Program
Whitney Kimball presented artist talks from two contemporary performance powerhouses who orchestrate large-scale collective spectacles in galleries, museums, opera houses, and performance festivals, Jeanine Oleson and Jaimie Warren.
Artists Statements
In a particularly captivating performance from her recent New Museum residency, “Hear, Here”, Jeanine Oleson’s Rocky Horror Opera Show staged live opera performers before a crowd of hardcore opera fans. Audience members were encouraged to applaud, throw roses, and sing along to their favorite parts; imagine Bizet’s “Toreador” with hoots and whistles from rows of people in 18th century outfits. Absurd parlays like the above often characterize Jeanine Oleson’s performances, sculptural objects, and photographs– from bringing Hilton Kramer and Clement Greenberg to a “Womanhouse” panel, to fusing Harold Camping’s apocalypse radio sermons with arias from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. Oleson is an award-winning photographer, performance/video artist and educator.
Jeanine Oleson Video Documentation
Jaimie Warren Video Documentation
Jaimie Warren is an artist, photographer, performer, and the co-creator/co-director of the traveling variety show “Whoop Dee Doo”. Founded in 2008 in Kansas City, the show travels the country and creates unlikely collaborations of local talent– drag queens with clogging troupes; high school students and Peruvian folkloric dancers; American Indian drummers with local scientists; and so forth. This is all performed with puppets and sets designed by, and before an expectant audience of, children. Warren also has amassed a large following for her own work, photo portraits and murals inspired by scenes from art history, pop culture, and the Internet– making for such titles as “Lasagna Del Ray”, and “Pretzel Rod Stewart”. She is represented by The Hole Gallery in New York, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, i-D, the Huffington Post, New York Magazine, Paper, and Dazed & Confused. In 2014, Warren co-produced, co-directed, and co-starred in her own video special, B.A.L.F., for VICE.
Photo Gallery
Bios
Jeanine Oleson is an artist whose practice incorporates interdisciplinary uses of photography, performance, film/video, and installation work. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Rutgers University. Oleson has exhibited at venues including: Exit Art, NY; Beta-Local, San Juan, PR; X-Initiative, NY; Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY; L.A.C.E., Los Angeles; Monya Rowe Gallery, NY; Samson Projects, Boston, MA; John Connelly Presents, NY; H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City Museum of Art, MO; Participant, Inc., NY; MOMA/PS 1, Queens, NY; Pumphouse Gallery, London; White Columns, NY; and Art in General, NY. Oleson has received a Franklin Furnace Fellowship and a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant in 2009; Brooklyn Arts Council Community Arts Regrant, 2008 and 2009; and Professional Development Fellowship, College Art Association, 1999-2000. She’s also been in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Smack Mellon Studio Program, NY. Oleson is an Assistant Professor of Photography in the Department of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons the New School for Design.
Jaimie Warren is a photographer and performance artist living in Kansas City, MO and Brooklyn, NY. She is the recipient of the 2014 Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer, and has had a solo artist monograph published by Aperture. She has exhibited solo projects at The Hole and Higher Pictures (NYC), the Kemper Museum (Kansas City, MO) and the Miami Dade College Museum of Art (Miami, FL). Her work has been featured in numerous publications including the New York Times, i-D, the Huffington Post, New York Magazine, Paper, and Dazed & Confused. Warren is a recipient of the Lighton International Artist Exchange Program grant, the Rocket Projects grant funded by the Charlotte Street Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and a United States Presidential Scholars Program Teacher Recognition Award.
Whoop Dee Doo has created commissioned projects and events for organizations including the Smart Museum (Chicago), Deitch Projects (New York), The Kemper Museum for Contemporary Art (Kansas City), Loyal Gallery (Sweden), the Time-Based Arts Festival/Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland, OR), the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (Philadelphia, PA), Luminaria (San Antonio, TX), City Arts/Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD), POP Montreal and DHC Contemporary Art (Montreal), and Miami Dade College and LegalArt (Miami, FL).
