Thomas Lawson is an artist with a diverse, project-driven output. He has exhibited paintings at MetroPictures in New York, Anthony Reynolds in London, David Kordansky Gallery and LAXART in Los Angeles, and in numerous other galleries and museums around the world, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to the Hammer Museum and MoCA in Los Angeles, to Magasin in Grenoble, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
Surveys of his work have been organized by the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art at La Jolla, the CCA in Glasgow, and the Goss-Michael Foundation in Dallas. He has created temporary public works in New York, New Haven, Glasgow, Newcastle and Madrid. He has written extensively about contemporary art for various publications, including Artforum, Flash Art, and Afterall, and an anthology of his writing, Mining for Gold, was published in 2005 by JRP/Ringier.
From 1979 until 1992 he, along with Susan Morgan, published and edited REAL LIFE Magazine, an irregular publication by and about younger artists interested in the relationship between art and life. An anthology of REAL LIFE Magazine, was published by Primary Information, NY in 2007.
From 2002 until 2009 he was co-editor of Afterall Journal, a joint publication between Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London and CalArts. Since 2009 he has been Editor-in-Chief of East of Borneo, a collaborative online magazine and archive of contemporary art, as seen from Los Angeles.
He has also curated various exhibitions of younger artists for such venues as Artists Space and P.S.1 in New York and the Municipal Art Gallery in Los Angeles, and was a co-selector of the British Art Show in 1995. In 2011 he was lead organizer of “The Experimental Impulse” at the gallery at REDCAT, as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time initiative.
In addition to the Guggenheim Fellowship he has received three Artist Fellowships from the NEA, project support from Art Matters, Inc., and Visual Arts Projects, and residency fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ucross Foundation.
