Why Contemporary Art Matters: Politics and Aesthetics Today

Floor Three, Seminar Room, Laurie M. Tisch Education Center

This four-week course will contextualize and make sense of two seemingly disparate strands of contemporary art: on the one hand, work that speaks to urgent political and social realities and on the other, conceptually-driven practices that seem detached from current events. Looking at the Whitney’s exhibitions of Laura Poitras and Andrea Fraser alongside Flatlands, a group show of five emerging painters, and Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, this course will explore the intersections of these apparently divergent concerns and consider the ways that contemporary art truly can and does matter. This course will include a special session with an exhibiting artist.

Instructor: Meredith Mowder, a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum since 2013, is currently a PhD candidate in art history at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she is writing her dissertation on performance art’s migration into the sphere of entertainment in New York City during the 1980s. She has published essays on the intersections between art and music in the postwar period and has taught courses on contemporary art and sound art at Hunter College and Parsons, The New School.

Four-session course: Thursdays, February 18, 25; March 3, 10
Afternoon session: 1–2:30 pm 
Evening session: 6:30–8 pm 

For general inquiries and information related to the course, please email courses@whitney.org.