School of Art Welcomes Multiform Conceptual Artist Chloë Bass to Campus

Texas Isaiah

Chloë Bass

The School of Art in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to welcome Chloë Bass as the last fall guest speaker in the Visiting Lecture Series. Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication and installation. Her lecture is tonight, Dec. 1, at 5:30 p.m. at Hillside Auditorium 202. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Bass' work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy, where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual, The Bureau of Self-Recognition, and has recently concluded a study of pairs, The Book of Everyday Instruction, and will continue to scale up gradually until she's working at the scale of the metropolis. She is currently working on Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place, an investigation of intimacy at the scale of immediate families.

"Chloë Bass' practice is very unique in many ways due to the specificity of awareness in which she uses text, memory and emotion to engage community," said Aaron Turner, assistant professor of art, photography and interdisciplinary practice. "I feel that her expansive social practice is vital for our students to be exposed to, because it gives them a different perspective on how to approach art making. Bass' practice also encompasses all areas of focus within the School of Art, there is something for everyone to engage with."

Turner also describes Bass' practice as also a great example of how to embrace one's lived experience and intersecting it with art and community. Her use of social practice engages communities in a shared experience or contemplation through her unique perspective and use of public space.

Bass shares that she is captivated by the common denominators of the human experience: the things people do always. She highlights the seemingly normal as a means of questioning its stability.

She has held numerous fellowships and residencies: she is a 2020-2022 Faculty Fellow for the Seminar in Public Engagement at the Center for Humanities (CUNY Graduate Center), a 2020-2022 Lucas Art Fellow at Montalvo Art Center and was a 2019 Art Matters Grantee.

Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent exhibits at The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, the Knockdown Center, the Kitchen, the Brooklyn Museum, CUE Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the James Gallery and elsewhere. Reviews, mentions of and interviews about her work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Temporary Art Review and Artnews, among others.

Bass has three solo museum exhibitions on view in Fall 2022: Soft Services, a new commission for the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; #sky #nofilter: Hindsight for a Future America, a new commission for the California African American Museum, presented at Art + Practice in Los Angeles; and Chloë Bass: Wayfinding at the Skirball Cultural Center, also in Los Angeles.

Learn more about Bass and her work in tonight's lecture at Hillside Auditorium room 202, 5:30 p.m.