Join the artist Paul Pfeiffer in conversation with Yasufumi Nakamori, Director of Asia Society Museum and Vice President of Arts and Culture. Pfeiffer’s image-based work is informed by American popular culture, including film and broadcast sporting events. He has been the center of an acclaimed mid-career survey exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles since fall 2023, which will travel to Guggenheim Bilbao and opening on November 30, 2024. In this conversation, he will speak about his journey as an artist, as well as his role in the community in mentoring and nurturing younger generation of artists. 

This conversation will be followed by a reception with the artist, and the MOCA exhibition catalogue, Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom (MACK, 2024) signed by the artist will be available for purchase. 

This program is made possible with the support from the Department of Art and Art History at Hunter College, the City University of New York.

Artist Biography

Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, Hawaii) is an artist living and working in New York City, who has been making work in video, photography, installation, and sculpture since the late 1990s. Known for his innovative manipulation of digital media, Pfeiffer recasts the visual language of mass media spectacle to examine how images shape our awareness of ourselves and the world. Sampling footage from YouTube and other sources, he uses these to plumb the depths of contemporary culture, assessing its racial, religious, and technological dimensions. At the same time, Pfeiffer's objects and images function diachronically, establishing profound genealogies that connect contemporary culture and its many particularities to the long, seemingly remote histories of art, media, religion, and human consciousness.

Pfeiffer has had many one-person exhibitions at Whitney Museum of American Art (2001); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003 and 2017-18); the National Gallery of Victoria,Melbourne (2005); MUSAC León, Spain (2008); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009); Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2015); Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil (2018); and The Athenaeum, Athens, GA (2023). He has presented work inmajor international exhibitions, most recently the Performa Biennial and the Honolulu Biennialin 2019 and the Toronto Biennial and Seoul Mediacity Biennale in 2022. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of AmericanArt, New York; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; M+, Hong Kong; The Guggenheim; Tate Modern; and the Pinault Collection, among many others.

Pfeiffer’s first large-scale retrospective of his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023-24) will travel to the Guggenheim Bilbao and open November, 2024.

Yasufumi Nakamori is Director of Asia Society Museum and Vice President of Arts and Culture at Asia Society.