Rivalry Projects is thrilled to present Clifford Prince King & Ryan Patrick Krueger: keep a place for me, on view from November 3-December 22, 2023. Join us for an opening reception on First Friday, November 3, 2023 from 5:00-9:00 PM. The artists will be present for the opening reception as well as a conversation about their work on Saturday, November 4, 2023 at 11:00AM. 

Clifford Prince King & Ryan Patrick Krueger: keep a place for me tenderly intertwines King and Krueger’s practices to offer a mediation on queer coming of age experiences. Long time friends, and collaborators, both King and Krueger utilize photography as a way to memorialize, archive, and sustain images of connection. The exhibition will include new photographs and collage to look back upon the lived experiences of adolescence and the development of identity.  

Clifford Prince King uses photography to reenact, prolong, and celebrate moments of pleasure and interpersonal connection. Drawing upon lived experience, and often photographing lovers past and present, King’s images reenact moments to create a tangible extension of memory.  For this exhibition King presents a selection of photographs from 2017 to 2023 that capture moments of quiet intimacy, along with new collages that utilize vintage porn magazines, durag boxes, and vernacular photographs that tap into a collective material consciousness.

In keep a place for me, Ryan Patrick Krueger will debut a new body of collage-based wall works that utilize found materials. Sourcing photobooth pictures, everyday objects, and queer publications, both pre- and post-Stonewall, from Ebay, thrift stores, and happenstance encounters, Krueger works with memory – collective, individual, and those lost to time – to collect, reframe, and recover a lost visual history of queer intimacy. Searching for signs of life within ephemera and keepsakes, Krueger’s work charts a queer, historical presence through narratives lost and forgotten in the weeds of time. 

Both Clifford Prince King and Ryan Patrick Krueger use photography as an ode to sentimental experiences while bringing hidden spaces and charged moments to the foreground. keep a place for me points to impermanence, desire, and evidence of lives lived. 

 

About the Artists

Clifford Prince King (B. 1993) documents his intimate relationships in everyday settings that speak to his experiences as a queer black man. In these instances, communion begins to morph into an offering of memory; it is how he honors and celebrates the reality of layered personhood. 

King’s artwork is held in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Arts, ICA Miami, Minneapolis Institute of Art and Studio Museum in Harlem. Recent exhibitions include Gordon Robichaux, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, MassMoCA and Light Work. His photographs have been featured in Apartamento, Aperture, BUTT, Cultured, The CUT, Dazed, Fantastic Man, i-D, Interview, T Magazine, The New York Times, Vice, Vogue, and The Wall Street Journal. 

Ryan Patrick Krueger (B. 1992) is a lens-based artist whose work addresses themes of grief, loss, and desire through their process of collecting and appropriating vernacular photographs in order to consider the intersections of LGBTQ+ American history and photography. 

Krueger holds a BFA in Photography from Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, and is currently pursuing a MFA in Photography from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They have exhibited nationally including solo presentations at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, Rivalry Projects, Buffalo, NY, and MONACO, St. Louis, among others and was also included in the 2022 Fotofest Biennial in Houston, TX. The work has been featured in national publications including Art in America, Out Smart Magazine, Sixty Inches From Center, and Glasstire Magazine, to name a few. Krueger lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Rivalry Projects is a commercial art gallery and arts production space located at 106 College Street in Buffalo’s historic Allentown neighborhood. Rivalry is founded on the competing motivations of artist and curator, Ryan Arthurs, to create an arts space that can function as both a site of exhibition and production of contemporary art. Rivalry exhibits emerging, mid-career and underrepresented artists working in all media.

Rivalry Projects is a member of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA).