(Image Description: A headshot of Ezra from the top of chest upwards. He is a white person with black curly hair, dark eyes and brows, is wearing a navy blue shirt. Ezra's eyes gaze off camera while showing off a smirk. The headshot is set against a background of dark green leaves with light blue light patches seeping in between the branches and leaves.)
Ezra Benus is an artist, educator, and curator whose multi-media practice concerns relationships and intimacies of power, care, and pain, and questions the constructions of time related to values of normativity and productivity. Ezra’s practice is cradled by embedded Jewishness, queerness, and sickness as purviews and navigational tools in this world. Their work has been exhibited at Fylkingen (Stockholm), The 8th Floor, Flux Factory, NYU Gallatin Galleries, Dedalus Foundation, Gibney Dance, The Laurie M. Tisch Gallery at the JCC Manhattan, EFA Project Space, Doris McCarthy Gallery at University of Toronto, and Art Windsor Essex Gallery. Ezra is also one half of Brothers Sick (with Noah Benus), a sibling artistic collaboration foregrounding disability justice, politics of illness and care, bridging histories of eugenics with contemporary issues of ableism. Brothers Sick have exhibited with Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Visual AIDS, Shape Arts UK, ONE Archives, The Shed, Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) Frankfurt, and are set to present a large-scale commission at Museion in Bolzano, Italy in the Fall. Their artwork Pareidolia (Vaccinate Now) was featured in curator Susanne Pfeffer's Artforum’s December 2021 top ten artworks of the year. Ezra studied at Hunter College, and has lectured and consulted at universities and art spaces such as Red Bull Arts in Detroit, Hunter College Art Galleries, Eyebeam, SUNY Purchase, CUE Art Foundation, York College, Princeton University, and UT Austin. Benus was an Erich Fromm Fellow at Paideia Institute in Stockholm, and the first Access and Adult Learning Fellow in the education department at the Brooklyn Museum. Ezra completed residencies at Wave Hill Winter Workspace (2020), and SHIFT Residency at EFA (2020-2021). Ezra is the Disability Futures Fellowship Manager at United States Artists. Ezra is sick, tired, and forever grateful to be building tender community with fellow queer, disabled, and sick artists around the world. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Note: Ezra was also part of the curatorial project Strijd ∞ (pronounced Stride Infinity), addressing the struggle for democratization in higher education. This project was exhibited in the Netherlands, Berlin, Ireland, and Italy, along with contributions to published articles in in the "Nomos of Images" research project, based at the Kunsthistorisches Institut (KHI) in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut, and in the Polish art history journal "Art for the Sake of Democracy".) |
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