Lynn Randolph “Catastrophic Change”

David Lewis Gallery

This event has ended.

David Lewis presents the New York debut of Lynn Randolph, painter of the iconic feminist Cyborg. The visionary work is a response to, and imagining from, Donna Haraway’s acclaimed and explosive Cyborg Manifesto:

“Cyborg, [is] a 1989 painting by Lynn Randolph, in which the boundaries of a fatally transgressive world, ruled by the subject and the object, give way to the borderlands, inhabited by human and unhuman collectives.”
(Donna Haraway, 1990)

The exhibition will present Cyborg in conjunction with Randolph’s recent Catastrophic Change. Acclaimed ecological theorist, and inventor of the Hyperobject, Timothy Morton shares his experience of Randolph’s work, and connects Catastrophic Change to the times in which we live, as well as to the history of Romanticism, drawing attention to the enormous stakes of today’s crises for the whole planet:

“Cyborg has been with me since I first saw it almost thirty years ago.
A shamanic woman at the keyboard. Now that the very possibility of life as such is at risk, Randolph has summoned her mighty creative powers, the ——Blakean power of the “human form divine.” It’s okay to scream. Really okay.”(Timothy Morton, 2022)

These two manifesto-paintings are exhibited with selections from Randolph’s recent body of works of and around the Cthulucene, further developing the field of vision, and cosmic scope, of her project.

“Lynn Randolph’s paintings infiltrate the fibers of my flesh and spirit. I mean ——this statement literally. Randolph’s powerful figures protect, haunt, incite, soothe, instruct, and trouble me.”
(Donna Harraway, 1998)

Lynn Randolph (b.1938) grew up in Port Arthur, Texas, an oil refinery town on the Gulf Coast. Randolph earned a BFA from the University of Texas in Austin. Shortly thereafter she moved to Houston where she has lived and painted ever since. Randolph’s paintings are known for their engagement with specific ideas relating to feminism, techno-science, political consciousness and other social issues.

Lynn Randolph’s paintings have been exhibited and collected in permanent museum collections and other public and private institutions including: The Bunting Institute at Radcliffe/Harvard; The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona; The San Antonio Museum of Art; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston; the Menil Collection, Houston; M.D. Anderson Hospital, Palliative Care Houston, and the Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin.