Andrew Suggs is a curator, writer, and artist from Appalachian Tennessee who lives in New York. Andrew’s work and research focuses on art and AIDS, queer art and artists, and performance.
Full CV
Andrew Suggs is a curator, writer, and artist from Appalachian Tennessee who lives in New York. Andrew’s work and research focuses on art and AIDS, queer art and artists, and performance.
Full CV
Kin to these tremors
Co-curator
Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College
December 7 – 17, 2023
Kin to these tremors centers the precariousness of human life. Facing imminent sickness, decay, or death, the figures depicted in this exhibition exude a subtle agency, whether in Maria Lassnig’s self-portraits created near the end of her life or in Lucky DeBellevue’s chenille sculpture evoking the soft architecture of the human form. In other artworks, the body is pried at, shown ill, and found under strain. Together, the works on view maintain a sense of persistence, even as their subjects variously encounter senescence, disease, environmental hazards, or sociopolitical violence. The exhibition asks: Under these conditions, what forms might agency, resistance, and dignity take?
The exhibition’s title originates from “Patient History,” a poem by Travis Chi Wing Lau that describes his experiences of pain as a marker of time. Punctuating the exhibition, a cacophony of metronomes—an artwork by Martin Creed—stands as a persistent reminder of time’s creep.
Featured artists include Vito Acconci, Lucky DeBellevue, Martin Creed, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Maria Lassnig, Adam Putnam, Jo Spence, and Rosemarie Trockel.
Kin to these tremors is curated by Đỗ Tường Linh, Cicely Haggerty, Lekha Jandhyala, Audrey Min, and Andrew Suggs.
Header image: Rosemarie Trockel, Paranoia, 2013, acrystal, perspex, digital print, and acrylic paint, 23 5/8 x 23 5/8 x 3 1/2 inches. Maria Lassnig, Der ewige Weihnachtsmann bringt auch was im Juli, 2002. pencil and acrylic on paper, 17 5/16 x 23 9/16 in. Vito Acconci, Pryings, 1971, video, black & white, sound, 17 minutes. Lucky de Bellevue, Untitled, 2002, chenille stems and tassel, 92 x 29 x 17 in. Adam Putnam, Untitled (Wisp), 2007, silver gelatin print, 20 x 16 in. Jo Spence, Remodeling Photo History: Colonization (from Remodeling Photo History series), 1981-1982, silver gelatin print, 9 15/16 x 7 15/16 in. Martin Creed, Work No. 223, 1999, 3 metronomes beating time, one quickly, one slowly and one neither quickly nor slowly. Felix Gonzalez Torres, “Untitled” (A Walk In the Snow), 1993, c-print, 24 7/8 x 32 in. Rosemarie Trockel, Menopause, 2005, wool, 16 1/2 in. x 116 1/2 in.
Installation views from From the Collection: First Year Curatorial Practice 2023, CCS Bard Galleries, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, December 7 – December 17, 2023. All works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, curated by the M.A. candidates of the Class of 2025. Photo: Olympia Shannon 2023.