"Still Move," performance stills taken at Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Canada, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Photo: Rod Leland Photography

Join us for the Chicago launch of Lost Bodies and Still Move, two new monographs on the work of artist Brendan Fernandes. David Getsy and Zach Stafford will join Fernandes in a conversation about his recent work. A book signing and reception will follow the discussion.

In his multimedia practice, Brendan Fernandes addresses a wide range of questions surrounding identity and expression, including the concept of queer bodies, the history of ballet as a cultural signifier—particularly in juxtaposition to African modes of visual and ritual art—and, more recently, the dance floor as a sacred space of freedom. Lost Bodies (Agnes Etherton Art Centre, Queen’s University, ON, 2016) and Still Move (Black Dog Press, London, 2017) explore these themes in depth.

Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya, lives and works in Chicago) is a Canadian artist of Kenyan and Indian descent. He completed the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007) and earned his MFA from the University of Western Ontario (2005) and his BFA from York University in Canada (2002). Fernandes has exhibited widely domestically and abroad, including exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Art and Design, New York; Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal; The National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA: The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; Bergen Kunsthall, Norway; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Sculpture Center, New York; The Quebec City Biennial; the Third Guangzhou Triennial in China; and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

Upcoming projects include a performance of Free Fall at The Getty, Los Angeles (June); a residency at Recess, New York (July); and a solo exhibition at Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ(fall 2017). He is currently Artist in Residence and Faculty at Northwestern University in the Department of Art Theory and Practice, and is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

David J. Getsy is the Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  He has published seven books, most recently Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale University Press, 2015) and the anthology of artists’ writings, Queer (MIT Press, 2016), which is a 2017 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist.  He writes about histories of art and performance with an emphasis on queer and transgender topics and methods in modern and contemporary art, and his current projects pursue archive-based recoveries of forgotten queer and genderqueer performance practices in late-twentieth-century America.

Zach Stafford is the editor at large of Out Magazine and a contributing writer for The Guardian where he covers justice, violence and social issues. He regularly provides commentary on radio, podcasts, and has appeared on the BBC, CNN, and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Zach is also the co-editor of the bestselling book Boys, An Anthology (2013), and is currently touring his photo-essay project, When Dogs Heal, which explores the lives of HIV+ people and the pets that saved their lives.