LACMA, Perrotin, the new Metro and now the Brick: Todd Gray is having a banner year
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Set us as preferred For years, artist Todd Gray kept the two strands of his creative life totally separate from each other.There was his commercial work: shooting bands like the Rolling Stones live on stage and creating album covers for acts like Cheryl Lynn and Barry White.
And there was his fine art, which has generally taken the form of sculptural photographic collages that he creates out of pictures he makes.In 1988, when he was hired to shoot the cover of Bobby Brown’s hit solo album, “Don’t Be Cruel,” he hid the news from his classmates at the California Institute of the Arts, where he was pursuing his master of fine arts.“I didn’t tell anybody,” he recalls.
People who knew the artist from one world didn’t necessarily know about the other — a divide that Gray’s wife, artist Kyungmi Shin, likened to the separation between church and state.That concept serves as the foundation for the artist’s new solo show at the Brick, “Todd Gray: Church and State.” The exhibition, which opened Sunday in East Hollywood, aims to unify both halves of his work.Many of his more than 100 album covers are on view.So are three mural-sized collages that reflect his ongoing investigations into the legacies of colonialism.
This includes two brand new works, as well as a nearly 30-foot piece from 2021, “Sumptuous Memories of Plundering Kings,” never before seen in Los Angeles.It is a commanding work: composed out of overlapping framed photographs stacked upon one another, it links together sites marked by the slave trade, including imperial gardens in Europe and old slave trails in Ghana (where Gray and Shin maintain a residence).On a sunny Thursday morning, I meet the artist at the Brick, where he is in the process of installing his show.
Gray, 72, is a personable, wide-ranging conversationalist.At one moment, he ...