The State of NFT’s – A Conversation with Kris Graves, Roula Seikaly & Aline Smithson

We are pleased to host the Quantum curatorial team of Kris Graves and Roula Seikaly along with creative artist Aline Smithson in the Griffin Zoom Room on Tuesday December 6th at 7pm Eastern / 4pm Pacific.

The conversation will be a broad discussion of creativity, the current state of NFT’s and how the market has changed since our last conversation in March. We are excited to invite Aline Smithson to the conversation, as a print artist discussing the process of moving her art to a new market of the digital space.

This event is FREE to Griffin Museum members. $10 for Non Members. Interested in Membership and its benefits? See more about what the Griffin offers here.

About Kris Graves –

Kris Graves (b. 1982 New York, NY) is an artist and publisher based in New York and London. He received his BFA in Visual Arts from S.U.N.Y. Purchase College and has been published and exhibited globally, including Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Portrait Gallery in London, England and Aperture Gallery, New York; among others. Kris Graves Projects and Monolith Editions collaborates with artists to create limited edition publications and archival prints, focusing on contemporary photography and works on paper that address issues of race, identity, equity, gender, sexuality, and class.

About Roula Seikaly –

Quantum Art Curator Roula Seikaly is an independent curator and writer based in Berkeley, and Senior Editor at Humble Arts Foundation. Her curatorial practice addresses contemporary photography and new media, social justice efforts in contemporary art, exhibition making, and institutional critique. Her writing is published virtually and in print on platforms including Hyperallergic, Photograph, BOMB Magazine, and KQED Arts. She has curated exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, SOMArts, SF Camerawork, Blue Sky Gallery, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, and Photographic Center Northwest. She is the co-recipient of Blue Sky Gallery’s 2019 Curatorial Prize for the exhibition An Inward Gaze.

About Aline Smithson –

Aline Smithson is a visual artist, educator, and editor based in Los Angeles, California. Best known for her conceptual portraiture and a practice that uses humor and pathos to explore the performative potential of photography. Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, her work is influenced by the elevated unreal. She received a BA in art from the University of California at Santa Barbara and was accepted into the College of Creative Studies, studying under artists such as William Wegman, Allen Ruppersburg, and Charles Garabian. After a decade-long career as a New York Fashion Editor, Aline returned to Los Angeles and to her own artistic practice. She has exhibited widely including over 40 solo shows at institutions such as the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, the Shanghai, Lishui, and Pingyqo Festivals in China, The Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco, the Center of Fine Art Photography in Colorado, the Tagomago Gallery in Barcelona and Paris, and the Verve Gallery in Santa Fe. In addition, her work is held in a number of public collections and her photographs have been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, PDN (cover), the PDN Photo Annual, Communication Arts Photo Annual, Eyemazing, Soura, Visura, Shots, Pozytyw, and Silvershotz magazines.

Aline is the Founder and Editor- in-Chief of Lenscratch, a daily journal on photography and  has been teaching at the Los Angeles Center of Photography since 2001. In 2012, Aline received the Rising Star Award through the Griffin Museum of Photography for her contributions to the photographic community. In 2014, Aline’s work was selected for the Critical Mass Top 50 and she received the Excellence in Teaching Award from CENTER. In 2015, the Magenta Foundation published her first significant monograph, Self & Others: Portrait as Autobiography. In 2016, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum commissioned Aline to a series of portraits for the upcoming Faces of Our PlanetExhibition. Her work is currently on exhibition with the National Portrait Gallery in London as a finalist in the Taylor Wessing Prize. Kris Graves Projects commissioned Aline to create LOST II: Los Angelesto be published in April 2019. She is a dedicated film shooter.