Apr 15, 2019 | Essay, From the Chair
Lothar Baumgarten, a German artist living in New York, dwelled for eighteen months with indigenous people in the forests of Venezuela and Brazil in the late 1970’s, with only cameras, film, art supplies, and whatever else fit into a single backpack accompanying...
Apr 1, 2019 | Essay, From the Chair
This week I am in New York directing the Conney Conference on Jewish Arts, a meeting place for artists working with Jewish content, wrestling with theory and practice and, through public talks and dialog, attempting to create a sense of place for their own...
Mar 25, 2019 | Essay, From the Chair
All memory is individual, unreproducible – it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds....
Mar 11, 2019 | Essay, From the Chair
I often ask my students to create a knowledge map that illustrates as many of their inspirations and influences as they can recall. As you can imagine, asking the question in the context of an art course would return a long list of visual artists, often confined to...
Mar 4, 2019 | Essay, From the Chair
Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees is a book written by Lawrence Weschler in 1982 about the West Coast conceptual artist Robert Irwin. The book explores the dislocation that occurs in the face of Irwin’s early work with light and space. His conceptual...
Feb 25, 2019 | Essay, From the Chair
The terminology by which we describe and communicate ideas about art is, by its very nature, limiting. The limitations of language create a space of discourse with boundaries and hard surfaces to push against in order to expand our understanding of that which is the...
