NEW YORK.- Vis-à-Vis - Dialogues Between Artists and Curators: AA Bronson and Linda J. Park will take place Wednesday December 13, 6:30 PM. Over a decade after the death of his two artistic partners, AA Bronson has focused on creating work that confronts the experience of personal loss, trauma, and individual identity. Outside of the collaborative group General Idea, which defined his life and work for twenty-five years, AA Bronson continues to traverse the borderline between the private and public domain, to merge life with art, and the social and political with the making of art.

AA Bronson’s work focuses on death and disease, and individual and collective trauma, as well as illusion and identity. His well-known billboard-sized portrait of Felix Partz on his deathbed, exhibited at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, is a poignant example. This image is at once a memorial to his partner, a stark portrayal of the ravages of AIDS, and an art-historical reference to Gustav Klimt and the “fin de siecle”. Combining text and images, the artist’s ongoing series of self-portraits—including “The Hanged Man”, and the diaristic writings of “Negative Thoughts” and “Mirror Mirror”—are intimate inquiries into the connection between body, mind, history and memory. Most recently, AA Bronson’s has increasingly tied aesthetic experience to alternative healing practices as a means of investigating who we are and how we bear witness to the transitory nature of life.

Linda J. Park is a Program Officer at the New York Foundation for the Arts. Prior to joining NYFA, Ms. Park was a curatorial and arts management consultant at Howell Art & Design, NYC. From 2001 to 2004, Ms. Park was the Curatorial and Development Associate at Downtown Arts Projects and worked extensively with US and Canadian artists. She has curated and organized individual artist projects, group exhibitions, as well as been involved in developing career resource programs. Ms. Park was the Principal Organizer of Brewster 2003 Collaborations, a public art project in upstate New York, and her writing has been in published in periodicals such as Read Baby (Art & Culture), Latitude 53, and See Magazine.

This public dialogue with AA Bronson will explore the range of the artist’s life and work. This event takes place at Americas Society and is free, open to the public and wheelchair accessible.