“I bought a Champion sports bra in the MoMA shop with the MoMA letters emblazoned on it in a collegiate font. It felt like a ridiculous but inevitable product and I wondered what extra layers there would be when an artist put it on. With charm necklaces of a brain, a heart and a palette around my neck, I did and took pictures of myself. Once you take a selfie, you’re in the realm of the attentions, vanities and insecurities of social media. Not any less so as an artist, a painter, a ‘female’ painter. As Jia Tolentino says in an essay from her book ‘Trick Mirror’, “Women—who, as John Berger wrote, have always been required to maintain an external awareness of their own identity—often navigate online conditions so profitably. It’s the self-calibration that I learned as a girl, as a woman, that has helped me capitalize on ‘having’ to be online.”
American artist Gina Beavers (b.1974, Athens, Greece) lives and works in Newark, New Jersey. She holds a BA in Studio Art and Anthropology from the University of Virginia (1996), an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2000) and an MS in Education from Brooklyn College (2005).
Her most recent institutional exhibitions include ‘Autofiction’ at the Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen, 2021 and ‘The Life I Deserve’ at MoMA PS1, New York, curated by Oliver Schultz, 2019. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in the USA and abroad, among them several in Sweden: ‘Works from the Gullringsbo Konstsamling’ at Carl Kostyál Stockholm in 2022, ‘Friends and Friends of Friends’ at the Schlossmuseum Linz, Austria, curated by Oli Epp in 2020, ‘Malmö Sessions’ at Carl Kostyál in collaboration with Erika Hellman and Svenska Has AB in 2019 and ‘Summer Show’ at Carl Kostyál Stockholm, curated by Johan Deurell & Oscar Carlson in 2017.
