Artist Conversation: Grant Mooney and Alan Ruiz

Tuesday, November 12, 2024 at 4:30pm
Reading Room, South Gallery, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery

Free and open to the public

This talk brings together Grant Mooney and Alan Ruiz, both artists have concurrent solo exhibitions in central Connecticut this fall. Mooney's and Ruiz’s practices overlap in their responsive consideration of the materials of a site. This talk will be moderated by Benjamin Chaffee '00, curator of Grant Mooney’s calcis, currently on view in the North Gallery of the Ezra and Cecile Zilhka Gallery.

calcis continues Mooney’s sculptural practice of attending to the hyper-relational way materials shape and are shaped by their proximal surroundings. Working with the received conditions of the space, Mooney’s work departs from the materiality of the gallery’s limestone bricks. Though carefully attuned to the social extensions and technological production of this material, Mooney’s approach to sculpture is articulated through forms of ornamentation and touch, paying close attention to the formal and dynamic relationship between often overlooked elements of an environment. For Mooney, artworks are deeply entangled entities. The exhibition is on display at Wesleyan from September 17 through December 8, 2024. 

Alan Ruiz’s solo exhibition Risk Management, running from October 4 through January 19, 2025, is the 195th MATRIX exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut. Ruiz critically examines the built environment, directing our attention to the perceptual, political, and unconscious functions of architectural space. At the Wadsworth, Ruiz turns his focus on the unrealized 2000 proposal by Dutch architectural firm UNStudio to radically reimagine the museum’s campus. With an installation of new site-specific sculptures, Ruiz invites viewers to consider changing ideas around social institutions, audience, politics, and self-image, as well as the attempt to find a form to contain these shifting collective understandings. More information about the Wadsworth Atheneum exhibition is available here.

Grant Mooney (b. 1990, Seattle, WA) lives and works in New York. He studied art at Central Saint Martins, London and California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Mooney’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis (2024), Progetto, Lecce, Italy (2023), Miguel Abreu Gallery (2022/2023), Konrad Fischer Galerie, Berlin (2021), Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco (2019), Kunstverein Braunschweig (2017), and as part of the SECA Art Awards at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017), Pied-à-terre, Ottsville, PA (2015), and the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2015). His work has been included in group exhibitions at Konrad Fischer Galerie, Düsseldorf, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2024), the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2022), Braunsfelder, Cologne (2022), Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2021), the ICA, Los Angeles (2021), Yale Union, Portland (2020), Stadtgalerie Bern (2020), SculptureCenter, New York (2020), Fondation D’entreprise Ricard, Paris (2017), and Kunst-Werke Berlin (2017), White Flag Project Library, St. Louis (2016), Futura Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague (2016), and Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco (2016), among others.

Alan Ruiz (b. Mexico City) is an artist whose work examines the way space is produced as both material and ideology.  Through site reflexive exhibitions, his work explores the way social institutions, and the architecture that contains them, may reflect social hierarchies, relations of authority, and unconscious processes. He has held recent solo exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2024), CCS Hessel Museum of Art, Annadale-on-Hudson, NY (2022) and the Kitchen, NYC (2021). His practice extends into the discursive form of writing, public lectures, and group workshops. He has presented talks and participated in public programs at the Chinati Foundation, Dia: Beacon, Kunstverein München, Artist Institute, and SculptureCenter. His writing has been published in journals including ArtForum, Transatlantique, BOMB Magazine, and Movement Research Performance Journal. Ruiz is a recipient of a 2019 Creative Capital Award and a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Architecture. He currently teaches at the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons, Eugene Lang College, The New School, and Hunter College. In addition to his academic roles, Ruiz is a certified Group Relations consultant and president of the New York Center for the Study of Groups, Organizations, and Social Systems. He received an MFA from Yale University and was a fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.