Liz Collins: Mischief

Artist Liz Collins and curator Julia Bryan-Wilson join Rail contributor Ksenia M. Soboleva for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Rebecca Teich.

Liz Collins —— Multimedia artist Liz Collins works fluidly between art and design, with emphasis and expertise in textiles. Liz’s solo exhibitions and installations have been presented at Museum of Arts and Design, the Tang Museum, Luis de Jesus Los Angeles, among others. Collins’ honors include a USA Fellowship, a MacColl Johnson Fellowship, Foundation for/ Contemporary Arts & ArtistRelief grants, Drawing Center Open Sessions. In 2020, the Tang Museum released Liz Collins Energy Field, Collins’ first major publication. Next year several of her works will be included in Lynne Cooke’s upcoming survey show about textiles and abstract art, and an expanded version of Mischief, Collins’ mid-career retrospective at Touchstones Rochdale will open at the RISD Museum in 2025 with a major publication.

Julia Bryan-Wilson —— Curator and critic Julia Bryan-Wilson, PhD, is Professor of LGBTQ Art History at Columbia University. She is the author of multiple books, including Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago, 2017, a New York Times best art book of the year and winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award, the Robert Motherwell Book Award, and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize). Her book on Louise Nevelson is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2023. She was a 2019-20 Guggenheim Fellow, and her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, and others.

Ksenia M. Soboleva —— New York-based writer and art historian Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva specializes in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation titled “Fragments: Art, AIDS, and Lesbian Identity in the United States.” Her writings have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, art-agenda, and various exhibition catalogues. She has curated exhibitions at Candice Madey Gallery, La MaMa Galleria, and Assembly Room. Soboleva was the 2020-2021 Jan and Marica Vilcek Curatorial Fellow at the Guggenheim Museum, where she assisted in organizing the Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks exhibition. She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and LGBTQ+ History at the New York Historical Society.

Rebecca Teich —— Writer and curator Rebecca Teich is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. The co-curator of Desperate Living Reading Series with Ry Dunn, she curated the Fall 2018 and 2019 Segue Reading Series, and was Artists Space’s teaching-poet-in-residence 2019–2021. Teich’s writing has been featured in The Tiny Mag, No, Dear Magazine, poets.org, Nightboat Resonances, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Baest Journal, and elsewhere. Teich’s first chapbook, Caffeine Chronicles (2021), was published by Portable Press @ YoYo Labs.