Michael Slenske in dialogue with artist Roy Thurston followed by a reception at the Benton Museum of Art at ½ûÂþÌìÌÃ. !
ROY THURSTON (b. 1949, Long Island, NY) has been creating sculptural color fields for over four decades. He received his MFA from the Claremont Graduate School, now Claremont Graduate University, in 1974. Thurston has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, and his art now resides in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), and several galleries and private collections worldwide. Thurston is currently based in Los Angeles.
MICHAEL SLENSKE is a Los Angeles-based writer, editor and curator. He has been a contributing writer and editor at Los Angeles, Modern Painters, Art + Auction, Galerie, Architectural Digest, Interiors, and the Los Angeles Times's DesignLA and served as the editor-at-large of CULTURED and LALA, which he helped to launch. His profile of in the January 2022 issue of Los Angeles magazine was awarded a ; his report on the was nominated for a 2022 ; and his recently His work has also been included in numerous artist books—for Abraham Cruzvillegas, Bari Ziperstein, Kenny Scharf, and Jose Dávila among others—and his feature writing has appeared in: New York, W, WSJ., Wallpaper*, AUTRE, Sotheby's, Gagosian Quarterly, The Magazine Antiques, Art & Antiques, Interview, Art in America, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Garage, Mother Jones, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, , vulture.com, and artsy.net. Recently, Slenske organized a series of artist commissions for the and the.
Since 2018, Slenske has also run the artist pop-up and happening The Street & The Shop (la), which has been staged at various galleries, studios, and architecturally significant spaces around Los Angeles including the Paramount Backlot as part of Frieze LA, Tin Flats, Arnoldi Studio, Witke Shop, and the Bradbury Building in collaboration with NeueHouse. The Street & The Shop also launched a collaboration between during LA Art Week 2024.
Slenske has curated the group shows and at Wilding Cran Gallery; at a Frank Gehry loft overlooking Venice Beach with The Landing Gallery; ; at Diane Rosenstein Gallery; 2024; and . He has also organized solo shows for , , , , Fawn Rogers , , , and and co-curated the Los Angeles edition of with Warren Neidich, Renee Petropoulos, and Anuradha Vikram.
