Courtney Malick is a writer, editor and curator based between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Her work focuses on video, new media, sculpture, performance, installation and the intersections therein. Her work parses current sociological issues, behavioral tendencies and cultural shifts by producing research-based exhibitions, publications and discursive events.
Malick received her MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (NY) in 2011 and her BA in Art History from the New School University (NY) in 2006. Since 2009 she has curated exhibitions, performances, screenings, and various other kinds of discursive events in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco, while also writing on contemporary art for a wide range of publications.
WRITING/EDITING
Malick is a contemporary art essayist, critic and editor. A founding member of DIS Magazine in 2009, she has gone on to contribute to art publications such as Arforum, Art in America, Art Papers, CURA Magazine, Flash Art and Kaleidoscope, amongst many others. Additionally, she has been commissioned to write research-based texts for institutional organizations such as the California Institute for the Arts, Daata Editions (in association with the Zabludowicz Collection), and Victoria and Albert Museum. Malick has also edited a number of catalogs and print publications, such as, L.A. Goes Live published by LACE and the Getty Museum (Los Angeles), Science and Surrealism, which accompanied the historical group exhibition of the same title that took place at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco in 2015. That same year she also edited the catalog essay for the exhibition, Man Ray and Sherrie Levine: A Dialog Through Objects, Images and Ideas, curated by Larry List, that took place at Jablonca Maruani Mercier Gallery in Brussels, as well as the Spring 2016 issue of the Miami Rail magazine.
Malick’s forthcoming memoir, L.O.T.P. (Life of the Party), chronicles the antics of downtown Manhattan in the early and mid-aughts, just as smartphones and social media would change being young and partying forever. L.O.T.P. dishes on the ensuing cultural wasteland of post-internet art and the slew of artists, designers, musicians, DJs, models, nodels, and actors that she counts amongst her closest friends, and who dominated the city’s sordid and glittering nightlife of the time.
The book is replete with jaunty antics of the glittering overindulgences that Malick’s cohort regularly got themselves into while out on the town, and doesn’t fail to generously dishe on the most critical of gossip; what everyone was wearing, who was blowing who, how friendships sparked dynamic collaborations, and all of the raucous mishaps and hilarious scenarios that she found herself navigating while venturing into the harsh realities of the contemporary art world along the way.
PUBLIC SPEAKING
Malick also works frequently as a public speaker, having moderated several panels at art venues, including an event on new media strategies and advancements in technology tht wa organized by ArtTable and took place at Steve Turner gallery in Los Angeles, which included panelists; artist Jeff Baij (Los Angeles); curator, Ceci Moss (Los Angeles); curator, Gene McHugh (Los Angeles); artist and programmer, Ryder Ripps (New York); and artist Michael Staniak (Australia). Malick also moderated a panel talk during the Photo LA fair i 2017 that included panelists; artist and writer, Lucy Chinen (Los Angeles); Rhizome Editor, Aria Dean (Los Angeles/New York); and LACMA curator, Ryan Linkof (Los Angeles).
CURATING
Beyond having worked as assistant and associate curator for many gallery and museum exhibitions, Malick’s independent curatorial practice has also expanded and continues to take a range of dynamic forms. In the summer of 2016 she curated an exhibition titled The Pleasure Principle at FARAGO in Los Angeles, which presents work by artists Lucy Chinen (Los Angeles); Matthew Doyle in collaboration with Yuehao Jiang (Los Angeles); Yoshua Okon (Mexico City); Ada Sokol (Berlin); Ryan Trecartin (Los Angeles) and Whitney Vangrin (New York). The Pleasure Principle reveals how each of these artists, in different ways, use aspects of their work to examine the cultural and consumer effects of the encroaching industry of neuro-marketing and its problematic role within current advancements of cognitive capitalism. Neuro-marketing brings data from neuroscience findings on how individuals' cerebral pleasure centers are triggered to advertising strategies.
In 2016 Malick completed a year-long, two-part curatorial project titled, In the Flesh. The first exhibition, sub-titled, Part l: Subliminal Substances, took place at Martos Gallery in Los Angeles in the fall of 2015 and included artists Ivana Basic (New York); Encyclopedia Inc. (Los Angeles); Nicolas Lobo (Miami) and Sean Raspet (Los Angeles). The second exhibition, sub-titled, Part ll: Potential Adaptations, took place at Nina Johnson Gallery in Miami in the spring of 2016, and included artists, Ivana Basic (New York); Hannah Black (Berlin); Megan Daalder (Los Angeles); Cecile B. Evans (London) and Martha Friedman (New York). The project, in its entirety, shed light on ways that artists are addressing the effects of the many inorganic and synthetic substances that people are both knowingly and unknowingly ingesting into their bodies through all kinds of mass produced products.