XXX: 30 years of Art, Life and Queer Collaboration: A Book launch and Talk with Aziz + Cucher, Aruna D’Souza, and Stamatina Gregory

Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher have been partners in art and life since the early 1990s after meeting as students at the San Francisco Art Institute. Their interdisciplinary practice includes video, photography, screenprinting, digital animation, sculpture and textiles. The images, objects and installations they make are meant to reflect on the boundaries of identity at a time when these are becoming increasingly fluid and undefined. Often a synthesis of reality and fiction, their work tries to reveal the pathologies associated with unfettered globalization, post-human conditions and the intersections between the social, the biological, and the technological. In all their projects they are searching for a visual poetics that can express both the anxieties and unexpected beauty of living in such a moment. Their work has been exhibited at the 46th Venice Biennale, MASS MoCA, the New Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the List Visual Art Center at MIT (Cambridge, MA), the National Gallery of Berlin, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), among others. They both teach at Parsons School of Design.

Aruna D’Souza writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns and The New York Times. Her book Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited) was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times. Her most recent editorial project in Linda Nochlin’s Making it Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now, published by Thames and Hudson, in 2022. She is the editor of Lorraine O’Grady’s Writing in Space 1973-2018 (Duke University Press, 2020) and is co-curator of O’Grady’s work, Both/And, which opened in March 2021 at the Brooklyn Museum. She is the recipient of the 2021 Rabkin Prize for art journalism and a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant.