Guest Faculty Lecture: Catherine Opie, Helen Molesworth and Christina Quarles

Catherine Opie

Summer Series Speaker

Catherine Opie (b. 1961) is one of the most important photographers of her generation. Her subjects have included early seminal portraits of the LGBTQ+ community, the architecture of Los Angeles’ freeway system, mansions in Beverly Hills, Midwestern icehouses, high school football players, California surfers, and abstract landscapes of National Parks, among others. She was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow recipient and the Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography at the American Academy in Rome for 2021. She has exhibited at international venues such as Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Photographer’s Gallery in London, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. Opie was a professor of photography at UCLA for 25 years. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Learn More

Christina Quarles

Christina Quarles (b. 1985) is a Los Angeles-based artist, whose practice works to dismantle assumptions and ingrained beliefs surrounding identity and the human figure. Quarles received her Bachelor’s from Hampshire College in 2007. In 2016 she received her MFA in painting from Yale School of Art and attended The Skowhegan Residency that same year. Quarles’ work has been featured in numerous institutional exhibition including “Christina Quarles,” at The MCA Chicago (2021), “Collapsed Time” at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2023), “The Milk of Dreams,” at the 59th International Art Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Cecilia Alemani ,and in ‘manifesto of fragility,’ the main exhibition of the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath.

Learn More

Helen Molesworth

Helen Molesworth is a writer, podcaster, and curator based in Los Angeles and Provincetown. In 2023, Phaidon published Open Questions, Thirty Years of Writing About Art, an anthology of her essays. Her podcasts include Death of an Artist, a 6-part podcast about the intertwined fates of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta, and the inaugural season of Recording Artists with The Getty. She is also the host of DIALOGUES, a podcast that features interviews with artists, writers, fashion designers, and filmmakers hosted by the David Zwirner Gallery. Her major museum exhibitions include One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, Dance/Draw, This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, Part Object Part Sculpture, and Work Ethic. She has organized one-person exhibitions of Ruth Asawa, Moyra Davey, Noah Davis, Raoul De Keyser, Louise Lawler, Steve Locke, Anna Maria Maiolino, Josiah McElheny, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, Amy Sillman, and Luc Tuymans. She is the author of numerous catalogue essays, and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2021, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2022, she was awarded The Clark Art Writing Prize. Photo by Catherine Opie.

Learn More