Artist Talk: Judith Belzer and Lex Brown

Artist talk, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Harvard University


Judith Belzer is a painter based in Berkeley, California. Her work explores human engagement with the natural world, often looking to the man-made landscape to consider this dynamic and sometimes uncomfortable relationship. Using imagery derived from nature, her most recent work leaves the realm of the identifiable physical landscape to ask questions about the stability and quality of our societal and private interactions.

Belzer’s work has been shown regularly throughout the United States and is held in many private and institutional collections. She earned a B.A. in English from Barnard College and studied at The New York Studio School. The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation granted Belzer a fellowship in 2014. Upcoming solo exhibitions include “Contact Hypotheses” at Anglim/Trimble Gallery in November 2021 and another, of recent work, in March 2022 at Hosfelt Gallery, which represents Belzer’s work.


Lex Brown is an artist, musician, and writer. Working fluidly across art forms, her work uses poetry and science-fiction to create an index for our psychological and emotional experiences as organic beings in a rapidly technologized world. She has performed and exhibited work at the New Museum, the High Line, the International Center of Photography, Recess, and The Kitchen (New York); REDCAT Theater and The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; The Baltimore Museum of Art in Baltimore; and at the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. Brown holds degrees from Yale University (MFA) and Princeton University (BA). She is the author of My Wet Hot Drone Summer, a sci-fi erotic novella that takes on surveillance and social justice, first edition published by Badlands Unlimited. Consciousness, a survey of Brown’s work spanning the past 8 years, is available in limited hand-bound edition from GenderFail. Containing documentation from 46 different videos and performances, as well as 33 original song lyrics performed in artist-run spaces, museums, music venues, and galleries it is Brown’s first book to have been acquired by the collections of the Met, MoMA, and Whitney museums amongst other notable collections. Brown teaches as a Media Fellow in Art, Film, & Visual Studies and Theater, Dance, & Media at Harvard University.