Aria Dean is an American critic, artist, and curator. Dean is the assistant curator of net art and digital culture at Rhizome. Her writings have appeared in various art publications including Artforum, e-flux, The New Inquiry, Art in America, and Topical Cream. Dean has exhibited internationally at venues such as Foxy Production and American Medium in New York, Chateau Shatto in Los Angeles, and Arcadia Missa in London. Dean also co-directs As It Stands LA, an artists project space that opened in 2015. Dean lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles.
Early life and education
Dean was born in 1993. Dean graduated from Oberlin College in 2015.
Work
After graduating from Oberlin College, Dean was appointed social media coordinator for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. In September 2016, ARTnews announced that Dean had been appointed assistant curator of net art and digital culture for Rhizome. Dean works to help Rhizome's efforts to preserve, present, and re-perform works of net art from the 1980s to the present day, organize events, and publish articles online. Dean's first solo exhibition, Baby Is A Cool Machine, opened at American Medium in 2017. The exhibition, according to the gallery's website, "hones in on her materially-driven examination of the situation of blackness in the United States." The show was critically praised by James Hannaham at 4Columns and selected by Kat Herriman as a Critic's Picks for Artforum. In 2018, Aria Dean was named one of Cultured Magazine's 30 artists under 35. In late 2017, Dean curated New Black Portraitures as part of Rhizome's Net Art Anthology. The online exhibition included visual artists Manuel Arturo Abreu, Hamishi Farah, Juliana Huxtable, Rindon Johnson, Pastiche Lumumba, N-Prolenta, Sondra Perry, and Redeem Pettaway and, "explored the changing status of black portraiture in relation to strategies for visibility, concealment, and self-representation online." In early 2018, Dean wrote and directed a play for the Swiss Institute in New York. Her second solo exhibition, lonesome crowded west, features sculptural objects and installation that "shuttle between experiences as personally lived and the sweeping generalizations of the media and historical modernism" according to critic Matt Stromberg of HyperAllergic. In an interview with Travis Diehl, Dean reveals that the clay in her painting-like sculpture is from Mississippi that the series of works speaks to her "proximity and distance in relation to that place." Other works featured crowd shots from hip-hop videos, a two-channel installation that explore the loneliness of black existence in predominantly-western contexts.
"They index the sort of relationship that I was interested in, subsuming oneself into this particularly black crowd where individuals that already don’t exist so distinctly as “proper” western individual subjects get subsumed into this other object. The show title is from a Modest Mouse album, The Lonesome Crowded West, and I’m not a huge Modest Mouse fan, but I like the album. I latched onto that phrase. “The Lonesome Crowded West” is my situation in relationship to the objects. I am the lonesome crowd, in the west…"
Exhibitions
Solo exhibitions
lonesome crowded west, Château Shatto, Los Angeles, 2018
Gut Pinch, The Sunroom, Richmond, VA 2018
Baby is a Cool Machine, American Medium, New York, NY 2017
Selected two-person exhibitions
White Ppl Think I'm Radical, Arcadia Missa, London, U.K., 2017
Condo New York: Château Shatto, Los Angeles, presents: Jean Baudrillard, Body by Body, Aria Dean, Jacqueline de Jong, Foxy Productions, New York, NY 2017
At this stage, Château Shatto, Los Angeles, CA 2017
Selected lectures/presentations
"Notes on BlacceleraLon," Reed College, September 1, 2017
