, 2022. Artwork © Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Photo: Rebecca Fanuele, courtesy Consortium Museum
Closed
Black American Portraits
November 7, 2021–April 17, 2022
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
www.lacma.org
Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, guest curated by David Driskell at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976, and complementing the presentation at lacma of The Obama Portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, Black American Portraits reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces. Spanning more than two centuries from circa 1800 to the present day, this selection of approximately 140 works draws primarily from lacma’s permanent collection and chronicles the ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves in their own eyes. Countering a visual culture that often demonizes Blackness and fetishizes the spectacle of Black pain, these images center love, abundance, family, community, and exuberance. Work by Lauren Halsey, Titus Kaphar and Nathaniel Mary Quinn is included.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Uncle Dope, 2017 © Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Photo: Michael Tropea
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The Slipstream
Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time
May 14, 2021–April 10, 2022
Brooklyn Museum, New York
www.brooklynmuseum.org
The Slipstream draws examples from Brooklyn Museum’s contemporary art collection to contemplate the profound disruption that occurred in 2020. Borrowing its title from an aeronautical term that refers to the pull of the current that is left in the wake of a large and powerful object, the exhibition examines the placement and displacement of power that runs through American history and continues today. The show features more than sixty works by multiple generations of artists from the 1960s to the present day, including Titus Kaphar, Rick Lowe, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Taryn Simon.
Taryn Simon, Press XL, from the series Paperwork and the Will of Capital, 2015, Brooklyn Museum, New York © Taryn Simon
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Since Unveiling
Selected Acquisitions of a Decade
November 20, 2021–April 3, 2022
The Broad, Los Angeles
www.thebroad.org
Since Unveiling highlights artworks that have entered the Broad collection in the last decade, with some acquisitions completed as recently as this year. The fifty-seven works on view by twenty-nine artists represent many facets of contemporary art, from explorations of abstraction and figuration to examinations of place, identity, and narrative. Many works witness, critique, and interpret current events, speaking to politics and power structures. Work by Gregory Crewdson, Andreas Gursky, and Nathaniel Mary Quinn are included.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Pure Insecurity, 2019 © Nathaniel Mary Quinn
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Nathaniel Mary Quinn in
Evidence: Selections from the Permanent Collection
July 1, 2021–February 20, 2022
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
www.moca.org
Our experience of time is situational and decidedly elastic, a reality that many of us have perceived with new acuity over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in ways intimately related to our differing responsibilities and stations in life. This selection of works from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, considers some of the myriad ways that artists mark, capture, or meditate on the passage of time: its duration, its ordering into past and present, and its relation to memory. Work by Nathaniel Mary Quinn is included.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Mama in Fall, 2017, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles © Nathaniel Mary Quinn