The Ordinary: Artists Talk

​Join us for an evening in conversation with four artists from The Ordinary: Patrick Webb, Veronica Wolfgang, Creed Bauman, and Leo Pontius.

​The Ordinary, Collective Z's Pride Month group exhibition of twenty-six queer artists, is built on a single, quiet provocation: that the most radical claim a queer life can make is not to be extraordinary, but to be ordinary — and to be ordinary on its own terms.

​Working across painting, sculpture, and textile, the four artists will discuss the works on view and the questions behind them: what it means to make the everyday visible, what gets edited out of queer life on the way to acceptance, and why the whole of a life should count.

​Patrick Webb has spent more than three decades painting contemporary queer life through Punchinello, the masked commedia dell'arte everyman he adopted in the early 1990s as a gay surrogate and protagonist. A Guggenheim Fellow and longtime Pratt Institute professor, he is represented in the show by House of Cards and Secrets.

​Veronica Wolfgang is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, and textile, crocheting reclaimed materials into forms no machine could make. In Belladonna Suspended, a fiberglass torso hangs in a crocheted cocoon that branches into root-like tendrils — a body caught mid-metamorphosis.

​Creed Bauman builds sculptural paintings in chalk pastel and tempera on shaped birch panels, extended with wire, dowels, and plaster.

​Leo Pontius is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose painting-weavings are made by cutting double-sided acrylic paintings into strips and hand-weaving them back together. Their Self Portrait unravels and spills out of an antique frame — identity coming apart, and recomposing, in plain view.

​The talk is free and open to all. Come early to see the show — doors open at 6, conversation to follow, with time after for questions and a drink or two among the work.