Critic's Roundtable: A Conversation

Join us on Zoom on May 31st at 6pm Central for a conversation between Christopher Blay and the 2022 Toni Beauchamp Prize winner Lauren Levato Coyne and Honorable Mentions Daniel Gerwin and Lisa Yin Zhang.

Follow the link below to join!

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88433921351?pwd=MmVBajZBMnFHNTZFR1ZkV25MbklXdz09

Meeting ID: 884 3392 1351
Passcode: 372990

Christopher Blay is the Chief Curator of the Houston Museum of African American Culture. The Liberian-born American artist, writer, and curator was the News Editor at Glasstire Magazine from 2019 - 2021 and before that, curator for the Art Corridor Galleries at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth. Blay’s writing credit includes the Fort Worth Weekly, Glasstire Magazine, Art in America, Nasher Sculpture Center Magazine, and catalog essays for Richard Prince and Letitia Huckaby respectively. Blay is a 2003 Graduate of Texas Christian University with a BFA in Photography and a minor in Art History.

Lauren Levato Coyne (she/they) is a queer artist and writer whose transdisciplinary works focus on ecosystems, gardens, hybrid forms, and chimerism. She writes across forms of nonfiction and poetry and is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Marriage Bones (Fractal Edge Press) and at the hotel andromeda (dancing girl press), a collaborative art/writing folio project with Kristy Bowen. Her most recent art writing can be found in Sculpture and White Hot magazines. Levato Coyne's visual works include drawing, painting, costume making, photography, and sculpture. Her work is widely exhibited in galleries and museums.

Levato Coyne earned her MFA in painting from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. She holds a series of dual undergraduate degrees including writing & literature and gender & ethnic studies from Purdue University and political journalism from Georgetown University. She is currently a programming director at Ferrin Contemporary in North Adams, MA.

Daniel Gerwin is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. His 2019 solo show was reviewed in the LA Times, and his work has been written about in Frieze, ArtCritical, Hyperallergic, and other publications. He has curated three exhibitions in Los Angeles, taught painting, drawing, and theory, and writes regularly about contemporary art for Artforum and Hyperallergic, as well as catalog essays and other exhibition texts. He received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, his BA from Yale University, and taught at University of California Davis, University of the Arts, University of Iowa, and University of Pennsylvania. In 2004 he was awarded a residency at Blue Mountain Center, and in 2016 he was a Resident Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. 

Lisa Yin Zhang is an artist, curator, writer, and editor from Queens, New York. She is currently an assistant editor at frieze, and is working on a novel.