Rudy Lemcke is a multidisciplinary artist and curator who lives and works in San Francisco, California. He holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of Louvain, Belgium and a degree in Web Design and Technology from San Francisco State Multimedia Studies Program where he won the Robert Bell outstanding achievement award.

His artwork has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art; DeYoung Museum, Pacific Film Archive/University Art Museum, Berkeley, California; San Francisco Art Institute / Walter McBean Gallery, SF Camerawork, New Langton Arts, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, University Art Gallery, Stoney Brook University, New York; Grey Art Gallery, New York; Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, Florida; The Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, Louisiana; and Musee D’Art Contemporain de Montreal, Canada.

His work on HIV/AIDS was included in the traveling exhibition Art, AIDS, America organized by the Tacoma Art Museum, Washington. His recent writing on HIV/AIDS was published in the Cambridge Scholars anthology The Shapes of Epidemics and Global Disease (2020).

His curatorial work includes a trilogy of projects titled The Turning, Queerly and includes the exhibitions: From Self to Selfie (2017), A History of Violence (2018) and Precarious Lives (2019).

Selected Bibliography

Atkins, Robert, Sokolowski, Thomas W. From Media to Metaphor: Art About AIDS, Independent Curators Inc., 1991, 41.

Blake, Nayland, Lawrence Rinder, Amy Scholder, eds. In a Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995, 74-75.

Kamps, Toby, Steve Seid, and Jenni Sorkin. Silence, Yale University Press, 2012, 103.

Katz, Jonathan David. “The Senators Were Revolted: Homophobia and the Culture Wars,”A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, Amelia Jones (Editor),Malden, Mass., and Oxford, 2006, 244.

Keats, Jonathon, Intro.; Morgan, Tom; McBride, Laura, Design, Modernism, Twenty-five Years 1979-2004, San Francisco: Modernism Inc., 2005, 276.

Roth, Moira. Difference/ Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, commentary by Jonathan D. Katz, Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishing Group, 1998, 142.

Selz, Peter. Art of Engagement: visual politics in California and beyond / Peter Selz ; with an essay by Susan Landauer, Berkeley, Calif. ; London : University of California Press, 2005, 210.

Tina Takemoto, “Immemorial: The Poetics of AIDS; A Conversation with Rudy Lemcke,” Art Journal Open (June 22, 2015).

Zuern, John. “Figures in the Interface: Comparative Methods in the Study of Digital Literature,” Reading Moving Letters: Digital Literature in Research and Teaching. Ed. Roberto Simanowski, Jürgen Schäfer, and Peter Gendolla. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2010.