AIC | Virtual Convo: André Kertész—Postcards from Paris

The scale, subjects, and circulation of photographer André Kertész’s carte postale prints serve as the starting point for a conversation led by Grace Deveney, David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Associate Curator of Photography and Media. Deveney talks with contemporary artists Derrick Woods-Morrow and Felipe Baeza about how intimacy operates in their own work and how proximity, distance, and kinship are navigated through materials and studio process.

Liz Siegel, curator of Photography and Media and curator of the exhibition “André Kertész: Postcards from Paris,” opens the conversation.

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Derrick Woods-Morrow (b.1990) centers process-oriented collaborative projects with Queerx Black Fol(x) across a wide variety of media. His work has been exhibited in collaboration with Paul Mpagi Sepuya in the Whitney Biennial (2019); in Photography Now: The Searchers at the Center for Photography at Woodstock (2019); and in thematic international and national group exhibitions at Kunsthal KAdE, Netherlands (2020), the Schwules Museum in Berlin (2020/21), the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans (2020), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2020), and the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago (2019).

In 2019 his second short film, much handled things are always soft, debuted in collaboration with the VISUAL AIDS 30th Annual Day With(out) ART programming at more than 100 institutions in the U.S. and worldwide. Much handled things are always soft was later independently screened on the social media POC cruising app Jack’d, reaching an audience of over 3 million Black and Brown folx in Canada and the U.S.

Woods-Morrow is a member of the Chicago-based collective Concerned Black ImageMakers and serves on the board of directors at the Fire Island Artist Residency. His work has been written about in the New York Times, W Magazine, Artforum, Artnet, the Chicago Tribune, Newcity, Hyperallergic, Visual Art Source, Artpapers, ArtDaily, and Spot Magazine. Originally from Greensboro, NC, he splits his time between Chicago and Rhode Island, where he holds a Schiller Family Assistant Professorship in Race in Art and Design in the Sculpture Department at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Felipe Baeza, born in Guanajuato, Mexico, is a visual artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Baeza’s practice is equal parts confrontation of violent pasts and a tribute to people whose sense of personhood is constantly litigated and defined by those in power. His “fugitive bodies” created over densely layered paintings appear in different states of becoming and at times are even abstracted to the point of invisibility. Baeza’s recent exhibitions include Prospect 5. New Orleans: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow, New Orleans (2021); Unruly Suspension, Maureen Paley, London (2021); Desert X, Palm Springs (2021); and Through the Flesh to Elsewhere, the Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2020). Baeza received a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from Yale University.

Please note that all event times listed are in central time.

We recommend using a laptop or desktop computer and downloading the latest version of Zoom to enjoy this program.

If you have any questions about virtual programming, please reach out to museum-programs@artic.edu.

Closed captioning will be available for this program. For questions related to accessibility accommodations, please email access@artic.edu.

Image: André Kertész. Quartet, 1926. The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Nicholas and Susan Pritzker. © Estate of André Kertész 2021.