Doreen Garner (born 1986) is an American sculptor and performance artist. Her art practice explores where history, power, and violence meet on the body via beauty or medicine. Garner has exhibited at a number of venues, including New Museum, Abrons Arts Center, Pioneer Works, Socrates Sculpture Park, The National Museum of African American History in Washington, D.C., Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art in Brooklyn, and Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. Garner holds a monthly podcast called #trashDAY with artist Kenya (Robinson). Garner lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Early life and education
Garner was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1986. She graduated from Tyler School of Art at Temple University and received an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Work
Garner moved to New York in 2014 after she graduated from Rhode Island School of Design. She attended the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. Garner's body of work includes, "corporeal, gushy, colorful, complex sculptures that incorporate braiding hair, silicone, Vaseline, condoms, and various other manipulated and found materials to create medically and historically informed expressions of black-female physicality".
The following year, Garner was an artist-in-residence at the Henry Street Settlement in downtown Manhattan.
Sculptures
In 2016, Garner held two simultaneous solo-exhibitions in New York. At Essex Flowers, Removing the Veil: Vanity as Material for Incision, the artist exhibited several sculptures that addressed beauty practices and the body. The sculptural works on view mimic flesh using silicone, and included a hairy mass with Swarovski crystals, pearls, hair weaves, and more suspended in a cage, and a portrait of a woman torn from a magazine situated in a dissection tray. In Wave Hill, Garner exhibited Flora: Viscera, an exhibition of works that resembled botched surgeries. Garner was also featured in a group show curated by New York artist Derrick Adams at Volta Art Fair in New York.
In early 2017, ARTnews announced Garner as one of the artists selected for the Socrates Annual, previously known as the Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition, at Socrates Sculpture Park. During the summer of 2017, Garner held a solo-exhibition titled, Doctor's Hours, at Larrie gallery. The show exhibited several sculptural works, a number of drawings, and a library containing selected books that inspired the exhibition, such as In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification by Victoria Pitts-Taylor and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.
Garner curated her first New York show the same summer. Titled Stranger Things, the group-exhibition at Outpost Artists Resources explored various themes of, "intimacy, hygiene, latent sexuality, and racialized violence" as noted by Vanessa Thrill at Artforum. Artists in the show included Jes Fan, Kenya (Robinson), Tamara Santibañez, Erik Ferguson, Nakeya Brown, Ted Mineo, and Elliott Jerome Brown, Jr.
In the fall of 2017, Garner held a two-person exhibition at Pioneer Works, titled White Man on A Pedestal, with Kenya (Robinson). The large-scale exhibition included new sculptural works, including a large-sized 3-D rendered J. Marion Sims all in red and a number of fleshy works hanging as meat racks, gynecological tools, and an army of men by (Robinson). The exhibition began with a performance by (Robinson), titled #WHITEMANINMYPOCKET, and ended with a performance by Garner, titled Purge. The exhibition interrogated the legacy of Sims, known colloquially as the "Father of Modern Gynecology", who has fallen largely out of favor in the medical community for his brutal mistreatment and experimentation on black female bodies. Writer and critic William J. Simmons wrote in Cultured Magazine that the show, "follows that Garner's work is as historically informed as it is visually arresting," and that "there is a wealth of research and documentation that takes her imagery out of the realm of shock and into a deeper appeal".