Conversation: John Sonsini and David Pagel
On the occasion of his exhibition Still Life Paintings and forthcoming book, John Sonsini speaks with critic and curator David Pagel. The event is FREE to attend, and limited seating will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.
John Sonsini was born in Rome, NY, in 1950 and received his BA from California State University Northridge in 1975. His work will be the subject of a book written by David Pagel and published by Radius Books, forthcoming in 2024. Recent solo exhibitions include “A Day’s Labor: Portraits by John Sonsini,” Art Design & Architecture Museum, and “Daywork: Portraits” Long Beach Museum of Art. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Hudson River Museum, Tang Teaching Museum, S Phillips Collection, the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, the Cantor Arts Center, the National Portrait Gallery,. and at the Whitney Museum of American Art,. His work is in the public collections of the Autry Museum of the American West, AD&A Museum, U Addison Gallery of American Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, The Broad Art Foundation, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Cornell University, The Frances Young Tang Museum, Hammer Museum, Henry Art Gallery, High Museum of Art, Long Beach Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Marieluise Hessel Collection, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, McNay Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Mulvane Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Palm Springs Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Weatherspoon Museum, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.
David Pagel is an art critic, curator, and professor of art theory and history at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, where he has taught since 1994. His reviews and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Art issues., Flash Art, and Art in America. Recent publications include Jim Shaw, Lund Humphries, London, 2019 and Talking Beauty: A Conversation Between Joseph Raffael and David Pagel about Art, Love, Death, and Creativity, Zero+, Claremont, 2018, as well as monographs on Ted Larsen (Radius Books) and Augustine Kofie (Zero+), and catalog essays on Jay DeFeo, Brenda Goodman, Gajin Fujita, and Dion Johnson. Pagel has organized more than 90 exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Australia, including, most recently, “Brown Letham: Passion and Paradox (and a little night music),” and “tbd: Jay Erker, Tony Larson, John Mills, Holly Perez, Marissa Reyes, and Jenny Ziomek,” both at Claremont Graduate University.
Pagel is working on a book on John Sonsini, scheduled to be published in 2024. He earned a B.A. in Modern Thought and Literature, with Honors and Distinction in the Humanities, from Stanford University in 1985 and an M.A. in Fine Arts from Harvard University in 1987. He was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Contemporary Arts Criticism in 1990, a Macgeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne in 2002, and a Thousand People Program Fellowship in Tianjin, China, in 2018. A self-taught diorama builder and an avid cyclist, Pagel is a seven-time winner of the California Triple Crown.
Limited Seating Available | Guest Parking Available.