The Henry is excited to welcome Paul Mpagi Sepuya as this year’s Monsen Photography Lecture speaker. This annual lecture brings key makers and thinkers in photographic practice to the Henry. Named after Drs. Elaine and Joseph Monsen, the series is designed to further knowledge about and appreciation for the art of photography.
This lecture will also be live-streamed on the Henry’s
YouTube channel.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography and Associate Professor in Media Arts at the University of California, San Diego. He makes photographs documenting himself and his extended queer community that challenge and deconstruct traditional norms of the studio portraiture genre. Sepuya subverts this genre through his embrace of his own Black, queer gaze, creating intimate images of himself with fellow artists, collaborators, and lovers that are at once extensions of relationships and projections of desire. His work is in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Guggenheim Museums; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Recent exhibitions include solo presentations at Vielmetter Los Angeles and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, a survey of work at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, and a project for the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Most recently, Sepuya’s solo exhibition,
Stage, was on view at Document in Chicago, and a publication co-curated and produced with TBW Books is forthcoming.