Artist Tony Lewis and curator Hamza Walker in conversation on the occasion of Lewis' exhibition Charlatan And Ultimately A Boring Man at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
Tony Lewis lives and works in Chicago. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions including Anthology 2014-2016, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2018); Plunder, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (2017); Alms, Comity and Plunder, Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy (2016); and nomenclature movement free pressure power weight, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH (2015). His work is represented in notable public collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C.; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY.
Hamza Walker is the Director of LAXART, an independent nonprofit art space in Los Angeles. From 1994-2016, he was the Director of Education and Associate Curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a non-collecting museum devoted to contemporary art. Hamza Walker and Kara Walker received the 2019 Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award for the exhibition Monuments, set to open at LAXART in September 2021. Recently, Walker was a juror for the Venice Biennale's prestigious Golden Lion award. In February 2019, Walker curated the talks and programs at the first edition of Frieze Los Angeles. In 2018 he curated Sperm Cult and Sol LeWitt, Page Works 1967 - 2007, an exhibition of works LeWitt made specifically for reproduction in magazines, journals and books.