Leidy Churchman

For this special Tuesday Evenings with the Modern online presentation, artist Leidy Churchman is in conversation with art critic, writer, and musician Johanna Fateman as they consider Churchman’s work featured in the Modern’s FOCUS: Leidy Churchman, on view January 22–March 21, 2021.

To be mindful online—in a culture where the internet is synonymous with distraction and compulsion, on a day when I refresh my feeds between every clause and tumble headlong down a YouTube chute—feels impossible, paradoxical. But the riddle of Churchman’s weird attentive practice, with its calm handling of both information and paint, does seem to open up space. While the internet has changed our experience of the world, it has not changed the nature of experience itself. Being online, Churchman reminds us, with a guileless rigor that Trungpa might call “directness and unselfconsciousness,” is actually just being. Johanna Fateman, “From iPhones to a mythic monkey kingdom: a show of paintings from the browser cache,” 4Columns, April 18, 2020, on Leidy Churchman: Earth Bound, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

A video recording of this lecture will be available on the Modern's Youtube.