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Aria Dean

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American critic, artist, and curator

Aria Dean (born 1993) is an American artist, critic, and curator. Until 2021, Dean served as Curator and Editor of Rhizome. Her writings have appeared in various art publications including Artforum, e-flux, The New Inquiry, Art in America, and Topical Cream. Dean has exhibited internationally at venues such as Foxy Production and American Medium in New York, Chateau Shatto in Los Angeles, and Arcadia Missa in London. Dean also co-directs As It Stands LA, an artists project space that opened in 2015. Dean lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles. She is represented by Greene Naftali.

Early life and education

Dean was born in 1993. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2015.

Work

After graduating from Oberlin College, Dean was appointed social media coordinator for the Museum of Contemporary Art.

In September 2016, ARTnews announced that Dean had been appointed assistant curator of net art and digital culture for Rhizome. Dean helped Rhizome's efforts to preserve, present, and re-perform works of net art from the 1980s to the present day (called Net Art Anthology), organize events, and publish articles online. Dean stepped down as Editor and Curator in January 2021 to pursue her solo practice and a new project.

Dean's first solo exhibition, Baby Is A Cool Machine, opened at American Medium in 2017. The exhibition, according to the gallery's website, "hones in on her materially-driven examination of the situation of blackness in the United States." The show was critically praised by James Hannaham at 4Columns and selected by Kat Herriman as a Critic's Picks for Artforum. In 2018, Aria Dean was named one of Cultured Magazine's 30 artists under 35.

In late 2017, Dean curated New Black Portraitures as part of Rhizome's Net Art Anthology. The online exhibition included visual artists Manuel Arturo Abreu, Hamishi Farah, Juliana Huxtable, Rindon Johnson, Pastiche Lumumba, N-Prolenta (Brandon Covington), Sondra Perry, and Redeem Pettaway and, "explored the changing status of black portraiture in relation to strategies for visibility, concealment, and self-representation online."

In early 2018, Dean wrote and directed a play for the Swiss Institute in New York.

Her second solo exhibition, lonesome crowded west, featured sculptural objects and installation that "shuttle between experiences as personally lived and the sweeping generalizations of the media and historical modernism" according to critic Matt Stromberg of Hyperallergic. In an interview with Travis Diehl, Dean revealed sourcing the clay in her painting-like sculpture from Mississippi, and that the series speaks to her "proximity and distance in relation to that place." Other works featured crowd shots from hip-hop videos, a two-channel installation that explore the loneliness of black existence in predominantly-western contexts.

"They index the sort of relationship that I was interested in, subsuming oneself into this particularly black crowd where individuals that already don’t exist so distinctly as "proper" western individual subjects get subsumed into this other object. The show title is from a Modest Mouse album, The Lonesome Crowded West (1997), and I’m not a huge Modest Mouse fan, but I like the album. I latched onto that phrase. "The Lonesome Crowded West" is my situation in relationship to the objects. I am the lonesome crowd, in the west…"

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

  • Wolves, Progetto, Lecce, IT, 2023
  • Show Your Work Little Temple, Greene Naftali, New York, NY, 2021
  • Aria Dean: Suite!, REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA, 2021
  • Aria Dean, Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Gallery for New Media, Buffalo, NY, 2018
  • lonesome crowded west, Château Shatto, Los Angeles, 2018
  • Gut Pinch, The Sunroom, Richmond, VA 2018
  • Baby is a Cool Machine, American Medium, New York, NY 2017

Selected two-person exhibitions

  • White Ppl Think I'm Radical, Arcadia Missa, London, U.K., 2017

Selected group exhibitions

Selected lectures/presentations

  • "Notes on BlacceleraLon," Reed College, September 1, 2017
  • "Blackness Against the Digital," University of the Arts, Helsinki, April 2017
  • "Busta Rhymes at the End of the World," Machine Project, LA, February 24, 2017
  • "Our Bodies, Online" panel at the New School, February 7, 2017
  • "Blackness in CirculaLon," panel at Open Score, New Museum, 2016
  • "Due West," Arcadia Missa/Dominica Reading at LACA, Los Angeles 2016

Bibliography

Essays

References

  1. "Notes on Blacceleration – Journal #87 December 2017 – e-flux". www.e-flux.com. Retrieved January 16, 2018.
  2. Durón, Maximilíano (September 22, 2016). "Rhizome Hires Aria Dean as Assistant Curator of Net Art". ARTnews. Retrieved January 15, 2018.
  3. "Announcing: Aria Dean appointed as Rhizome's assistant curator of net art". Rhizome. Retrieved January 15, 2018.
  4. "Announcing: Aria Dean appointed as Rhizome's assistant curator of net art". Rhizome. Retrieved January 15, 2018.
  5. "Variation and Repetition: Aria Dean •Mousse Magazine". moussemagazine.it (in Italian). Retrieved January 15, 2018.
  6. "Baby is a Cool Machine". American Medium. Retrieved January 15, 2018.
  7. "ARTnews in Brief: Contemporary Austin Announces New Director, Marfa Invitational Names 2020 Exhibitors—and More from February 21, 2020". ARTnews. February 21, 2020. Retrieved October 8, 2020.
  8. Hannaham, James. "Aria Dean". Retrieved February 6, 2018.
  9. Durón, Maximilíano (September 22, 2016). "Rhizome Hires Aria Dean as Assistant Curator of Net Art". ARTnews. Retrieved January 16, 2018.
  10. "Announcing: Aria Dean appointed as Rhizome's assistant curator of net art". Rhizome. Retrieved February 6, 2018.
  11. "Baby is a Cool Machine". American Medium. Retrieved February 6, 2018.
  12. Hannaham, James. "Aria Dean". Retrieved February 6, 2018.
  13. "Aria Dean at American medium". www.artforum.com. Retrieved February 6, 2018.
  14. Dean, Aria. "Aria Dean Cultured Magazine". Retrieved February 6, 2018.
  15. "online black art is moving from instagram to bitmapping". I-d. January 31, 2018. Retrieved February 6, 2018.
  16. "New Black Portraitures". www.newmuseum.org. Retrieved February 6, 2018.
  17. "SI OFFSITE | LUNAR INTERVAL IV: FULL MOON | Aria Dean: Get-Together: A Tragedy of Language | Swiss Institute". www.swissinstitute.net. Retrieved March 27, 2018.
  18. "Aria Dean Searches for an "Ontology of Blackness"". HyperAllergic. October 24, 2018. Retrieved October 26, 2018.
  19. Olunkwa, Emmanuel. "Interviews. ARIA DEAN". ArtForum. Retrieved October 26, 2018.
  20. Diehl, Travis. "Aria Dean with Travis Diehl: Going Formal". X-TRA. eXhibitions. Retrieved October 26, 2018.
  21. "Aria Dean: Suite!". January 8, 2021.
  22. "Gut Pinch". thesunroom.xyz. Retrieved February 6, 2018.
  23. "White ppl think I'm radical, Arcadia Missa". Arcadia Missa. Retrieved January 16, 2018.
  24. Mitter, Siddhartha (January 25, 2022). "Whitney Biennial Picks 63 Artists to Take Stock of Now". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved January 25, 2022.
  25. "ARIA DEAN, HELEN MARTEN, KELLEY WALKER, OLGA BALEMA, RAQUE FORD - 8TH FLOOR - Exhibition Highlights - Greene Naftali".
  26. "Condo New York | Chateau Shatto". chateaushatto.com. Retrieved January 16, 2018.
  27. "At this stage | Chateau Shatto". chateaushatto.com. Retrieved January 16, 2018.
  28. "Notes on Blacceleration – Journal #87 December 2017 – e-flux". www.e-flux.com. Retrieved January 16, 2018.
  29. "The Demand Remains". The New Inquiry. March 28, 2017. Retrieved January 16, 2018.
  30. "Poor Meme, Rich Meme – Real Life". Real Life. Retrieved January 16, 2018.
  31. Dean, Aria. "Alex Da Corte at Art + Practice". artforum.com. Retrieved January 16, 2018.
  32. "Closing the Loop". The New Inquiry. March 1, 2016. Retrieved January 16, 2018.
  33. "Infinite, Fragmented Anguishes". Los Angeles Review of Books. August 15, 2024. Retrieved September 11, 2024.
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