Art History From Home: Domestic Aesthetics
Thurs, May 7, 2020
12 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, 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. © Estate of Ruth Asawa
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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 talk 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. This session explores these themes in the work of artists including Roy Lichtenstein, Carol Bove, and Ruth Asawa.
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.