144 Powers
SUMMER 2022 Exhibition
The Alice Austen House presents the work of Paul Mpagi Sepuya in our Summer 2022 exhibition.
About the Exhibition
144 Powers
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Above: “Study for friendship, D.C.S and F.C. (2106),” 2015, 34 x 48 inches
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“The subjects appearing in my work are a cast of friends and intimates, muses, lovers, mentors, and peers. I am inspired to work with these “shared subjects,” as I call these friends, for their mobility and visibility at the particularly charged intersection of creative, social, and sexual in the queer community. I am keyed into the recognition that happens weeks after a turn in the darkroom – like the photographer’s dark room, the queer dark room allows for the memory of a kind of vision you can’t explain to one who hasn’t entered. The relationships that exist across subjects and myself serves as the basis for the organization and editing of my work…”
– Paul Mpagi Sepuya, 2017
Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography, and Associate Professor in Media Arts at the University of California San Diego.
His work is in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Getty and Guggenheim Museums, the Hammer Museum, LACMA, MoCA Los Angeles, MoMA, SFMoMA, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum, among others. His work has been covered in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Art in America, The Nation, and The Guardian, and was featured on the cover of ARTFORUM’s March 2019 issue.
Recent museum exhibitions include those at the Barbican Centre, LACMA, the Guggenheim Museum, the Getty Museum, and a project for the 2019 Whitney Biennial. A survey of work from 2006-2018 was presented at CAM St. Louis and Blaffer Art Museum, accompanied by a monograph published by CAM St. Louis and Aperture Foundation.
Most recently, Paul was an artist-in-residency at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and was featured in the PHOTO 2022 International Festival of Photography in Melbourne and a group exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. A solo exhibition at Bortolami in New York is open through late June.
Exhibition Programming
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