Todd Gray: My Life in the Bush with MJ & Iggy
April 26, 2017 through August 27, 2017
MoAD presents the work of Los Angeles-based multi-disciplinary artist, Todd Gray, who investigates the erasures and potentiality of imaging blackness through photography, sculpture and performance. Comprised of his most recent works in which Gray collages his archived photographs of Iggy Pop and Michael Jackson with his California Mission series, Todd Gray: My Life in the Bush with MJ and Iggy examines California as a site of new narratives and reflections of power. Interested in colonialism as both a psychic and material phenomenon, Gray explores blackness and labor within celebrity.
Todd Gray lives and works in Los Angeles and Ghana. He received both his BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He is Professor Emeritus, School of Art, California State University, Long Beach. Recent solo and group exhibitions include the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Luckman Gallery, Cal State University, Los Angeles, Studio Museum, Harlem, NY, USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, Tucson Museum of Art, Detroit Museum of Art, Renaissance Society, University of Chicago among others. Performance works have been presented at institutions such as the Roy & Edna Disney Cal/Arts Theater, REDCAT, Los Angeles, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, and the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles. He was the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Grant in 2016.