b. 1993
Los Angeles-born artist, writer and curator Aria Dean graduated from Oberlin College in 2015. She worked as Curator and Editor of the American not-for-profit arts organization Rhizome until 2021. Her selected writings were compiled in Bad Infinity, published by Sternberg Press in 2023. She currently lives and works in New York.
Dean’s sculptures, installations, videos, and writing interrogate the structures and received ideas of race, power, and form. Often taking Blackness as a starting point and borrowing from the formal language of minimalism, Dean investigates the potential of narratives and histories attuned to material, political, and technological realities.
Dean’s work is housed in collections at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, Netherlands; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
