Michael Slenske in dialogue with artist Roy Thurston followed by a reception at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. Register for the event!
ROY THURSTON (b. 1949, Long Island, NY) has been creating sculptural color fields for over four decades. He received his MFA from the Claremont Graduate School, now Claremont Graduate University, in 1974. Thurston has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, and his art now resides in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), and several galleries and private collections worldwide. Thurston is currently based in Los Angeles.
MICHAEL SLENSKE is a Los Angeles-based writer, editor and curator. He has been a contributing writer and editor at Los Angeles, Modern Painters, Art + Auction, Galerie, Architectural Digest, Interiors, and the Los Angeles Times's DesignLA and served as the editor-at-large of CULTURED and LALA, which he helped to launch. His profile of Celeste Dupuy-Spencer in the January 2022 issue of Los Angeles magazine was awarded a National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award from the Los Angeles Press Club; his report on the censoring of Ben Sakoguchi’s work at the Orange County Museum of Art’s California Biennial was nominated for a 2022 SoCal Journalism Award; and his April 2023 profile of Henry Taylor for LA Mag was named a finalist for the 16th NAEJ Awards and recently won a SoCal Journalism Award. His work has also been included in numerous artist books—for Abraham Cruzvillegas, Bari Ziperstein, Kenny Scharf, and Jose Dávila among others—and his feature writing has appeared in: New York, W, WSJ., Wallpaper*, AUTRE, Sotheby's, Gagosian Quarterly, The Magazine Antiques, Art & Antiques, Interview, Art in America, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Garage, Mother Jones, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, artinfo.com, vulture.com, and artsy.net. Recently, Slenske organized a series of artist commissions for the Oscars issue of The Hollywood Reporter and the first two issues of The WrapBook.
Since 2018, Slenske has also run the artist pop-up and happening The Street & The Shop (@thestreetandtheshopla), which has been staged at various galleries, studios, and architecturally significant spaces around Los Angeles including the Paramount Backlot as part of Frieze LA, Tin Flats, Arnoldi Studio, Witke Shop, and the Bradbury Building in collaboration with NeueHouse. The Street & The Shop also launched a collaboration between Lizzie Mandler Jewelry and Vincent Pocsik during LA Art Week 2024.
Slenske has curated the group shows L.A. On Fire and Water & Flower at Wilding Cran Gallery; Object Lessons at a Frank Gehry loft overlooking Venice Beach with The Landing Gallery; Storm Before the Calm at Praz-Delavallade Los Angeles; Signal to Noise at Diane Rosenstein Gallery; Northern Exposure (co-curated with Margot Ross) at the Canadian Consulate in Los Angeles during LA Art Week 2024; and The Art of Oscar at Jeffrey Deitch. He has also organized solo shows for Aryo Toh Djojo, Charles Arnoldi, Emily Marchand, Eric McHenry, Fawn Rogers Hely Omar Gonzalez, Jeremy Shockley, Martin Nuñez, and Robert Gunderman and co-curated the Los Angeles edition of DRIVE-BY-ART with Warren Neidich, Renee Petropoulos, and Anuradha Vikram.
