Artist's Biography

Walead Beshty (b. 1976, London, UK) is an artist and writer living and working in Los Angeles. Beshty holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art. His solo exhibitions include: Popular Mechanics, Wallspace, New York, NY (2009); Walead Beshty: Legibility on Colored Backgrounds, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2009); Pulleys, Cogwheels, Mirrors, and Windows, The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI (2009); Passages, LA><ART, Los Angeles, CA (2009); Industrial Pictures, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, Belgium (2008); Hammer Project: Walead Beshty, The Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2006); Walead Beshty, P.S.1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY (2004).

Selected group exhibitions include, Walead Beshty, Kelley Walker, Christopher Williams, China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles, CA (2009); Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009, Tate Britain, London, UK (2009); The Space of the Work and the Place of the Object, The Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY (2009); The Photographic Object: between sculpture and photography, The Photographer’s Gallery, London, UK (2009); The Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2008); The California Biennial, The Orange County Museum of Art (2008/2006); Now You See It, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2008), Objects of Value, Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL (2008); Signs of the Times, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles, CA (2008); the sickness of the hunt, Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice, France (2008);  Word Event (After George Brecht), Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2008); Meanwhile in Baghdad, The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL (2008); Between Two Deaths—curated by Ellen Blumenstein and Felix Ensslin, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2007); Looking Back: The White Columns Annual, White Columns, New York (2006).  In September of 2009, Beshty will be included in New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Selected publications include, The Photograph as Contemporary Art, (Charlotte Cotton ed., Thames and Hudson, 2009), The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography, (Lyle Rexler, Aperture Books, 2009), Vitamin PH (Phaidon Press, 2007). In the Fall of 2009 a monograph of his work is due out on JRP/Ringier.

He is a regular contributor to Texte zur Kunst and Afterall Journal, and has written for Artforum, Aperture, Art Review, and Art on Paper, among others. He has curated several exhibitions, including The Gold Standard, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, with Robert Nickas in 2006. Between 2003 and 2007, he served on the faculty of UCLA, CalArts, UCIrvine, and USC; and in the 2007-2008 academic year, he was the visiting professor in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the Fall of 2008, he joined the core faculty of the Graduate Art Department of Art Center College of Design as Associate Professor.