The Un-Private Collection: Nathaniel Mary Quinn + Donna Augustin-Quinn
Overview
In conjunction with Since Unveiling: Selected Acquisitions of a Decade, The Broad presents an Un-Private Collection conversation with Broad collection artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn and Donna Augustin-Quinn, actress, director, writer, and producer.
Quinn grew up in Chicago and had a childhood interlaced with experiences of poverty, abandonment, and loss. In his art, he collects materials from many sources—the internet, magazines, and old family albums—to create abstracted faces of those he has lost. The resulting works of charcoal, gouache, and pastel resemble collage but are rendered by hand.
Quinn's Pure Insecurity (2019) and C’mo’ And Walk With Me (2019), recently acquired by the museum, are featured in Since Unveiling: Selected Acquisitions of a Decade, a new collection exhibition opening on Saturday, November 20, 2021.
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Tickets to the event include access to the museum's galleries.
An ASL interpreter will be provided.
Bios
Nathaniel Mary Quinn
In his collage-like composite portraits derived from sources both personal and found, Nathaniel Mary Quinn probes the relationship between visual memory and perception. Fragments of images taken from online sources, fashion magazines, and family photographs come together to form hybrid faces and figures that are at once neo-Dada and adamantly realist, evoking the intimacy and intensity of a face-to-face encounter. Quinn received a BA in art and psychology from Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 2000, and an MFA from New York University in 2002. After completing his MFA, Quinn moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he continued to paint while working as a teacher for at-risk youth. He has since been both expanding and refining a process in which he collects images from mass media that call out to him, divesting them of their original cultural context and repurposing them in a purely aesthetic manner. Using oil paint, charcoal, gouache, oil stick, and pastel, he meticulously re-creates details and facial features from these found images, covering parts of the composition as he works. Quinn’s first solo museum exhibition, This Is Life, was presented at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin, from December 2018 to March 2019. He is represented by Gagosian and has had solo exhibitions in their New York and Beverly Hills, and London locations, and has also had solo exhibitions at Almine Rech in Brussels, Belgium and Aspen, CO; Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, IL; and M+B Gallery in Los Angeles, among others. His work is in the public collections of numerous institutions, including Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; The Broad, Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Norton Museum of Art and Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and Studio Museum in Harlem and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
Donna Augustin-Quinn
Donna Augustin-Quinn is a British-born actress, director, writer, and producer who lives in Brooklyn, New York. She has successfully produced a critically acclaimed theater play, Shoot 2 Win, and two comedic web series, The Show for the BBC and YouTube show Dirty Laundry. Her first short film Magpie Sings the Blues became an official selection at London’s Black Urban Film Festival in 2014. After that, she wrote, directed, and starred in the short film Bodega, which screened at many film festivals including, Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, Black Harvest Film Festival in Chicago, Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, and HBO’s American Black Film Festival in the Emerging Directors category. She’s currently developing two feature films, Quinn and The Formidable Mr. Foresythe, and several TV projects. In addition, Donna continues to enjoy acting; her recent roles include NBC’s yearly comedy showcase, Netflix’s It’s Bruno, and Starz’s new show Hightown.
About The Un-Private Collection
The Un-Private Collection is an ongoing series of public programs The Broad began in September 2013. The series introduces audiences to the museum’s 2,000-work contemporary art collection by showcasing stories behind the collection, the collectors and the artists. Since launching the program, The Broad has brought together a variety of artists whose works are in the Broad collection in conversation with cultural leaders, including Mark Bradford with Katy Siegel, Shirin Neshat with Christy MacLear, Jeff Koons with John Waters, Takashi Murakami with Pico Iyer, Eric Fischl with Steve Martin, John Currin with James Cuno, Kara Walker with Ava DuVernay and architect Elizabeth Diller with Eli Broad, Joanne Heyler and Paul Goldberger. Talks have been held at venues throughout Los Angeles, making the programming available to audiences across the city. Conversations are live-streamed and full videos of past talks are available online. The Un-Private Collection series is part of the Broad collection’s 30-year mission to make contemporary art accessible to the widest possible audience.
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