MEET AVRAM FINKELSTEIN

“Teaching is learning, collectivity is critical, queer cultural is bold, resourceful, inventively radical, and is essential to anyone concerned with twenty-first century meaning-making.”

Avram Finkelstein is an artist and writer, and a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. His work has shown at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the New Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, David Zwirner, the Shed, the Museum of the City of New York, Kunsthal KAdE, and the Migros Museum, and is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the New Museum, the Metropolitan, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. He is featured in the artist oral history project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and his book for UC Press, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images, was nominated for an International Center Of Photography 2018 Infinity Award in Critical Writing and Research. He has written for BOMB, frieze, Art21, and Foam, been interviewed by The New York Times, frieze, Artforum, NPR, Slate, and Interview, and spoken at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and NYU.

He writes, “as a queer artist, my practice has centered on gendered hierarchies, and gravitated toward public spaces in an attempt to reflect questions of access. But I’m currently reconsidering whether non-traditional art spaces are more intrinsically accessible because of their “publicness”, but rather through the ways they are “shared,” which I believe is a more accurate metric for defining accessibility. Spurred by readjustments to my increasing disability, the way every social space is simultaneously accessible and restricted is foregrounded for me, and I’m progressively interested in the activation of shared space as a means to measure any prior generosities the word “public” implies. As a consequence, I’m deploying translucent, lightweight materials, such as vellums and voiles, to help “perform” representation as a process shaded, reimagined, or activated by the viewers own presence, the wind currents created while observing the work, and the anthropomorphic physicality of the work. Notation is a method for memorization, translating experience or cognition into physical codes. I’m a life-long notetaker. I have also drawn my whole life. My hand, however, no longer belongs to me, and it dictates its own language. As a result, my work has expanded beyond my questioning gendered representation and morphed into a war, or a dance, or a chronicle of a tenuous reacquaintance with my own disobedient body, triggering more personal explorations of corporeality as a system in flux. My practice is wholly absorbed in gesture as a form of codification—of note taking—to help re-situate the meanings of social spaces.”