Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to host a conversation between artist Zoe Walsh and artist and professor Linda Besemer on February 14th at 3pm on the occasion of Walsh’s Spotlight Outsides on view at the gallery.
Zoe Walsh (b. 1989; Washington, D.C.) is a Los-Angeles-based artist holding an MFA from Yale University and BA from Occidental College.
Walsh has mounted solo and two-person exhibitions at Yossi Milo, New York, NY; M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Pieter Performance Space, Los Angeles, CA; and Fondation des États-Unis, Paris, France, among others.
Walsh’s work has been featured in group exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Peppers Art Gallery, Redlands, CA; Usdan Gallery, Bennington, VT; La Maison des Arts, Malakoff, France; Abrons Art Center, New York, NY, and UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA.
In 2019, the artist was a nominee for the Emerging Artist Grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and received the Al Held Foundation Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, Italy. In 2024, Walsh was awarded a residency at Fountainhead in Miami.
Linda Besemer creates provocative paintings that challenge the forms and symbolic language of modernism and abstraction, exploring and exploiting these traditions through a dynamic feminist-queer-trans perspective.
Notable exhibitions of Besemer’s work include the Whitney Biennial, the Corcoran Biennial, and Queer Abstraction at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. Additional highlights are Extreme Abstraction at the Buffalo AKG Museum of Art, Glitch at the Los Angeles Museum of Art, and Synthetic at the Whitney. Their work also appeared in California Video at the Getty (with her partner Erika Suderburg), Optic Nerve at the Columbus Museum of Art, One Word: Plastic at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, and, in 2019, An Abundance of Errors, a solo exhibition here at Vielmeter Los Angeles.
Besemer’s paintings have been featured and reviewed in leading art journals and newspapers, including ARTFORUM, Art in America, Frieze, Art US, The New Art Examiner, Art Issues, Art +Text, Art Papers, Art News, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. They have lectured widely as a visiting artist, served as a keynote speaker at painting conferences, and presented academic papers. Their paper, “Abstraction: Politics and Possibilities,” published in the art journal X-TRA, is widely recognized as groundbreaking for artists exploring materialist subjectivity in relation to race, gender, and postcoloniality.
Prestigious organizations honored Besemer with grants from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Howard Foundation (Brown University), the Chuck Close Rome Prize, the Kraft Media Prize (Corcoran Gallery), the Anonymous Was a Woman Fellowship, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. In November, they were inducted into the National Academy of Design in New York.
From 1987 to 2023, Besemer served as the James Irvine Distinguished Professor of the Arts at Occidental College, teaching painting and drawing in the Art and Art History Department and gender theory in the Women’s Studies/Gender Studies Department. Upon retirement, they earned the Emeritus Alumni Seal Award for distinguished teaching, professional achievement, and dedication to the community.
