Degenerate Art
February 21, 2026, 2-4pm
Panelists: Forrest Kirk, Ken Gonzales-Day, Laurie Lipton, Zak Smith, moderated by Steven Wolkoff
Forrest Kirk is a Black American painter, whose work is a visceral exploration of identity, history, and resilience. Using acrylics and Gorilla Glue, he layers, binds, and distorts surfaces to reflect the complexities of the Black experience—its strength, its fragmentation, and its reconstruction. In the artist’s own words, “My art is both a mirror and a battleground, where color, texture, and adhesive tension speak to the struggles and triumphs woven into our cultural fabric. Gorilla Glue, a material meant to repair, takes on a deeper meaning in my work—it holds fractured narratives together, just as Black Americans have continually rebuilt and redefined themselves in a society that often seeks to dismantle. My paintings are textured testimonies, confronting themes of systemic oppression, resilience, and self-determination. Through abstraction and symbolism, I challenge the viewer to see beyond the surface—to witness the layered realities of Black existence. The thick application of paint, the erratic glue trails, and the rawness of the materials are intentional acts of defiance and reclamation. My work is not just about telling a story—it’s about demanding recognition, about creating spaces where Black voices are seen, felt, and understood in their full complexity.”
Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems ranging from lynching photographs to educational museum displays. His widely exhibited Erased Lynching series (ongoing), along with the publication of Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke University Press, 2006) transformed the understanding of racialized violence in the United States and raised awareness of the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and African-Americans in California, locating these collective acts of violence within the larger history of anti-immigration, white supremacy, and racial terror lynchings.
Works from the Profiled Series and the award winning PAC Prize publication Profiled (LACMA, 2011) have been exhibited internationally and grew out of his research into the history of educational displays on race, by drawing on the collections of over forty museums including, L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Getty Museum and LACMA in LA, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and Washington D.C., the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (NPG), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), among others.
Gonzales-Day received his MFA in art from UC Irvine; his MA in art history from Hunter College, C.U.N.Y.; and was a Van Leer Fellow at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (ISP). Other fellowships include: the Getty Research Institute (GRI), The Smithsonian SAAM fellowship in American Art, and the Smithsonian Artist Fellowship (SARF); He was a Senior Fellow at The Terra Foundation in Giverny, France; The Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy, and Gonzales-Day has received fellowships and awards from Art Matters, The Avery Foundation, California Community Foundation, Creative Capital, L.A.s’ COLA Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography. His work is in the permanent collection of The Getty; LACMA; MOCA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; MoMA, NYC; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery; Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Art, among others.
Laurie Lipton was born in New York in 1953 and began drawing at the age of four. She was the first person to graduate from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania with a Fine Arts Degree in Drawing (with honors). She has lived in Holland, Belgium, Germany, France, London and moved back to the USA after 36 years abroad. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the USA.
Lipton was inspired by the religious paintings of the Flemish School. She tried to teach herself how to paint in the style of the 16th century Dutch Masters and failed. When traveling around Europe as a student, she began developing her very own peculiar drawing technique building up tone with thousands of fine cross-hatching lines like an egg tempera painting. “It’s an insane way to draw”, she says, “but the resulting detail and luminosity is worth the amount of effort. My drawings take longer to create than a painting of equal size and detail.”
Zak Smith is an artist whose work is included in several public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Saatchi Gallery, London; and The Whitney Museum of American Art. He is the author of several books including We Did Porn, Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow and the recent career retrospective Drown In It . He lives and works in Los Angeles.
These discussions are presented in conjunction with the exhibition DEFENDING ETHICAL INTEGRITY: the new Degenerate Art.