Art History from Home: Eros

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.

Erotic imagery has been part of art history since antiquity. This session explores ways in which modern artists, including Claes Oldenburg, Yayoi Kusama, David Wojnarowicz, and Stewart Uoo, engage with themes of eros across a range of psychological, aesthetic, and sociopolitical parameters. In their various approaches, we will see how sexuality emerges visually through humor, longing, trauma, and desire.

Xin Wang is a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum and a Ph.D. candidate in modern and contemporary art at The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She is the curator of numerous exhibitions in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, and her latest writings have appeared in Art in America, Art Agenda, and Wallpaper (Chinese edition). She is currently planning an exhibition that explores Asian Futurisms for The Museum of Chinese in America in New York City.