ALBANY, NY.- The University Art Museum announces the opening of three new exhibitions: Race, Love, and Labor: New Work from the Center for Photography at Woodstock’s Artist-in-Residency Program; Keltie Ferris: Body Prints and Paintings and Gerard & Kelly: Performance Documents.

The museum’s first floor will feature Race, Love, and Labor, an exhibition of photography by twenty artists who have participated in a unique residency program for artists of color at the Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW), New York. Culling from CPW’s collection, guest curator Sarah Lewis selected photographs, artist books, and video by artists “whose fierce portrayals of the consequences of work on well-being and human dignity sears the soul with a light that Walker Evans could have never anticipated, to images by Deana Lawson who expertly shows a hard won self-possession through her pioneering portrayal of nude forms.” The artists in the exhibition are: Endia Beal, William Cordova, Isaac Diggs, Caleb Ferguson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Nikita Gale, Gerard H. Gaskin, Eyakem Gulilat, Tommy Kha, Kathya Maria Landeros, Deana Lawson, Alma Leiva, Yijun Pixy Liao, Gina Osterloh, Dawit L. Petros, Tim Portlock, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Xaviera Simmons, Joanna Tam, and Preston Wadley.

This exhibition, curated by Sarah Lewis, cultural historian, curator, and Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, was organized by and first presented at The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz; it will travel to the Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, Staller Center for the Arts at Stony Brook University.

The second floor exhibition, Keltie Ferris: Body Prints and Paintings will pay special focus on the evolution of Ferris's body prints from singular black and white impressions to multiple and increasingly colorful serial progressions. Also featured will be paintings from a cross-section of Ferris's career including the debut of her largest painting to date. Ferris is best known for visceral and elegant abstract paintings built up in layers of spray gun washes, rubbed-out pastels, and palette knife zips. For the last three years, the body prints have become a significant extension of her layered approach to image-making. Different in emotional tenor than the paintings, the prints provide Ferris with an understanding of her paintings at their most elemental. To make the prints she layers pigment onto paper that retains the oiled imprint of her clothed or unclothed body. From air, to pigment, to trace, the prints require a physicality that literally embeds the artist 'in' the work as its indisputable maker. As she works back and forth between the body prints and the paintings, Ferris is expanding her pursuit of a fully engaged gestural presence without the conventions of the hand.

Keltie Ferris was born in 1977 in Louisville, Kentucky. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Selected solo exhibitions include Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York City (2015); Keltie Ferris: Doomsday Boogie at Santa Monica Museum in Santa Monica, California (2014); Body Prints at Chapter NY in New York City (2014); KF+CM 4EVER at Horton Gallery in New York City (2010); and Man Eaters at Kemper Museum in Kansas City, Missouri (2009). Selected group exhibitions include If Color Could Kill at Salena Gallery of Long Island University in New York (2016); Abstract America Today at Saatchi Gallery in London (2014); Wanton Mobility, curated by Arielle Bier at KLEMM’s in Berlin (2014); 2014 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at Academy of Arts & Letters in New York City (2014); and Raw/Cooked: Ulrike Muller at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York (2012).

Gerard & Kelly: Performance Documents (Nancy Hyatt Liddle Gallery) will draw from the projects of collaborative artists Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly over the past five years. This rare exhibition of performance documentation charts the prevailing concerns around history, memory and the present tense of performance that have come to define Gerard & Kelly’s practice. Screened as a single-channel video projection, these “documents” underscore the artists’ inquiry into the relationships between performers and spectators, language and movement, intimacy and public space. The selected videos demonstrate Gerard & Kelly’s continued interest in broadening their scope beyond dance to include film, text and visual art, which provide a larger and more unstructured palette on which to grapple with the questions that interest them, while also giving viewers the opportunity to consider the expanded field of dance in museums.

Brennan Gerard (b. 1978 in Piqua, Ohio) and Ryan Kelly (b. 1979 in Drums, Pennsylvania) live and work in Los Angeles, California. Solo exhibitions include P.O.L.E. (People, Objects, Language, Exchange) at the New Museum in New York (2015); Timelining at the Kitchen in New York City (2014); Kiss Solo at Kate Werble Gallery in New York City (2013). Group exhibitions include The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City (2015); The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2014); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in Los Angeles (2013); CSS Bard, Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2012); and Art in General in New York City (2010). Their performances have been presented by Dancespace Project at St. Marks Church, Park Avenue Armory, Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York City.