Thursday, April 16
6-7 pm
Pay-What-You-Wish Admission
In celebration of Federico Solmi: Adrift, join featured artist Federico Solmi for a special conversation with Phong Bui, publisher and artistic director of the Brooklyn Rail. This conversation will explore Solmi’s visually sumptuous and incisively satirical multimedia works that expose the excesses and contradictions of power across history and contemporary culture.
After the conversation, join us outside on the Plaza as Urban Video Project (UVP) projects Solmi’s American Circus on the building’s facade from dusk to 11 pm.
About Federico Solmi:
Born in 1973 in Bologna, Italy, Federico Solmi now lives in New York. His groundbreaking work in video and audio was recognized with the award of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2009. Solo museum surveys include American Circus at the Haifa Museum of Art in Haifa, Israel, in 2016; The Grand Masquerade at the Tarble Art Center in Charleston, Illinois, in 2019; and Joie de Vivre at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey, in 2022–23. In September 2024, his solo show The Great Farce opened at the Block Museum of Art Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. Solmi: Ship of Fools was also the subject of a major exhibition in Venice, Italy at Palazzo Donà Dalle Rose, during the Venice Biennale in 2024. In 2018, Solmi participated in the citywide project Open Spaces: A Kansas City Arts Experience in Kansas. In 2019, his work was included in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s traveling exhibition The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today. In 2021, he was featured in the Phillips Collection’s centennial exhibition Seeing Differently as well as the inaugural exhibition of the Ocean Flower Museum Island in Danzhou, China. He has participated in several international biennial exhibitions, including the SITE Santa Fe Biennial in New Mexico in 2010; Venice Biennale in 2011; Shenzhen Animation Biennial in China in 2013; and Beijing Media Art Biennale in 2016.
Solmi’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Phillips Collection (Washington DC), The Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix AZ), The Block Museum (Evanston, IL), The Thoma Foundation (Chicago, Santa Fe), Pinacoteca di Brera (Milano IT), Table Art Center (Charleston, IL), 21 C Museum Hotel (Louisville KY), Fundacion Mer (Madrid ES), Ocat Oct Contemporary Art Terminal (Shanghai CN), Collezione Farnesina Experimenta (Rome IT), Collezione Bologna Fiere SPA (Bologna IT).
About Phong Bui:
Phong H. Bui is a multifaceted citizen of the New York art world. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and former curatorial advisor at MoMA PS1 (2007-10). He is also the Co-Founder, Publisher, and Artistic Director of the monthly journal the Brooklyn Rail and its imprint, Rail Editions. He was the Host and Producer of Off the Rail on Art International Radio (2010-15). Bui is a Board Trustee of the International Association of Art Critics (2007-2019), Anthology Film Archives (2017-2023), Fountain House, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Second Shift Studio Space St. Paul, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Studio in a School, the Third Rail, and the Center for Fiction. He is on the Advisory Boards of Art Omi Pavilions, Denniston Hill, Floating Forest, Sky High Farms, among others. Bui is also the Co-Founder/Co-Chairman of the Monira Foundation at Mana Contemporary, a non-profit which, in addition to a robust residency program, aims to curate ongoing exhibitions and public programming in Jersey City and beyond. All aspects of his activities, from publishing, writing, editing, curating, to art practice, including executing large-scale installation, making portraits of featured interviewees in the Rail and other forms of social activism are integral parts of his “social environment,” a consequential step following Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture and Nicholas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics.
Federico Solmi
The Indulgent Wanderers, 2026
Acrylic, paint, mixed media on plexiglass, LED screen, video loop, 18 x 25½ x 4 inches
Courtesy of the artist
Federico Solmi
American Circus
The Everson is supported by the General Operating Support program, a regrant program of the County of Onondaga with the support of County Executive, J. Ryan McMahon II, and the Onondaga County Legislature, administered by CNY Arts; and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
