Lecture
with Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Recorded on March 12, 2021
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Darkroom Mirror (0X5A0752), 2019, 34 x 51 inches. Image courtesy of the artist, DOCUMENT, Chicago, and Vielmetter Los Angeles
For the 2021 Medium Festival of Photography, Los Angeles-based artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya presented his photographic practice, ranging from foundational images to current projects. Sepuya’s work in photography weaves together histories and possibilities of portraiture, queer and homoerotic networks of production and collaboration, and the material and conceptual potential of blackness at the heart of the medium. Through his portraiture, Sepuya challenges the history of photography and deconstructs traditional portraiture by way of layering, fragmentation, mirror imagery, and the perspective of the black, queer gaze. His interests also include queer literary modernism, questions of artistic responsibility and care regarding representation and refusal.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Image courtesy of the artist.
Biography
Paul Mpagi Sepuya is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography. His work is in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty and Guggenheim Museums, LACMA, MOCA Los Angeles, MoMA, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum, among others. His work has been reviewed in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Art in America, The Nation, and The Guardian, and was featured on the cover of ARTFORUM’s March 2019 issue. Recent museum exhibitions include those at the Guggenheim Museum, the Barbican Centre, the Getty Museum, and a project for the 2019 Whitney Biennial. A survey of work from 2008-2018 was presented at CAM St. Louis and the University of Houston Blaffer Art Museum, accompanied by a monograph published by CAM St. Louis and Aperture Foundation. He is Acting Associate Professor in Media Arts at the University of California, San Diego.