Clark Art Institute – Terra Foundation for American Art Colloquium: “Textures of Work”

26.09.2016 – 30.09.2016 /

Terra Foundation American Art, Giverny France.

Coloquium

Terra Foundation Giverny (Giverny, France)

The Terra Foundation for American Art and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute are pleased to announce “Textures of Work,” a jointly-organized research colloquium to be held at the TFAA properties in Giverny, September 26-30, 2016.

Bringing together a group of scholars and artists from Europe and the United States, the event will query the place of work as an activity and as an object of study within art history, as well as a current motif in the practice of contemporary artists. Although scholars of modern European and US art have long prioritized themes of labor, facture, and praxis, “work”-in its current, global, abstracted guise-remains a slippery concept. In the art world, “work” traditionally denotes an activity, a spatial designation, a place, subject, or site. Today, such a conceptual landscape has blurred. Professional roles, for example, are unprecedentedly fluid; the art industry’s “cultural producer” is potentially curator, gallerist, blogger, collector, critic, administrator, or historian all at once. The rhythms of work are by turns pulsatory and unrelieved, its textures weaving together activities that used to define different, even mutually exclusive, realms of life. The meeting is intended as a forum to reconsider the various textures of art/work-and their built-in absences and exclusions-among art historians and practitioners.

The colloquium is conceived in partnership between the Paris Center of the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Research and Academic Program of The Clark, along with two external conveners, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Associate Professor, History of Art Department, University of California, Berkeley, and Eva Ehninger, Laurenz Assistenz-Professur für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Universität Basel. The pilot event in Giverny, which marks the first formal collaboration between the two institutions, will be followed by a joint colloquium at The Clark in Williamstown in 2017.

With the participation of:

Jo Applin, Senior Lecturer, Department of History of Art, University of York

Tania Bruguera, Artist

Julia Bryan-Wilson, Associate Professor, History of Art Department, University of California, Berkeley

Sebastian Egenhofer, Professor, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Universität Zürich

Eva Ehninger, Laurenz Assistenz-Professur für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Universität Basel

Ursula Frohne, Professor, Universität Münster

Trevor Paglen, Artist and Theorist

Benjamin Piekut, Associate Professor, Department of Music, Cornell University

Alla Vronskaya, Postdoctoral Student, Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur, ETH Zürich

And also Veerle Thielemans, European Academic Program Director, Terra Foundation for American Art, and Christopher Heuer, Associate Director, Research and Academic Program, The Clark Art Institute

Admission to this event is by invitation only.