Paul Brach Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Devin Kenny (American, b. 1987) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, musician, and independent curator. He has collaborated with various art and music venues in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, including Recess; Het Roode Bioscoop; REDCAT; Freak City; Julia Stoschek Collection; the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; SOMA Summer, Mexico City; Goethe-Institut New York, and MoMA PS1, where he participated in Greater New York (2015). A graduate of Cooper Union, Kenny received his MFA in 2013 from the New Genres department at UCLA and is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Kenny uses music, performance, video, writing, fashion design, and almost any other means possible to explore and complicate ideas on contemporary culture. Kenny’s work often exists online, as websites, blogs, video posts, and audio files. Employing the tropes of social media–driven youth culture to reach a base audience, the work is free to convey broad ideas while subversively inserting political and philosophical theory. There is a hyperawareness in Kenny’s work that belies his sincerity in making it, an ironic stance that separates what he makes from the pop culture that it mimics. Kenny uses the Internet as source material and venue, consuming and processing cultural production to reveal it anew to his audience.
All lectures are free, open to the public, and presented online. RSVP required. To register, please email artvals@alum.calarts.edu with the subject RSVP PBVALS.
Poster credit: L-A Zenezini
