EXHIBITION SYNOPSIS

EJ,

I’m so glad we’re meeting here.

When did you learn that we’ve always loved you? That this is your home? If we could stay close enough to outlive the need to look outside, how would we choose to feed each other? What would you like to grow?

Rest a little while here, on this lip of paper. Ease into your time. Tomorrow will always be there, and if not, we’ll rest a while longer.

There are lilies in the bedroom. A sweet rose gold breeze floats across your surface, coloring the dreams beneath.

It has always been Us.

Teaching through touch and smell. Sharing a buffet of holdover grammar, shaping sound. A group project in constant evolution.

Breathe deeply here. When the walls go invisible, we’ll still see you. The rest can go. We’ll rebuild when we’re good and ready.

All love,

Us.

Twice As Good Is Too Much—EJ Hill’s first exhibition in Los Angeles since his 78-day durational performance at Made in L.A. 2018—continues his exploration of the obstacles and pressures Black youths face in the American educational system. In an act of rest and refusal, there will be no body laboring in the center of the gallery. Instead, Hill offers a declarative chalkboard with words rendered in his signature neon. In this new lesson, part of an ongoing series of unlearnings, Hill repudiates the familiar adage that Black people have to be twice as good to get half as much.

—Savannah Wood

EJ Hill (b. 1985, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2013 and BFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2011. Select recent solo exhibitions have been held at Company Gallery, New York (2018); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2017); ACRE Projects, Chicago (2012); and The Hills Esthetic Center, Chicago (2011). Hill has participated in group exhibitions at California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Aspen Art Museum (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice, Italy (2017); The Underground Museum, Los Angeles (2017); Institut d’art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, France (2017); PinchukArtCentre, Kiev, Ukraine (2017); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2016); Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); and POPA Galleria de Arte, Buenos Aires (2013). He was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2018-19) and is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2018), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2018), the Mohn Public Recognition Award at the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. 2018 (2018), the Los Angeles Artadia Award (2018), the Art Matters Foundation Grant (2017), and the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2015). The Lily League, Hill’s forthcoming solo exhibition at the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery at Harvard University will be on view from January 31—March 28, 2020.