Artist Talk: AA Bronson
@ University of Chicago
Classics Building, Rm. 110, 1010 E. 59 St., Chicago IL
Opening Friday, February 10th, at 4:30PM
AA Bronson is an artist living and working in New York City. In the sixties, he left University with a group of friends to found a free school, a commune, and an underground newspaper. This led him into an adventure with gestalt therapy, radical education, and independent publishing. In 1969 he formed the artists’ group General Idea with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal; for the next 25 years they lived and worked together to produce the living artwork of their being together, undertaking over 100 solo exhibitions, and countless group shows and temporary public art projects. They were known for their magazine FILE (1972-1989), their unrelenting production of low-cost multiples, and their early involvement in punk, queer theory, AIDS activism, and other manifestations of the other. In 1974 they founded Art Metropole, Toronto, a distribution center and archive for artists’ books, audio, video, and multiples, which they conceived as the shop and archive for their Gesamtkunstwerk: The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, a kind of meta-museum. From 1987 through 1994, they focused their work on the subject of AIDS. Since his partners died in 1994, AA has produced work focused on the subject of death, grieving, and healing, most recently his performance series Invocation of the Queer Spirits. From 2004 to 2010 he was the Director of Printed Matter, Inc. in New York City, founding the annual NY Art Book Fair in 2006, of which he is now Director. He also founded and co-directs the Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In 2008 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, and in 2011 he was named a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres (a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) by the French government.
For other upcoming contemporary art events this winter at the University of Chicago please visit: http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/opc/
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