Courtney Malick is a writer and curator based between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Her work focuses on video, new media, sculpture, performance, installation and the intersections therein. Through such media, 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 in 2011 and her BA in Art History from the New School University 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.
WRITING/EDITING
In addition to her curatorial practice, Malick is also a contemporary art essayist, critic and editor. A founding member of DIS Magazine, she also contributes to art publications such as Art in America, Art Papers, CURA Magazine and Kaleidoscope. Additionally, she has been commissioned to write research-based texts for institutional platforms such as Viralnet in association with California Institute for the Arts, and Daata Editions in association with the Zabludowicz Collection. Malick also works as an editor, in 2015 editing the exhibition catalog, Science and Surrealism, which accompanied the historical group exhibition of the same title that took place at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco. 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.
Malick will also publish her forthcoming memoir, L.O.T.P. (Life of the Party), which 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, who dominated the city’s sordid and glittering nightlife.
PUBLIC SPEAKING
Malick also works frequently as a public speaker, having moderated several panels at various art venues in 2016 and 2017, including an event organized by ArtTable that took place at Steve Turner gallery in Los Angeles on new media strategies and advancements in technology, 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). Another recent panel moderated by Malick took place at the Photo LA fair and included panelists; artist and writer, Lucy Chinen (Los Angeles); Rhizome Editor, Aria Dean (Los Angeles/New York); and LACMA curator, Ryan Linkof (Los Angeles). Upcoming speaking engagements include moderating a panel organized by artist, Amalia Ulman, on the topic of representations of disability in contemporary art to take place in LA in the spring of 2017.
CURATING
In the summer of 2016 Malick 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 burgeoning field of neuromarketing and its new role within current advancements of cognitive capitalism. Neuromarketing brings data from neuroscience findings on how individuals' cerebral pleasure centers are triggered to advertising strategies.
In the spring of 2016 Malick completed a year-long curatorial project titled, In the Flesh, which is divided into two parts. The first exhibition, sub-titled, 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, Potential Adaptations, took place at Gallery Diet 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).