Lunch on Fridays: Tony Lewis, Gregory Bae, Rashayla Marie Brown
Take A Joke, And Enjoy A Drink

Spend a lunch hour learning about the latest in art and design during these Friday lectures. Each lecture features a variety of artists and designers from around the world, including CIA faculty and visiting artists. This event is free and open to the public. Pizza and beverages will be provided.

To kick off our first lecture in the Lunch on Fridays fall season in the new Peter B. Lewis Theater, Cleveland Institute of Art is proud to host artists Gregory Bae, Rashayla Marie Brown and Tony Lewis (Lewis’ solo exhibition power nomenclature weight free pressure movement is currently on view through September 5 at MOCA). In this exciting LOF event, each artist will speak about their practice and their involvement with the Bellwether exhibition Take A Joke, And Enjoy A Drink.

Curated by Tony Lewis, Take A Joke, And Enjoy A Drink brings together artists from Chicago traveling to Cleveland and back. Lewis writes of the exhibition, “I look to these artists for their brilliance, generosity, commitment, and energy for what they do every day: the self-examination of the mind as an artist, to challenge each other, and those around them; as well as their capacity for friendship. It’s because of this willingness to work together no matter how agonistic it may become, that we can keep the solipsistic anxiety of making art in check. To work hard in thought through (and with) collective minds is as critical as making the work alone, as valuable as absurdity, and for many artists, it is the material.” Featuring work by Gregory Bae, Troy Briggs, Rashayla Marie Brown and Matt Morris, this group exhibition opens September 3^rd and runs through September 18^th at 1555 E. 40^th St.

Take A Joke, And Enjoy A Drink is organized with Bellwether in conjunction with the Cleveland Museum of Art, MOCA Cleveland, and the Cleveland Institute of Art. Bellwether is a project of the Cleveland Museum of Art, supported by the Contemporary Art Society and Roy Minoff.

Tony Lewis (1986, LA), grew up in Cleveland and currently lives and works in Chicago. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at Bindery Projects, Minneapolis; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; and Massimo de Carlo, London. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Sharon Hayes, Tony Lewis, Adam Pendleton, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (2015); the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; NEXT (2014), The Arsenal, Montreal; and Retreat (2014), organized by Theaster Gates, and presented by Black Artist Retreat, Valerie Carberry Gallery and Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago. His work is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland through September 5, Tony Lewis: power nomenclature weight free pressure movement is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition.

Gregory Bae was born in Salt Lake City in 1986. His childhood was spent growing up intermittently between the United States and South Korea. His father is a scientist, his mother a staunch Catholic, and his brother recently received his Ph.D in philosophy. He studied Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Bae has taught at the Fred Dolan Art Academy in the Bronx, New York, as well as the Hyde Park Art Center and Marwen, both in Chicago. He is a recipient of a City of Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Program grant, an Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and most recently, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. He has lived and worked in Providence, RI; New York City; Spartanburg, SC; and is currently based in Chicago but has just returned from 19 months of residency in South Korea. Gregory Bae’s homecoming solo exhibition “Orients” is on view at the Chicago Urban Art Society through September 19th.

A lifelong nomad who has moved 24 times, artist/scholar Rashayla Marie Brown manages a living studio practice across an extensive list of cultural production modes. Exploiting the role of the artist as both an agent and an object of desire, her work spans photographic and video-based image-making; performance and social engagement/disruption; curation and installation; and theoretical writings infused with autobiography, subjectivity, and spirituality. Her journey as a professional artist began as a radio DJ performing research in London, England and as founder of the family-owned design company Selah Vibe, Inc. in Atlanta, GA. Brown currently serves as the inaugural Director of Student Affairs for Diversity and Inclusion at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), fostering queer Afrofeminist narratives across institutions.

(Above image) Installation view, Tony Lewis: pressure free weight power nomenclature movement, MOCA Cleveland, 2015. Photo: Timothy Safranek Photographics.

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