Todd Gray

Kindly donated by the artist and David Lewis

Todd Gray (b. 1954, Los Angeles, CA) works between Los Angeles and Ghana, where he explores the diasporic dislocations and cultural connections which link Western hegemony with West Africa. 

Writing in the catalogue for the exhibition Black is, Black Ain't at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, Amy M. Mooney writes "critics have noted that Gray's work is "fluent in cultural iconography, driven by introspection, and steeped in issues of corporate politics and racial identity" and that his self-portraits thwart a traditional read of the exterior likeness". Gray describes himself as an artist and activist who primarily focuses on issues of race, class, gender, and colonialism, and uses these lenses to challenge binaries in the past and present. In general, his work aims to challenge the viewer both by what he is including and what he is leaving out.

Gray's work is represented in numerous museum collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Houston Fine Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; among others. He was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency Fellowship in 2016. In 2022 The American Academy in Rome announced Todd Gray as one of the winners of the prestigious 2022–23 Rome Prize and Italian Fellowships. Gray has presented this work in academic conferences at Yale and Harvard University.