Whitney Museum of American Art: Watch and Listen: Conversations On Arts

March 7, 2013Greil Marcus: Jay DeFeo and All That Jazz

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:11:08 -0400

Jay DeFeo came to the fore as part of a vibrant community of avant-garde artists, poets and musicians in the 1950s in San Francisco. Over the course of four decades, she produced an imaginative and diverse body of work in a wide range of media. In conjunction with Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective, author and critic Greil Marcus discusses DeFeo’s stylistic inventions, physical processes, and improvisational approach to materials. As Marcus argues, DeFeo loved jazz, and “in the deepest, fiercest, and most playful moments of her work, Jay DeFeo’s work was jazz,” too.

March 6, 2013Bennett Simpson: Why Contemporary Art Gives Me the Blues

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:16:53 -0400

Blues for Smoke features a wide range of contemporary art, music, literature, and film and explores the blues not simply as a musical category, but as a web of artistic sensibilities and cultural idioms. In conjunction with his exhibition, curator Bennett Simpson, from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, discusses the vitality and innovation at the core of the blues tradition as a major catalyst for experimentation within modern and contemporary art.

December 15, 2011 Artist, Critic, Canon: Critical Approaches to Art History, After Levine

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:09:12 -0500

Sherrie Levine stands at the forefront of a group of artists, such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Barbara Kruger, whose work has altered the way we distribute, perceive, and study representational images. In conjunction with SHERRIE LEVINE: MAYHEM, a panel of scholars and artists, including David Joselit, Zoe Leonard, and Elisabeth Sussman, explore how Levine and other artists have generated discourse on authorship, originality, and reproduction, and in turn, instigated new critical approaches to the art historical canon. This conversation investigates significant shifts in contemporary art practice and theory since the 1970s, and how these shifts influenced a generation of artists for whom the impulse of borrowing, reframing, and reproducing imagery is fundamental.

April 21, 2011 Reflections on the Midcareer Retrospective, with Glenn Ligon, Scott Rothkopf, and Huey Copeland

Whitney Museum of American Art — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 14:36:11 -0400

What does a midcareer retrospective mean for an artist, and how is a career defined? This roundtable takes up these questions on the occasion of Glenn Ligon’s midcareer exhibition. The Whitney has long supported living artists at key moments in their careers, and the Museum is unique in the number of midcareer exhibitions it features. Moreover, the Whitney has featured Ligon’s work in numerous exhibitions since the early 1990s, and has amassed the largest institutional holdings of his art. Ligon is joined by exhibition curator Scott Rothkopf and art historian Huey Copeland for a dialogue on the joys, fears, and implications of a midcareer show.

September 21, 2010 Conversations on Art: Marclay’s Performance Work

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:37:48 -0400

Christian Marclay is joined by musician Alan Licht and cultural critics Liz Kotz and Christoph Cox for a conversation on his "theater of found sound."

September 15, 2010 Conversations on Art: Robert Gober and Donna De Salvo on Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:03:52 -0400

Celebrated by critics and known to a broad public audience during his lifetime, Charles Burchfield is curiously under-appreciated today. Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield provides the most comprehensive examination to date of this modernist master. In this conversation, Robert Gober, acclaimed sculptor and curator of Heat Waves in a Swamp, and Donna De Salvo, Whitney chief curator, discuss Burchfield, the exhibition, his subjects, and his process.

January 30, 2008Conversations on Art: “Slow Fade to Black” with Margo Jefferson, Marco Williams, and Michelle Parkerson

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:34:13 -0400

Drawing on the issues raised by the exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, cultural critic Margo Jefferson and filmmakers Marco Williams and Michelle Parkerson consider cinematic portrayals of African-American history and film as a narrative device for interrogating stereotypes. Discussion moderated by art historian Kellie Jones.

September 6, 2007Conversations on Art: Alright Now: Escapism and Activism in the American Scene

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:35:20 -0400

While the late 1960s are often described as a singular movement, the legacy of that time still echoes in current artistic and political debates. Join cultural historian Greil Marcus and media scholar Todd Gitlin as they consider the historical and ongoing relationships between popular culture and politics in conjunction with the exhibition Summer of Love.