This year the Academy’s Take Home a N*de returns honoring the inimitable Tracey Emin. In addition to being one of the most noted artists of our times, her recent shows have celebrated the figure on a large scale. Having recently recovered from cancer, her return to New York will make this Take Home a N*de an event not to miss.
Tracey Emin was born in 1963 in London. She currently lives and works between London, the South of France, and Margate, UK. Emin is best known for her poignant works that mine autobiographical details through a variety of media including painting, drawing, photography, video, sculpture, and neon text. She is a prominent member of the Young British Artists who rose to fame in the late 1980s. Emin’s seminal works Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995) and My Bed (1998)—her own unmade, messy bed installed at the Tate Gallery—provocatively contributed to feminist discourse with the raw, confessional nature of her art.
Emin went on to receive her MA from the Royal College of Art in London, where she is now a Royal Academician and Honorary Doctorate. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999, and was awarded a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2013. Emin currently lives and works in London, United Kingdom. The artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Goetz Collection in Munich, among others.
Jerry Saltz is the senior art critic at New York magazine and its entertainment site Vulture, and the author of the New York Times bestseller How to Be an Artist. In 2018 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. A frequent guest lecturer at major universities and museums, he has lectured at Harvard University, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many others, and has taught at Columbia University, Yale University, the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and elsewhere.