Paula Cooper Gallery Now Represents Ja’Tovia Gary

Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce its representation of the artist and filmmaker Ja’Tovia M. Gary (born in 1984 in Dallas, TX; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY). Gary’s work seeks to liberate the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed while fleshing out a nuanced and multivalent Black interiority. Through documentary film and experimental video art, Gary charts the ways structures of power shape our perceptions around representation, race, gender, sexuality, and violence. The artist earned her MFA in Social Documentary Filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and is currently a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.

Paula Cooper Gallery will present a one-person exhibition of Gary’s work in Spring 2020 as well as show selected work in the gallery’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2019. Senior Director Steve Henry: “Ja’Tovia demonstrates a remarkable and incisive ability to explore ways in which place and time define our bodies and self. Using a broad range of techniques including animation, documentary, and narration, she creates potent, and often unsettling collages of images and sound. We are ecstatic to be working with her.”

Gary’s work has screened at festivals including Frameline LGBTQ Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, New Orleans, Toronto Inside Out and Ann Arbor Film Festivals. Gary’s work is part of The Whitney Museum’s permanent collection and has exhibited at cultural institutions worldwide including the Schomburg Center, NYU Florence, Goldsmiths University, MoCA LA, MoMA, The Hammer Museum, Brooklyn Museum, ICA Boston, and MoMA PS1. Her work has received support from the Sundance Institute and The Jerome Foundation. In 2016 Gary participated in the Terra Foundation Summer Residency program in Giverny, France. She was recently named one of Filmmaker Magazine 25 New Faces of Independent Filmmaking of 2017 and was named a 2019 Creative Capital Fellow as well as a 2019 Field of Vision Fellow. Gary is also represented by galerie frank elbaz in Paris.