Artist Talk: Erica Baum

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

6:30 p.m.

Aperture Foundation

547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor

New York

$5 DONATION

This event is free for students with ID and Aperture Members at the $50 level and above.

Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with the Department of Photography at Parsons The New School for Design, is pleased to present an artist talk with Erica Baum. Drawing inspiration from contemporary artists who utilize text, such as Ed Ruscha and Lawrence Weiner, along with documentary-style photographers such as Walker Evans and Eugène Atget, Baum creates what have been called “subliminal narratives” using found words and images from paperback books, card catalogues, and paper rolls from player pianos, among other literary artifacts. With experience in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, and poetry, Baum views text and language as physical objects—malleable mediums that can shape new associations and stir moods, with the re-authoring of commonly consumed words and images. Nat Trotman, an associate curator at the Guggenheim Museum, wrote of Baum’s work in Aperture magazine’s “Lit.” issue: “Through these open-ended investigations Baum honors the tradition of print—that textured, tangible objectification of language that inexorably fades with each passing year.”

Erica Baum (born in New York, 1961) received her MFA from Yale University and lives and works in New York. Her recent solo exhibitions include shows at Bureau New York; Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich; and Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany. Her work has been included in group exhibitions such as the forthcoming Photo Poetics, at Kunsthalle Berlin and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2015; AGORA, the 4th Athens Biennale, 2013; Speaking and Thinking, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, 2013; and Postscript, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, 2012. Her work was also included in the 30th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil. Her work is held in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, all New York; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; and FRAC Île-de-France.

Image: Erica Baum, Investigation, 2014