Art History From Home: / Domestic Aesthetics Thurs, Apr 23, 2020, 12 pm

Art History From Home:
Domestic Aesthetics

Thurs, Apr 23, 2020
12 pm

A horizontal canvas covered in stuffed animals and afghan blankets in muted colors.
A horizontal canvas covered in stuffed animals and afghan blankets in muted colors.

Mike Kelley, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987. Stuffed fabric toys and afghans on canvas with dried corn; wax candles on wood and metal base, overall: 120 3/4 × 151 3/4 × 31 3/4 in. (306.7 × 385.4 × 80.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee 89.13a-d. © The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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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 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. Featured artists include Mike Kelley, Miriam Schapiro, and Rosie Lee Tompkins. 

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, his work has appeared in Artforum, Frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, Garage, and Performa, where he was a writer-in-residence from 2012 to 2014.

Free with registration.


On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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Learn more at whitney.org/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.