Vielmetter Los Angeles invites you to join us for a conversation between artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya and curator Dhyandra Lawson on the occasion of the publishing of Sepuya’s major monograph Dark Room A-Z released by Aperture in the Fall of 2024.
Covering work made between 2016 – 2021, the volume maps the intersecting references, collaborators, and conceptual categories that underpin his work. Sepuya is also featured in Lawson’s exhibition Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st Century Art and Poetics at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, currently on view. A book purchase and signing opportunity will follow the conversation.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya (born in San Bernardino, California, 1982) is a Los Angeles–based artist and Associate Professor of Media Arts at UC San Diego. His work will be included in the forthcoming 14th Mercosur Biennial, opening in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in March 2025. Recent solo exhibitions include Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham, England; The Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany; the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska; the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri.
Sepuya’s work is included in numerous public collections including the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Guggenheim, New York, NY; the Henry Art Museum, Seattle, WA; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA, among others.
Dhyandra Lawson is the Andy Song Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). She co-curated the LACMA exhibitions Painting in the River of Angels: Judy Baca and The Great Wall and Vincent Valdez and Ry Cooder: El Chavez Ravine in 2023. She has also organized the exhibition and publication Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st Century Art and Poetics, which opened last year and is currently on view.
Previously Lawson was assistant curator of photography at LACMA where she organized the exhibitions Family Album: Dannielle Bowman, Janna Ireland and Contemporary Works from LACMA (2022) and Eleanor Antin: Time’s Arrow (2019). Her recent published contributions include writing in Black American Portraits (2022) and Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising (2022). Throughout Lawson’s tenure at LACMA, she has dedicated her acquisitions and exhibitions to bringing attention to emerging and historically underrepresented artists and expanding LACMA’s collection of global contemporary art.