Book Launch & Conversation ✨ Anuradha Vikram and Bean Gilsdorf at 18th Street Arts Center
Decolonizing Culture Book Launch
Conversation with Anuradha Vikram and Bean Gilsdorf
Wednesday, March 28 | 6:30-8pm
18th Street Arts Center
1639 18th Street, Santa Monica, CA
In celebration of her new book Decolonizing Culture, please join 18th Street Arts Center for a book launch and conversation with Artistic Director Anuradha Vikram. She will be joined by artist and editor Bean Gilsdorf.
Published by Art Practical and Sming Sming Books, Anuradha Vikram’s Decolonizing Culture includes seventeen essays that address questions of race and gender parity in contemporary art spaces. All of these essays originated in Vikram’s long-running column #Hashtags on Art Practical (formerly Daily Serving). Through her work, Vikram examines misguided institutional efforts toward inclusivity as well as artists who enact social progress through the creation of art.
She will be joined by artist, writer, and editor Bean Gilsdorf, who served as editor-in-chief of Daily Serving until 2017 and oversaw the publication of #Hashtags from 2013 – 2017.
Anuradha Vikram is a writer, curator, and educator. Her research focus is transnational futurism, combining media studies, theory of globalization, and critical race discourse with modern and contemporary art history. Vikram has guest curated exhibitions for the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Shulamit Nazarian Gallery, Mills College Art Museum, ProArts Gallery, and the DeYoung Museum Artist Studio, and held curatorial positions at UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice, Headlands Center for the Arts, Aicon Gallery, and Richmond Art Center. She has contributed essays to journals including Leonardo, KCET Artbound, Artillery, Hyperallergic, Daily Serving, and OPEN SPACE, the blog of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and to catalogues on the work of Sonya Rapoport, Chitra Ganesh, Ana Mendieta, and Om Prakash, among others. Vikram holds an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BS in Studio Art from New York University. She is a Senior Lecturer in the MFA Social Practice Area Emphasis at Otis College of Art and Design, and a member of the Board of Directors of the College Art Association, where she chairs the Museums Committee.
Bean Gilsdorf is an artist, writer, and editor based in San Francisco. She is the former Editor in Chief of Daily Serving, and her critical writing and interviews have been included in publications such as Artforum, BOMB, and Frieze. Her sculptures and performances delve into the relationship between historical narratives, the iconography of authority, and the ways in which representations influence our perception of cultural values. Her projects have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara; the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts; and the American Textile History Museum; as well as exhibition spaces in Poland, England, Italy, China, and South Africa. Gilsdorf graduated from Simon’s Rock at Bard College with a B.A. in Literature, and received her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including 2015 and 2016 Fulbright Fellowships to Poland, the Bess Winspear Memorial Scholarship at Banff Centre, a Graduate Fellowship at Headlands Center for the Arts, and a Graduate Full Merit Scholarship at California College of the Arts.