Kalup Linzy

Kalup Linzy is a true original talent!  Molly Shannon, actress

Kalup Linzy is an American video and performance artist currently living and working in Brooklyn. Born in Stuckey, Florida, Linzy graduated from the MFA program at the University of South Florida in 2003.  He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and in 2005 received a grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. In 2007, he was named a Guggenheim fellow and in 2008 he received a Creative Capital Grant and a fellowship from the Jerome Foundation.  Linzy's best known work is a series of video art pieces satirizing the tone and narrative approach of television soap opera.  Linzy performs most of the characters himself, many of them in drag.  Linzy also performs on stage using many of the same characters.  His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, and Artforum.  In 2007, New York Magazine named him one of the ten most promising artists.  Rachel Wolf writes:

In “Conversations Wit de Churen,” Linzy is doing to daytime soaps what John Waters did to his Baltimore childhood. Part Richard Pryor, part RuPaul, Linzy writes, directs, and stars (wigged, heeled, and often scantily clad) in this series of shorts that are tender and vulgar, hilarious and heartfelt. “It’s a real homage to the comic geniuses within the African-American community,” says Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum in Harlem, where Linzy’s work was the sleeper hit of the 2005 show “Frequency.” With new YouTube video stars popping regularly, Linzy (who received a Guggenheim fellowship this year) has been pegged as a key figure in a new generation of “queer video artists.”