CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/16/2026

Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents Vanessa Beecroft & Chris Kraus celebrating 'Jane Bleibt Jane'

Friday, October 16, at 6 PM, Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents an artist's talk with Vanessa Beecroft & Chris Kraus celebrating Jane Bleibt Jane, followed by a Q&A and book signing with Beecroft.

RSVP here.

Pre-order a signed copy here.

Performance artist Vanessa Beecroft (born 1969) is best known for her large-scale, regimentally choreographed performances and tableaux vivants involving women. In the 2010s she was a frequent collaborator with Kanye West, serving as creative lead for his Runaway music video and designing the first four presentations of his Yeezy collection. In Jane Bleibt Jane, Beecroft reflects on her career thus far through six in-depth conversations. Originating from a 2015 conversation between Christian Krachet and Walther Konig about the artist's work, the publisher then invited her to reflect upon her own performances. The title refers to a conversation with model Stacey McKenzie that Beecroft recorded in 2022 in collaboration with Chris Kraus—and to a film admired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, though no one involved has seen it.

VB55, Performance, 2005. Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Photograph by Nic Tenwiggenhorn.

Since the early 1990s, Vanessa Beecroft (b. 1969, Genoa, Italy) has developed a distinct visual language rooted in staged performance. Often composed of female figures, her live performances interrogate the tenuous ideals of beauty, the politics of display, and power dynamics through their exploration of vulnerability and control, collectivity and individuality, exposure and concealment. Beecroft’s practice spans photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture, each medium serving as a means to extend and re-contextualize the themes first articulated in her live works. Beecroft draws on classical influences, particularly from the Renaissance, to simultaneously evoke and subvert traditional representations of the human form.

Chris Kraus is a writer and critic. She studied acting and spent almost two decades making performances and experimental films in New York before moving to Los Angeles where she began writing. Her novels include Aliens & Anorexia, I Love Dick, Torpor, and Summer of Hate. She has published three books of cultural criticism—Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, Where Art Belongs and Social Practices. I Love Dick was adapted for television and she is also the author of the literary biography After Kathy Acker. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Kraus held the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College in 2019 and was Writer-in-Residence at ArtCenter College of Design between 2020–2024. She has written for various magazines and has been a coeditor of the independent press Semiotext(e) since 1990. Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability and dazzling speed and has been translated into seventeen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

White Glazed Cracked, 2022.

Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore
Vanessa Beecroft & Chris Kraus celebrating 'Jane Bleibt Jane'
Friday, October 16, 6 PM PST
917 E. 3rd Street
Los Angeles CA 90013
213-988-7413
RSVP here
Pre-order a signed copy here