Join AA Bronson in conversation with Adam Welch, Curator of Modern Art. In 2022 Bronson and Welch organized the most comprehensive retrospective to date of work by the artist group General Idea, which opened at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, before travelling to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Gropius Bau, Berlin. Bronson will reflect on his six-decade-long practice, both as part of General Idea (1969–1994), and following, often working in a spirit of collaboration and queer kinship. This talk coincides with Light Years: The Phil Lind Gift in the Signy Eaton Gallery, Level 2, 224.

In the sixties, artist AA Bronson left university with a group of friends to found a free school, a commune, and an underground newspaper. This led him into an adventure with Gestalt therapy, radical education, and independent publishing. He formed the artists’ group, General Idea, with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal in 1969, and for the next 25 years, they lived and worked together, producing the living artwork of their being together. General Idea undertook over 100 solo exhibitions, countless group shows, and temporary public art projects. They were known for their magazine FILE (1972–1989), their unrelenting production of low-cost multiples, and their early involvement in punk, queer theory, and AIDS activism. In 1974, they founded Art Metropole, Toronto: a distribution center and archive for artists’ books, audio, video, and multiples. General Idea’s Three Men #1-#4 (1977) is included in the AGO’s exhibition, Light Years: The Phil Lind Gift, on display now until November, 2025.

Since his partners’ deaths in 1994, Bronson has worked and exhibited as a solo artist, often collaborating with younger generations. From 1999 through 2012, while living in New York, he worked as a healer, an identity that he incorporated into his artwork. He acted as director of Printed Matter, Inc., in New York City from 2004 to 2010, founding the annual NY Art Book Fair in 2005. He has taught at UCLA, the University of Toronto, and the Yale School of Art. In 2008, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, and in 2011, he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. The DAAD invited him for a one-year residency in Berlin in 2013; he and his husband fell in love with the city and decided to stay.