Ezra Benus’ practice is cradled by embedded Jewishness, queerness, and sickness as purviews and navigational tools in this world.
They are an artist, educator, and curator raised and still based in Brooklyn, whose multi-media practice concerns constructions of values of normativity, relationships and intimacies of power, care, pain and pleasure. Ezra has had residencies with Art Beyond Sight’s Art + Disability Residency(2018-19), Wave Hill Winter Workspace (2020), SHIFT Residency at EFA (2020-21), BRIClab Contemporary Art at BRIC (2022-23). He has exhibited work in NYC at NYU Gallatin Gallery, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Dedalus Foundation, EFA Project Space, The Shed, and internationally with Shape Arts (UK), Museion (IT), MMK Frankfurt (DE), Doris McCarthy Gallery (CA), Art Gallery Windsor (CA). Curatorial projects and programs include Locus: Art as a Disabled Space (The 8th Floor), My Body Is The House That We Live (Gibney Dance), Disability Futures Virtual Festival (United States Artists, Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation), Crip Ecologies of Emergent Pain (Flux Factory), Crip’d Art Ecologies: Fermenting Crip’d Desire, Grief, Celebration, and Rage (CUE Art Foundation). Ezra is also one half of Brothers Sick, a sibling artistic collaboration on disability justice, illness, spirituality, and care. Commissioned published works include Blackwood Gallery’s SDUK: Lingering, and Kingdom of The Ill reader published by Hatje Cantz Verlag. Their work has been featured in publications such as Artforum (Susanne Pfeffer’s #1 artwork highlight of 2021), Pin Up, Mousse Magazine, Ocula, Art Agenda, Publico ípsilon, and Welt Kunst.