Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, is pleased to present a conversation between acclaimed writer Garth Greenwell and photographer Mark McKnight, winner of the 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize.
Join us in celebrating Greenwell’s newest book, Cleanness, and McKnight’s exhibition at Aperture Gallery, on view through January 18, 2020—coinciding with his first solo show at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, January 10–February 16, 2020. Greenwell and McKnight will speak together about the mystery and beauty of rendering queer life in words and photographs.
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You (2016), which won the 2017 British Book Award for Debut Book of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into a dozen languages. Greenwell’s newest book, Cleanness—about an American teacher in Sofia, Bulgaria, who navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love—is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for the New Yorker, London Review of Books, and New York Times Book Review, among other publications. Greenwell wrote about McKnight’s work for Aperture magazine, issue 236 (Fall 2019). He lives in Iowa City.
Aperture Foundation’s public programs are supported, in part, by generous donations from our Board of Trustees, our members and other individuals, and from corporate foundations and private foundations including: Grace Jones Richardson Trust, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Monday, January 13
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Mark Armijo McKnight (b. Los Angeles, CA) is an artist whose work has been exhibited internationally and written about in The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Interview, GQ, Aperture, Art in America, Frieze, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Mousse, and BOMB, among others. His work is held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ICA Miami, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Henry Art Gallery, and the Columbus Museum of Art.
His first monograph, Heaven Is a Prison, was published in 2020, followed by Posthume, published by TBW Books in 2025. Armijo McKnight is a Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of the 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize, the 2020 Light Work Photo Book Award, a 2020 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, and a 2023–24 Guggenheim Fellowship.
He is Assistant Professor of Expanded Photography at Rutgers University.
Represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend (New York)
Posthume (2025) published by TBW Books
Heaven is a Prison (2020) published by Loose Joints