Date: Thursday, February 4th

Time: 6 pm

Where: Zoom

How: Free event, just register on Eventbrite link to get login information

21c Chicago is thrilled to kick off our Curator Conversations series with Jefferson Godard, Jean Alexander Frater, and Derrick Woods-Morrow! Curator Conversations asks a local art curator to chat with an artist of their choice also from the Chicago arts community. Each month we’ll switch up those pairings to give you a look into the rich arts community that we have here in the city.

This event is FREE but please sign-up on our Eventbrite link to get the Zoom login information. This is sure to be an exciting conversation you won’t want to miss!

Check Out Their Work:

Jefferson Godard is a video art curator, gallerist, educator, and trained architect. In 2012, Godard founded Aspect/Ratio Projects, a contemporary art gallery focused on video art. The gallery is currently located in the West Town neighborhood of Chicago and represents both emerging and mid-career internationally based artists. In addition to the gallery, he has curated video art based exhibitions and screenings at spaces including: The Chicago Architecture Biennial, Gallery 400 at UIC Chicago, Nice and Fit Gallery Berlin, Souvenirs from Earth channel in France, Shane Campbell Gallery Chicago, and The Mission Chicago. As a trained architect, Godard has worked on several high-rise residential projects in his hometown of Miami, Florida as well as an award-winning urban park competition Bahndeckel in Munich, Germany. In addition to his curatorial and gallery endeavors, Godard has lectured or participated on panels at Northwestern University, MCA Chicago, Moving image Art Fair New York, Chicago Artists Coalition, Art Cologne, and chaired a panel discussion at the College Arts Association Conference.

http://www.aspectratioprojects.com/about–contact.html

IG: @jeffersongodard and @aspectratioprojectsgallery

Jean Alexander Frater experiments with the materials inherent to painting and then integrates other histories, traditions and language into this form. Alexander Frater is represented by Aspect/Ratio Gallery in Chicago. She was a 2017-2018 Chicago Artists Coalition BOLT resident, received an MFA from School of Art the Institute of Chicago, and a BA in Philosophy, from the University of Dayton, Ohio. Her work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as the Wexner Center for Arts, Columbus; El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe; Images Festival, Toronto; Possible Project Space, Brooklyn; Ben-Gurion airport, Tel Aviv; Kulturhuset, Stockholm, THE MISSION Gallery, Chicago; Transmitter Gallery, Brooklyn and Guest Spot @ The Reinstitute, Baltimore.

https://alexanderfrater.com/home.html

IG: @jeanalexanderfrater

Derrick Woods-Morrow‘s (b.1990) work is a meditation on deviation and disruption, on language and representation – on growing up in the American South. Currently based in Chicago and originally from Greensboro, North Carolina his artistic practice explores black sexual freedoms and the complicated histories concerning access to these freedoms.

As he navigates historical archives, he searches for moments, or ‘glitches’ that show alternative queer futures, existing, emboldened, and exacting – Freedom. Together, with other Queer Folx, he creates photographs, moving images, performance, installations and sculptures that recognize histories they were written out of and future places they wish to occupy.

Woods-Morrow’s work questions the very validity of the personal archive, of memory (ever fleeting), and of being ever-present with oneself. He is questioning the performance of the self untethered from expectation, both in his art, and his life – a new ideal of intimacy, where darkness liberates us, and blackness is inherently queer.

A recipient of the 2018 Artadia Award, Derrick Woods-Morrow received his MFA in Photography from the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 2016, and was most recently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Photography and Teaching Artist at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is an alum of the Fire Island Artist Residency & Chicago’s Bolt Residency. He has screened films at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center & Chicago Arts Incubator. His work has exhibited in collaboration with Paul Sepuya in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; at YNCI V: Detroit Art Week Expo (curated by Darryl Terrell); in Photography Now at The Center for Photography at Woodstock; and Down Time: On the Art of Retreat at the Smart Museum Chicago (curated by Leslie Wilson and Berit Ness). In Winter of 2019, a new film, much handled things are always soft (2019) will debuted in collaboration with the VISUAL AIDS 30th Annual Day With(out) ART programming at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art LA, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum, The New Museum & over a hundred institutions worldwide.

http://www.derrickwoodsmorrow.com/

IG: @moresweetbeef