On the occasion of Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley’s exhibition “America Rides the Breakfast Table” at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, we are pleased to invite you to a conversation with the artists and Jenelle Porter on their current show and their overall practice.
Centered around a presentation of Mary and Patrick’s most recent video project, “In The Body of The Sturgeon” (2017), “America Rides the Breakfast Table” brings gallery visitors into the world of the video through new paintings by Mary Reid Kelley, and photographic lightboxes that spotlight key vignettes. New sculptures, some with embedded video elements, materialize the graphic qualities of the video and memorialize its themes.
This is a free event.
Conversation: 4–5pm
Reception: 5–7pm
About the artists and participant
Mary Reid Kelley combines painting, performance, and her distinctive wordplay-rich poetry in polemical, graphically stylized videos made in collaboration with her partner, Patrick Kelley.
Mary Reid Kelley’s work has been exhibited internationally including recent solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; MUDAM Luxembourg, Belgium; the Tate, Liverpool, UK; Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; and The Contemporary, Austin, TX among many others. Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley’s video work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, W Magazine, La Reppublica, Vogue, The New Yorker, Artforum, Flash Art, Frieze, ARTnews, and Art in America. Mary and Patrick live and work in upstate New York. Their 2016 video, This Is Offal, won the Baloise Prize at Art Basel in 2016.
Mary Reid Kelley graduated with an MFA from Yale in 2009. She has received numerous awards for her work including a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship; a Guggenheim Fellowship, Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, and an AICA Award in Best Time-Based Format (performance, video film, sound) for “Mary Reid Kelley: Working Objects and Videos,” Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY, Curated by Daniel Belasco, among many others. Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Collection, The Goetz Collection in Munich, Germany, and the UBS Art Collection in New York, NY, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.
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Jenelle Porter is an independent curator working in Los Angeles. From 2011–2015 she was the Mannion Family Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston where she organized acclaimed thematic exhibitions such as “Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present,” and “Figuring Color: Kathy Butterly, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roy McMakin, Sue Williams”; as well as monographic exhibitions of Arlene Shechet, Erin Shirreff, Mary Reid Kelley, Jeffrey Gibson, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Dianna Molzan, and Christina Ramberg. Her exhibitions have twice been honored by the International Association of Art Critics. She is currently at work on an exhibition for the ICA/Boston to open in June 2019.
Prior to her years in Boston, Porter was curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2005–2010) where she organized “Dance with Camera” and “Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay,” as well as monographic exhibitions of Trisha Donnelly and Charline von Heyl. From 1998–2001 she was curator at Artists Space in New York. She was a curatorial fellow at the Walker Art Center, and a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Porter has authored books on artists Trisha Donnelly, Sam Gilliam, Charline von Heyl, Liz Larner, Liza Lou, Ruby Neri, Stephen Prina, and Matthew Ritchie; and has contributed texts to numerous exhibition catalogues, thematic publications, and journals.