Artist Talk: Nathaniel Mary Quinn
November 21, 2024 | 6:30 pm–7:30 pm
FREE
Advance Insider tickets available Friday, November 1, 7 PM (space is limited)
General tickets available Monday, November 4, 7 PM
We strongly recommend claiming a ticket to ensure your seat. This in-person program is expected to be at capacity.
Questions? Email Hirshhornexperience@si.edu
Hirshhorn Insiders, email HMSGdevelopment@si.edu
Artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn joins Hirshhorn Head Curator Evelyn Hankins to explore the history and process behind his visually striking portraits.
Although his compositions resemble collage, Quinn draws and paints directly on paper using a variety of media, including paint, charcoal, and pastel, to render his subjects. His portraits often blend and blur fragments of the artist’s personal photographs and memories with imagery taken from print media and the Internet.
Quinn’s 2019 work Literacy Lab recently entered the Hirshhorn’s collection and is currently on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960. Placed in conversation with Modernist compositions by Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger, Quinn’s work highlights its roots in history even as it upends conventions. Quinn created Literacy Lab through a process that evokes the Surrealists’ “exquisite corpse” technique: he used paper to conceal much of his composition, letting himself see only the area he was working on. The result is a mesmerizing yet disarming juxtaposition of pictorial elements varying in scale, perspective, and color that, even as they point to Picasso’s and other Cubists’ fragmented forms, create a wholly unique space for empathy and a reconsideration of how we view others.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nathaniel Mary Quinn (b. Chicago, Illinois, 1977) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received an MFA from New York University in 2002 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 2023. Quinn’s work is held by major institutional collections internationally, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.
If you have questions or a request for access services or accommodations that can make your experience more inclusive, please contact hirshhornexperience@si.edu. One to two weeks’ advance notice is recommended but not required.
Image: Kyle Dorosz
Artwork: Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Literacy Lab, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of Iris and Adam Singer, 2020
