MMDC 3

Angie Keefer

March 16, 2023, 6pm
Café & Bookstore

Artist, teacher, writer Angie Keefer reads from and talks about MMDC 3, her most recent collaboration with BILL (Julie Peeters) based on research in the Kunstenbibliotheek in Gent (Belgium) in spring 2022.

In this project, selected, sequenced, and edited materials from the library take the shape of a visual essay alongside an extended reflection written by Angie. MMDC 3’s source materials speak to the collective destruction of female iconography, knowledge and authority during the ancient cultural transition from polytheism to monotheism, and the ongoing sublimation of the same in contemporary architecture, décor, costume, poetry and performance.

Over approximately 40 pages, each iteration of MMDC presents a user’s portrait of a library, highlighting connections, continuations, and the importance of present interpretation of original materials. The series was initiated by Julie Peeters in 2015, each issue invites an artist to engage with a particular library collection.

page view of MMDC 3: Angie Keefer

Angie Keefer is an artist and teacher. In 2010, she co-founded The Serving Library, a not-for-profit artists’ organization dedicated to publishing, and, via publishing, to building an archive of materials to serve artist-run education. She is the editor of History of an Art School (Konig, 2022), which chronicles fifty years of women students and faculty at the Yale School of Art as told through their testimony. Second Thoughts, a collection of her writings and visual works composed over the last ten years, was published in 2019. Version Space, an ongoing interview series (2019–) convened and edited by Agie, brings graduate art students into conversation with artists working with Artificial Intelligence. Since 2019, she has been developing and facilitating collaborative filmmaking and poetry-writing workshops through public programs at various museums, galleries, and universities.

Solo exhibitions include OHRHUT at Kunstinstituut Melly (2018); First Class, Second Thoughts, Interminable Swell at Plug In ICA (2017); and Area Variance at Kunstverein Munich (2015). Her work has also been included in Greater New York, MoMA PS1 (2016); The Whitney Biennial, New York (2014); and The Liverpool Biennial (2014); while her talks and performances have been staged at Artists Space, New York (2015) and the São Paulo Biennial (2012), among others.

Angie currently teaches at the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem and in the Fine Arts department at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. She studied sculpture at Yale, where she received a BA in 1999.

BILL describes itself as a “magazine without words”. A publishing venture initiated by Brussels-based designer and teacher Julie Peeters, BILL invites artists, or works with unique image archives, to produce carefully edited visual essays combined with experimentation with print materiality. Artist Elena Narbutaite collaborates as associate editor. BILL has produced four magazines, as well as a newspaper, an exhibition catalogue, and three issues in the MMDC series.