biography
Todd Lanier Lester is an artist and works on the family farm in Tennessee. Over two decades he launched a series of three rights-focused, participatory works situated between visual media and performance methodology: Multiyear timeframes designated to investigate social themes, while colorful project names offer an umbrella under which artists and non-artists alike create rhizomatic responses unfettered by conceptual end dates. For 10 years freeDimensional (2003-12) urges a sea change in the artist residency sector by practicing artist shelter and evacuation placements, convening networks and coalitions of expert practice, and publishing lessons learned in immigration and cultural policy fora. For five years Lanchonete.org (2013-18) occupies a small bar on a denigrated yet swiftly gentrifying street in the center of São Paulo as nucleus for artist and urbanist residencies, community meals, open courses, concerts, murals, public health campaigns and a radio station. For two years Luv ’til it Hurts (2018-20) engages poz artists and allies from Egypt, Germany, France, Brazil, USA, Mauritius, Colombia, Poland, Taiwan and beyond to understand their local HIV-related stigmas and challenges, yielding an evolving group exhibition and activist soapbox that can be invited to other communities.
More recently Todd began writing on artist methodology, both reconsidering his own organic trajectory and researching those of others from whom he draws inspiration and affirmation. Besides writing, a new project is in the works. FARM/SCHOOL plays with time differently, suggesting its arrival–rather than completion–within 10 years.
Todd became a sticker artist–a.k.a. el mejor karate–whilst living in São Paulo. This ad hoc process continues to clarify the pseudonym or decoy-tendency in naming his previous artworks.
statement
The statement is on the making of an archive site and portal on present and future work. Like some other artists, I experience art as life, which makes updating one’s portfolio part of the process. With this site, I offer a trace set of tools that evolved over the lifespan of three works lasting twenty years altogether: freeDimensional, Lanchonete(.)org, and Luv ‘til it Hurts. As a student of politics and administration, I read Antonio Gramsci’s 1947 Prison Notebooks a long time ago, yet continue to deliberate on a popular line, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
freeDimensional is important to me because it’s the same period in which I settled into the vocation of artist. I understood that I was working in an interdisciplinary way in order to make a specific intervention. This happened around the same time as a social turn on the global art scene. I would make a series of three projects over twenty years, each with a unique theme, dedicated timeframe and variation on form: freeDimensional, a 10-year network on artist safety; Lanchonete(.)org, a 5-year site-specific collective on the right to the city; Luv ‘til it Hurts, a 2-year soapbox on HIV + stigma. Each was designed with the potential to live on after my dedicated leadership period, my response to the Gramsci line reiterated time and again. Each experiment, a salute to new birth, blinders against a ‘variety of morbid symptoms’.
I’m a dreamer from the sticks. Perhaps in contrast to the materials I grew up around, I enjoy the presence of theory and literary reference; framing my work in conceptual art terms. One of my biggest regrets is never learning to weld. The farm where I tended goats with my brother, learned to ride a horse and round-up cows continues to be my school. As I said, a portal onto the future or at least a play on words.