Nicola Tyson will be reading from her ongoing series Letters to Artists and Other Men, letters she recently composed to a select group of famous dead artists: Picasso, Manet, Bacon, Gainsborough and Ensor. The satirical, ranting missives are absurd, pointed and hilarious, and the concerns in them range widely. Art (her own and others), sexual politics (contemporary versus historical) and anecdotes from her own and their biography are covered, in an exercise that creates an amusing and mutable framework for locating and interpreting her own working practice.
Tyson debuted Letters to Artists and other Men at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York City and she is currently working with Sadie Coles HQ in London to publish them in an illustrated limited edition.
New York-based artist Nicola Tyson is represented by Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York and Sadie Coles, London. She will present new work at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects later this year.
Laurie Weeks will be reading from her debut novel “Zipper Mouth”, a chronicle of drug- and alcohol-fueled navigations of 1990s New York. With Zipper Mouth, Weeks intrepidly challenges writers like William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, who imagined New York through frenetic literary collage in the decades before her. Shifting from the narrator’s comedic meditation on the impossibility of cleaning her apartment to Weeks’s unanswered letters to Vivien Leigh and Sylvia Plath, Zipper Mouth’s fragmentary structure reflects Weeks’s interest in the personal and the private, narrative and context. Weeks is a New York-based artist, writer and performer. Her past works include contributions of short fiction to Semiotext(e)’s The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading, to Dave Eggers’s Best American Nonrequired Reading and to the screenplay for the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry. She has toured the U.S. with the girl-punk group Sister Spit.