Carole Conde & Karl Beveridge, Conceptual Contemporary Art Color Photograph, Social Commentary

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Referencing immigrants and the disabled. Social commentary conceptual artwork.
Provenance: Deaccessioned from a New York University.
Condé + Beveridge
Carole … Read more Referencing immigrants and the disabled. Social commentary conceptual artwork.
Provenance: Deaccessioned from a New York University.
Condé + Beveridge
Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge
Condé born in Hamilton in 1940. Beveridge born in Ottawa in 1945. Both live and work in Toronto.
Canadian artists Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge moved to New York City in 1969, and soon were at the centre of the burgeoning conceptual art movement. In 1975, they joined the Art & Language journal The Fox (with Joseph Kosuth and Ian Burn) and picketed the Museum of Modern Art to protest its lack of inclusion of women artists, while critiquing the apolitical minimalism of Donald Judd. This ferment culminated in a major museum show, It’s Still Privileged Art, at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1976, just prior to the artists’ return to Toronto in1977. Rarely has a conjugal couple had such longevity as a collaborative artistic duo as Canada’s Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge. The history of visual art is replete with collaborations between artists and life partners who achieved their greatest critical success as individuals. Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Edward Weston and Tina Modotti easily come to mind. Closer to home, we have Christopher and Mary Pratt. But few have sustained a collaboration over a lifetime, and fewer still have signed their works as one single authorial entity. For this reason alone, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge are a unique phenomenon. Perhaps the closest contemporary parallel to Condé and Beveridge as a collaborative duo are Bernd and Hilla Becher, the German photographers and conceptual artists who worked together for over 40 years. But that’s where the comparison stops.
By the late 1970s, Condé and Beveridge drew a focus on various issues that were urgent within the trade union movement. Their method of working dialogically with their subjects was invented for the landmark 1981 project Standing Up, and has been refined in numerous subsequent collaborations. In the past three decades, over fifty solo exhibitions of Condé and Beveridge’s work have been presented at major museums and art spaces on four continents, including: the Institute of Contemporary Art (London, UK); Museum Folkswang (Germany); George Meany Centre (Washington); Dazibao Gallery (Montreal); Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires); Art Gallery of Edmonton; and the Australian Centre for Photography (Sydney). Condé and Beveridge’s repeated calls for reflection, accountability and social justice have gained them recognition as activist-artists dedicated to improving cultural consciousness. The pair has exhibited extensively in Canada and internationally, and have work in many public and community collections including those of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Stedelijk Museum.
Equally, and congruent with the artists’ commitment to accessibility, their work has been displayed in a host of non-art and public settings, such as union halls, billboards, bus shelters and bookworks. The artists continue to work and live in Toronto See less