Andrea Fraser and Claudia Rankine will discuss the intersections between their recent works, This meeting is being recorded (2021) and Just Us: An American Conversation (2020), and their shared interests in subjects such as re-performing conversations, complicating notions of authority, the complex intersections of white privilege and antiracism work, and the emotional and psychological structures within these dynamics.

This program is presented in conjunction with Fraser’s solo exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery New York.

Andrea Fraser was born in Billings, Montana in 1965. She is a professor in the department of art at the School of the Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since the mid-1980s, her work in the field of institutional critique has investigated the social, financial, and affective economies of cultural organizations, fields, and groups. Combining the site-specific and research-based approaches to conceptualism with feminist investigations of subjectivity and desire, Fraser works across the disciplines of performance, video, text, and a range of other forms. Her work has been exhibited in solo shows at, among others, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at institutions including the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art; and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany. She has participated in the Venice and Shanghai Biennales; Whitney Biennial; Bienal de São Paulo; and Prospect New Orleans. Her project 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics (2018) was named the best art book of the decade by ARTnews. She lives in Los Angeles.

Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004); three plays, including HELP (2020) and The White Card (2018), which was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; and has collaborated on numerous videos. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is the co-editor of anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (2015). In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she is a professor in the creative writing program at New York University. She lives in New York.

Images: Andrea Fraser, This meeting is being recorded, 2021. Single channel 4K video installation, 99 minutes. Installation view, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. © Andrea Fraser. Photo: Alex Yudzon; Claudia Rankine, Photo credit Andrew Zuckerman-The Slowdown