Art History from Home: Domestic Aesthetics
Tues, Aug 4, 2020
6 pm
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.270, Hanging Six-Lobed, Complex Interlocking Continuous Form within a Form with Two Interior Spheres), 1955, refabricated 1957–1958. Brass and steel wire, overall: 63 7/8 × 14 15/16 × 14 15/16 in. (162.2 × 37.9 × 37.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Howard Lipman 63.38. © 2020 Estate of Ruth Asawa / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy The Estate of Ruth Asawa and David Zwirner
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This event will have automated closed captions through Zoom. Live captioning is available for public programs and events upon request with seven business days advance notice. We will make every effort to provide accommodation for requests made outside of that window of time. To place a request, please contact us at accessfeedback@whitney.org or (646) 666-5574 (voice). Relay and voice calls welcome.
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Online, via Zoom
This series of online talks by the Whitney’s Joan Tisch Teaching Fellows highlights works in the Museum's collection and recent exhibitions to illuminate critical topics in American art from 1900 to the present. During each thirty-minute session, participants are invited to comment and ask questions through a moderated chat.
Inspired by the exhibition Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, this session focuses on artworks that underscore the artistic potential of our immediate domestic environments. We will look closely at artists whose work takes the home itself as both model and material. They depict bathrooms and dollhouses, they riff on functional forms like quilts and shelves, and they make novel use of everyday materials like fabric, foil, or wire. Following on from the earlier session in the series, we will explore how these themes play out in the work of artists like Ruth Asawa, Carol Bove, Roy Lichtenstein, and Liza Lou.
Grant Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of art history at the University of Southern California and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney. His dissertation, Sheila Hicks: Weaving to the World, traces the first critical history of the prolific American artist, weaver, and pioneer of global contemporary art. An active curator, critic, and writer, he has had work appear in Artforum, Frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, Garage, and Performa, where he was a writer-in-residence from 2012 to 2014.