Member Spotlight: Louis Gagliano & Stefan Handl
Member Spotlight is a feature in Studio magazine and on the web that takes a look at the lives and livelihoods of some of our diverse and spirited members.
Names: Louis Gagliano & Stefan Handl
3Qs: Noah Davis
Studio Museum Assistant Curator Lauren Haynes and artist Noah Davis in conversation:
Tell us about The Gardener (2009). Is it based on a real person?
The Gardener is Osiris, who ruled Egypt in a time of great cultural and agricultural prosperity. After being hoaxed by his brother Seth and seventy-two conspirators, he was made to enter a chest. The chest was then sealed shut and tossed into the Nile, where it became his coffin. It later washes up in Byblos and drifts ashore into the roots of a sapling. Strengthened by Osiris, the sapling grows in a single night into a tall and graceful tree. Osiris became the Egyptian God of the afterlife.
Office Hours: Ronak K. Kapadia
Office Hours is a new feature in Studio magazine and on the web that engages artists, scholars and organizers on the application of critical knowledge and theory.
Ronak K. Kapadia is a PhD candidate in NYU’s American Studies program. He is currently writing his dissertation on creative responses to state security, immigrant detention, surveillance, and the U.S. empire since the late 1970s.
Vaginal Davis
Legendary performance/visual artist and avant-garde “drag superstar,” Vaginal Davis, has been interrogating notions of theater, performance, Blackness and queer politics since the 1980s. Davis recently performed her critically acclaimed show at P.S. 122, Vaginal Davis Is Speaking from the Diaphragm, which uses a talk-show format and a set design channeling “kindergarten occultism.” Read a brief interview with the artist after the jump.
