William Powhida
| William Powhida | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1976 New York City |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Hunter College |
| Known for | drawing, painting, writing |
| Notable work |
How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality Hashtagclass |
| Movement | postmodern, illustration |
How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality
William Powhida is a visual artist and former art critic born in 1976 in New York City. Powhida's work addresses the contemporary art field.
Topics have included creating an "enemies" list as well as letters addressed to contemporary curators (such as Zach Feuer Gallery), collectors and critics, requesting recognition. His 2009 piece "Relational Wall" includes portraits sourced from Artforum's "Scene & Herd". He also produces portraits drawn entirely from memory.
Powhida received his Master of Fine Arts in painting from Hunter College in January, 2002.
In 2004, Powhida began compiling lists of enemies, rendering portraits of each enemy in graphite and gouache with insults written beneath each face. Few were spared from these lists, and his father is no exception, who is identified by the word "failure" under his portrait. These early works, which were in an exhibition at Platform Gallery as well as galleries in Williamsburg, display the physical evidence of the artist's toil, measured in sweat and coffee stains left on the paper.
He followed up his initial enemy lists with a Seattle Enemies List specific to the Pacific Northwest, targeting Tacoma-based artist Dale Chihuly and the Northern spotted owl among others. The 2006 exhibition at Platform gallery debuted a drawing of over 300 small head studies entitled Everyone I've ever Met from Memory (That I Can Remember), which Brooklyn Rail critic James Kalm described as a "meta-drawing" demonstrating a level of ambition and commitment to carry out the kind of stoner idea many people have but most would not actually do. The exhibition also included hex drawings of then United States president George W. Bush and New York-based gallerist Zach Feuer and a fictitious Artforum Top 10 penned by himself.
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