VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents the Ninth Annual Eleanor and Frank Freed Lecture - CHARLES LEDRAY: workworkworkworkwork, Thursday, May 26, 2011, 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM. Law Building, Lower Level. This program is free and open to the public. A reception to meet the speaker follows the lecture.

Through approximately 50 sculptures and installations created over the last 25 years, the exhibition CHARLES LEDRAY: workworkworkworkwork traces the themes of community and identity that have animated the artist’s career to date. In these meticulously assembled works, LeDray revives manual traditions of exquisite craftsmanship with sculptures that range from re-creations of stuffed animals and tailored clothing to tiny ceramic vessels, bound books, and delicate carvings made from human bone.

Bill Arning, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, offers insights into LeDray's work and the larger cultural milieu in which handicraft and traditional masculinity were subversively mixed. Arning actively participated in the period during which dichotomies such as art/craft, masculine/feminine, and straight/gay exploded, with significant implications for how the art world understood notions of quality.

In this lecture, Arning contextualizes LeDray's practice via the Pathetic Art movement, ACT-UP and AIDS activism, third-wave feminism, and artists such as Polly Apfelbaum, Tony Feher, Robert Gober, Cary Liebowitz, and Donald Moffett. Arning also makes clear the ways in which LeDray’s work never fits comfortably within any of these critical and curatorial constructs.

The Freed Lecture is made possible by endowment income from the Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation.

Pictured:  Charles LeDray, Oasis, 1996–2003, 2000 vessels: glazed ceramic, glass, and steel, the Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Charles LeDray / Photo: Tom Powel, courtesy Sperone Westwater.