GREEN FAMILY ART FOUNDATION

Anthony Cudahy:
Spinneret

October 5, 2024 – January 26, 2025

The Green Family Art Foundation is pleased to present Anthony Cudahy: Spinneret, curated by Devon Zimmerman, opening October 5, 2024, and remaining on view until January 26, 2024. Please join the Green Family Art Foundation for the opening reception of Anthony Cudahy: Spinneret on Saturday, October 5, from 5 to 8 pm at 2111 Flora Street, Suite 110, Dallas, TX 75201. The opening reception is free and open to the public, no RSVP required. Complimentary valet parking and refreshments will be provided.

Anthony Cudahy: Spinneret draws inspiration from—and is named for—the silk-producing organ that spiders use to weave, or spin, their webs. Cudahy’s figurative paintings piece together enigmatic scenes of specific objects and equivocal environments from interwoven references drawn from Queer archives, art history, film, poetry, friends, and his own autobiography. His fluid application of paint and idiosyncratic palette—at moments sullen, earthen, corporeal and at others high-key, acidic, artificial—animates the ongoing push and pull between the real and surreal across his practice.

Through his art, Cudahy explores the hazy slippages of subjectivity in the digital age. The artist anchors his compositions to passages of gentle tenderness, absent-minded repose, or banal isolation; prosaic instances that often carry the greatest poetic weight. Within these moments, Cudahy contemplates love and friendship. His husband, the photographer Ian Lewandowski, frequently appears as the artist’s muse, found reading, sleeping, or entwined. Cudahy also turns to his network of friends, like the artist Lily Wong, who is caught lost in thought gazing from a balcony or tensely moving furniture in a New York apartment. The art historical mixes with the present, as Cudahy imbibes figures and compositions from works by artists as far-flung as Giorgione, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Lois Dodd, and Francis Bacon.

Wrapped around his scenes of intimacy are meditations on death and its politics. From the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s to the COVID-19 Pandemic, Cudahy examines these periods of crises with homages to artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, and more germane views of crowds congregating during lockdowns. Cudahy brings together different histories, culling images from a range of sources, including photos from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center archives in New York and medieval tapestries. These themes are woven throughout the works in the exhibition.

Anthony Cudahy: Spinneret is organized by the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine

About Anthony Cudahy:
Anthony Cudahy received a BFA from Pratt Institute, New York in 2011 and completed an MFA at Hunter College, New York in 2020. Along with recent solo exhibitions at Grimm Gallery, London (2023), Hales Gallery, London (2023), Museum of Fine Arts, Dole in France (2023), Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam (2022), and Hales Gallery, New York (2022), Cudahy has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at the ICA, Miami (2022) and FLAG Art Foundation (2021). His work is represented in the collections of the
Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam, among others. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

About Devon Zimmerman
Devon Zimmerman is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. His research focuses on
transatlantic networks that fueled modernism in art and design. Zimmerman has held various positions at the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. He curated or co-curated the exhibitions Deconstructing Power: W. E. B. Du Bois at the 1900 World’s Fair (2022–23); Networks of Modernism, 1898–1968 (2023); Ever Baldwin: Down the Line (2023); and Spontaneous Generation: The Art of Liam Lee (2023). He is also the curator of several
exhibitions, including Anthony Cudahy: Spinneret and Lee Krasner: Geometries of Expression (both 2024).

He edited and contributed to the catalog Ever Baldwin: Down the Line (2023) and Anthony Cudahy: Spinneret (2024) and has been published in journals such as Modernism/modernity. Zimmerman received an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and a PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Ian Lewandowski:
Mighty Real

October 5, 2024 – January 26, 2025

Mighty Real spans four years of photographs and a short film about The Saint, an underground members-only gay discotheque that stood between 1980 and 1988 in New York City’s East Village. Since 2020 Lewandowski has obsessively circled this place, interviewing and photographing surviving members, and extrapolating their recollections into staged constructed photographs. The Saint seems to have resisted its own documentation, perhaps rightfully so, and there is only scant physical evidence of
its existence. The bulk of The Saint’s membership perished due to AIDS-related complications. The exhibition includes a new short film, Phoenix Rising, about the famed planetarium projector that hovered above the perfectly circular dance floor of The Saint, below a giant perforated steel dome.

About Ian Lewandowski:
Ian Lewandowski (b. 1990) is a photographer from Northwest Indiana. His first solo exhibition, Community Board, was exhibited at The Java Project in Brooklyn in 2019. The Ice Palace Is Gone, his body of large-format color portraits made from 2018-19, was published as his first monograph by Magic Hour Press (Montréal) in 2021. My Man Mitch, his body of photographs and photo-based material native to his home state of Indiana, was published by Kult Books (Stockholm) in 2022. He teaches undergraduate and continuing education courses in photography at The New School and Gowanus Darkroom and manages and prints the photo work of Kenny Gardner (1913-2002). He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his husband Anthony Cudahy and their dog Seneca.

Green Family Art Foundation

greenfamilyartfoundation.org