Jane Dickson

Jane Dickson, RI Motel 3, 2023. Oil stick on linen, 30⅛ × 60 in. (76.53 × 152.40 cm)

Conversations | The street against Babylon: Urban avant-garde resistance
with Jane Dickson, FUTURA 2000, James Massiah, and Hans Ulrich Obrist
at Petit Palais, Paris
Friday, October 18, 5:30pm–6:30pm (Paris)

Petit Palais

Avenue Winston Churchill

Paris, France

Hip-hop, graffiti, and dub poetry are artistic strategies born in part as a reaction to oppression and racism in Western megalopolises such as New York City in the 1970s. As tools of resistance and a means of artistic emancipation for people of color and the disenfranchised, this repertoire of actions in urban terrain stands in opposition to Babylon, the metaphorical repository of former colonial or coercive power erected as an asphalt fortress, which is thus haunted by its past. This discussion looks at the history of forms that, from clubs to city walls, have transformed the metropolis into a theater of poetic actions.

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Jane Dickson, Out of Here South (Boulay Mi-Voye), 2000-2013. Oil on Astroturf, 73 × 114½ in. (185.42 × 290.83 cm)

A Conversation: Jane Dickson and Hamza Walker
at Karma Los Angeles
Saturday, September 21, 4–5 pm

Karma

7351 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles, California

Karma presents a conversation between artist Jane Dickson and Hamza Walker, director of LAXART, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles, on the occasion of Dickson’s exhibition Are We There Yet? at 7351 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, on view from September 19–November 2, 2024.

Jane Dickson (b. 1952, Chicago) makes paintings and drawings that explore the psychogeography of American culture. Dickson’s practice was forged in the crucible of New York’s late-seventies counterculture, where she participated in artist collectives like Fashion Moda, Collaborative Projects Inc., and Group Material. Working figuratively from her own photographic snapshots, especially of New York’s Times Square, where she lived for nearly thirty years, Dickson portrays strip clubs, diners, motels, sex workers, and their seemingly straight-laced foils: suburban homes, driveways, and businessmen. Using oils and acrylic on canvas and linen alongside a range of atypical surfaces such as vinyl, felt, astroturf, and sandpaper, she achieves impressionistic textures that often blur her subjects in hazes of neon and darkness. In her compositions, the tradition of social realist painting collides with postmodern feminist cultural critique, yielding paintings that are simultaneously representational and conceptual. Dickson lives and works in New York.

Hamza Walker is director of LAXART, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles. Prior to joining LAXART in 2016, he was director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a non-collecting contemporary art museum. Recent exhibitions at LAXART include Nikita Gale, Takers (2022); Kandis Williams/Cassandra Press, The Absolute Right to Exclude (2021); and Postcommodity, Some Reach While Others Clap (2020).

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Edward Hopper, Approaching a City, 1946. Oil on canvas, 27 ¹⁄₁₈ × 36 in. (68.9 × 91.4 cm). The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; acquired 1947. ©️ 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Jane Dickson in Approaching a City: Hopper’s Visions of Urban Space
at the Whitney Museum of American Art
Wednesday February 15, 2023 at 7 pm

Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street
New York, NY 10014

Inspired by Edward Hopper’s New York, this program brings together an interdisciplinary group of artists and writers to reflect on the histories and aesthetics of the urban spaces Hopper engaged with in his work, from the intimacies of private apartments to the public fantasies of the street to the flux of the city itself. Moderated by Kim Conaty, Steven and Ann Ames Curator, the conversation features speakers David Hartt, Kirsty Bell, Jane Dickson, and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.