Christine Wang
While most of artists emphasize the positive aspects of bringing attention to mass incarceration, Christine Wang, a young Los Angeles painter who studied under Andrea Fraser at the University of California, Los Angeles, is skeptical. “My paintings can’t vote,” Ms. Wang said in a matter-of-fact conversation with the New York Times, adding that her work mostly deals with her feelings of guilt over her privilege as an artist. This is why she decided to help organize art auctions for Critical Resistance, a nonprofit that fights the building of more prisons in Louisiana and California. In her most recent work, Ms. Wang adorned cardboard boxes with gold-leaf lettering that read #dineLA and #1stworldproblems. The hashtags refer to the gentrification of downtown Los Angeles. Shops, restaurants and art galleries have moved in, leading law enforcement to ticket homeless people for carrying open containers of alcohol. If they can’t pay the fines, they end up in jail. “The art world,” she said, “is complicit in the mechanisms of racism and incarceration.”
Christine Wang (b. 1985 Washington, DC) received her M.F.A. from the University of California in Los Angeles in 2013, her B.F.A. from Cooper Union in 2008. Wang has has had solo exhibitions …
While most of artists emphasize the positive aspects of bringing attention to mass incarceration, Christine Wang, a young Los Angeles painter who studied under Andrea Fraser at the University of California, Los Angeles, is skeptical. “My paintings can’t vote,” Ms. Wang said in a matter-of-fact conversation with the New York Times, adding that her work mostly deals with her feelings of guilt over her privilege as an artist. This is why she decided to help organize art auctions for Critical Resistance, a nonprofit that fights the building of more prisons in Louisiana and California. In her most recent work, Ms. Wang adorned cardboard boxes with gold-leaf lettering that read #dineLA and #1stworldproblems. The hashtags refer to the gentrification of downtown Los Angeles. Shops, restaurants and art galleries have moved in, leading law enforcement to ticket homeless people for carrying open containers of alcohol. If they can’t pay the fines, they end up in jail. “The art world,” she said, “is complicit in the mechanisms of racism and incarceration.”
Christine Wang (b. 1985 Washington, DC) received her M.F.A. from the University of California in Los Angeles in 2013, her B.F.A. from Cooper Union in 2008. Wang has has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Reiseburogalerie, Cologne; and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin. She has been an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, The Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, and Chashama North. In 2017, she was nominated for the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize. Wang is currently one of sixteen finalists for SFMOMA's 2019 SECA Art Award. She lives and works in San Francisco.
Text courtesy of the New York Times.