Moderated by Rachel Middleman
With Martha Edelheit, Jenna Gribbon, Keith Mayerson, Sur Rodney (Sur), & Didier William
Rachel Middleman is Professor of Art History at California State University, Chico. She teaches courses in modern, contemporary, and American art history. Dr. Middleman has a PhD in Art History with a Certificate in Visual Studies from the University of Southern California and a master's degree in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.She is the author of Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2018). She recently co-curated Anita Steckel: The Feminist Art of Sexual Politics (2022) at the Stanford Art Gallery.
Martha Edelheit (b. New York, NY, 1931) is a pioneering feminist artist whose work confronts dominant art historical paradigms, foregrounding female gaze and desire. An important voice for feminist art, she is known for both her frank depictions of sexuality and her insistence on their place within an art historical tradition and society. Edelheit studied at the University of Chicago, New York University, and Columbia University in the 1950s. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. Edelheit’s work will be featured in the 2025 exhibition Sixties Surreal at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Jenna Gribbon (b. 1978, Koxville, TN) studied painting at the University of Georgia (2001) and received her MFA from Hunter College (2019). Gribbon’s sumptuous oil paintings explore the act of looking and the relations between artist, subject and viewer via scenes of her family and friends that are at once candid, intimate and constructed. Gribbon’s first institutional exhibition will open at the Rose Art Museum in 2026. Her work has been included in exhibitions at museums worldwide and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum, NY.
Keith Mayerson (b. 1966, Cincinnati, OH) is inspired by symbols of American history and pop culture, and depicts familiar figures who have impacted the country’s consciousness. Iconic images, heroes, places, and events are rendered luminous and transcendent through Mayerson’s micro-managed brushwork and coloring. His ongoing series “My American Dream” has been presented in separate exhibitions as “chapters,” and will be the subject of his 2026 show at the Aspen Museum in Colorado. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. Mayerson studied Semiotics and Studio Art at Brown University and received an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. He is now Professor of Art at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California.
Sur Rodney (Sur) (b. 1954, Montreal, QC) is a Canadian-born writer, curator, and archivist who works collaboratively, drawing variously on performance, his writing, and community archives. He is renowned for his partnership with art dealer Gracie Mansion in the early 1980s, which preceded his 23-year partnership with the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks from 1995-2018. He also managed the Lorraine O’Grady studio (2008-2024). Sur’s catalog essay Looking and Looking, Everyday, for the Eric Firestone Gallery exhibition Martha Edelheit Naked City Paintings from 1965-1980, was published in 2023.
Didier William (b. Port au-Prince, Haiti, 1983) earned a BFA in painting from The Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University School of Art. His work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of Art, The Museum at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Carnegie Museum, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. William was an artist-in-residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in Brooklyn, NY. He is Assistant Professor of Expanded Print at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
Please join us for refreshments starting at 4:00 pm, followed by the panel discussion.
The exhibition has been extended through May 2, 2025.