Moma Talks: Conversations

Wednesday, March 31, 2010 6:30 PM Artist Andrea Geyer talks about the way she uses networks and systems to turn knowledge into works of art. MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry moderates the discussion.

Kenneth Goldsmith, reads Bern Porter’s 1955 poem Clothes. Recorded April 22, 2010 at MoMA.

Part I of a series of talks by ten artists represented in MoMA PS1's Greater New York 2010 , (May 23–October 18), an exhibition of work by artists in the New York metropolitan area who engage in a wide range of art practices and mediums. In sessions consisting of short and dynamic presentations of twenty images, twenty-five seconds per image, loosely modeled on an informal Japanese presentation style, artists discuss their work, their creative process, and other issues in contemporary art. Presenting artists include Xaviera Simmons, David Benjamin Sherry, Pinar Yolaçan, Erin Shirreff, and Michele Abeles. Moderated by Christopher Lew, Manager of Curatorial Affairs, Exhibition Funding Liaison, MoMA PS1.

April 02, 2009 06:30 PM Dinh Q. Lê was born in Ha-Tien, Vietnam in 1968. He received his BA in studio art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1989 and his MFA in photography and related media at The School of Visual Arts in New York in 1992. In 1993 Lê returned to Vietnam for the first time, and in 1996 he decided to settle in Ho Chi Minh City. Lê's work has been exhibited worldwide in such solo and group exhibitions and biennials as the 2008 Singapore Biennale and The Gwangju Biennial 2006, Korea. Lê is the cofounder of the Vietnam Art Foundation (VNFA), a Los Angeles–based organization that supports Vietnamese artists and promotes artistic exchange between cultural workers from Vietnam and around the world. With funding from VNFA, Lê and three other artists cofounded San Art, the first not-for-profit gallery in Ho Chi Minh City. He is currently a member of the peer committee for Art Network Asia and a member of the Asia Society's international council. Sarah Suzuki, Assistant Curator, Depart

April 06, 2009 06:30 PM This program examines how leading artists, scientists, and cultural theorists are responding to ecological issues. This panel discussion explores the ways in which contemporary artists and thinkers create utopian projects and embrace the distinct aspects of local environments and markets as a response to global homogenization. Participants debate what they have learned from projects that reclaim a connection to our environment and shift towards a low-tech approach to sustainable living. Participants include Raúl Cardenas Osuna from the collective Torolab and Fritz Haeg (www.fritzhaeg.com). Moderated by MoMA conservation scientist Chris McGlinchey.

Wednesday, March 11, 6:30 p.m. The Celeste Bartos Theater (T3) Feng Mengbo was born in Beijing, China in 1966 and continues to live and work there. He started to create video games in 1992, such as Game Over: Long March and Taxi Taxi Mao Zedong (both 1994) and in 1997 he made his first interactive installation My Private Album. In 1999 he started to use the game engine of the computer video game Quake III to create a series of interactive installations, online projects and action painting projects and performances. In 2008 his video game installation Long March: Restart was shown at the Guangzhou Triennial. Mengbo is also a painter. Works that are part of the series Built to Order, include Mao, r drawworld 0, and Wrong Code: Shanshui. Feng Mengbo's works have been exhibited internationally, including Documenta X and XI, biennials in Venice, Johannesburg, Lyon, Shanghai, and Gwangju, ISEA, Ars Electronica and many others. The recipient of the Award of Distinction of Prix Ars Electronica (2004), Mengbo gradua

Taking on the role of curator in the Museum’s galleries, artist Vik Muniz speaks about the exhibition and presents his own work as it relates to objectivity.

Reflecting upon the recent exhibition Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927–1937, this lecture explores the profound influence that Miró's unconventional painting, collage, and assemblage techniques have had on graphic design in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Celebrated American graphic designer Paul Rand, for example, consistently utilized Miró's oeuvre as a point of departure for creative design assignments for students. Through a comparison of Miró's works with those of Rand and other designers, this lecture considers how Miró's revolutionary approach effectively altered the formal language of communication design. Lecturer Marianne Eggler, (MPhil, The Graduate Center, City University of New York) is a historian of art, architecture, and design. She is completing her doctorate at The Graduate Center and is currently a lecturer at Parsons The New School of Design, CUNY John Jay College, and The Museum of Modern Art.

Whether we collect fire trucks, civil war items, or Flemish moths, the act of collecting can be an artistic gesture in and of itself. This lecture explores the work of artists who incorporate museum-like practices, such as collecting and creating museum narratives of their collections and turning spaces into literal or conceptual cabinets of curiosities, into their work. Artists and projects discussed in this lecture include Marcel Broodthaers' Museum of Modern Art (Department of Eagles); Herbert Distel's Museum of Drawers; The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles; The Salon De Fleurus in New York; and City Reliquary in Brooklyn; among others. Lecturer Pablo Helguera is a visual artist and the Director of Adult and Academic Programs at MoMA.

Friday, October 2, 2009 1:00–5:00 P.M. The New York State Artist Workspace Consortium is an organization comprising ten leading contemporary art institutions across the state. Fostering the creative process, the workspaces provide artists with freedom, space, time, equipment, technical assistance, stipends, and other resources for experimentation and exploration. This half-day conference examines the evolving relationships between workspaces, artists, curators, funders, journalists, and communities through a series of panel discussions and breakout sessions. Conference speakers include artists Edgar Arceneaux, Mark Dion, and Byron Kim; Sina Najafi, Editor-in-Chief, Cabinet Magazine; Mina Takahashi, Editor, Hand Papermaking; Nancy Princenthal, Senior Editor, Art in America; Phong Bui, Publisher, Brooklyn Rail; Linda Earle, Executive Director, The New York Arts Program, Ohio Wesleyan University; Alyson Baker, Executive Director, Socrates Sculpture Park; Ruby Lerner, CEO/President, Creative Capital; Yvonne For

October 25, 2007 6:30 p.m. This program explores the role that architectural arbiters have had and continue to have in shaping the history and defining the legacy of modern architecture in the United States. Through a lecture and discussion, scholars, curators, and architects address the process of selection and the values that they employ each time they design a course or exhibition, or publish a book or an article. Participants include Sarah Herda, Director, The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago; Toshiko Mori, architect and Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture and Chair of the Department of Architecture, Harvard University; Karen Stein, former Editorial Director, Phaidon Press; and Gwendolyn Wright, architectural historian and Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University. Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, moderates the discussion. The event is

Thursday, February 16, 2006 6:00 p.m. In honor of the modern architect and curator, Philip Johnson's powerful legacy is addressed through individual presentations, discussions, and a film screening. "Portrait of the Curator as a Young Man" Terence Riley, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art "The Very Picture of Architecture" Jeffrey Kipnis, Professor of Architecture, Knowlton School of Architecture, The Ohio State University.

March 2, 2007 6:30 p.m. Culling materials and subjects from the streets, Swoon creates paper cutouts and installations that re-envision the experience of urban life. Inspired by historical sources ranging from German Expressionist woodblock prints to Indonesian shadow puppets, this New York–based artist has covered the city streets with her work for over six years. She has exhibited most recently in P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center’s Greater New York 2005. In the summer of 2006, she participated in the “Miss Rockaway Armada” on the Mississippi River.

January 10, 2009 10:00 a.m–4:45 p.m. To mark the close of the exhibition Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927–1937, MoMA hosts a daylong symposium to consider issues surrounding the artist's creative production during a transformative decade within his long career. A distinguished group of international scholars offer new approaches to this period of the artist's work, examining its relation to the crisis of painting in Surrealism, the specific nature of the French and Catalan avant-gardes of the time, and the broader sociopolitical situation that emerged in Europe as the 1920s came to an end and the political tensions that would lead to World War II became increasingly apparent. Participants include Dawn Ades, Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex, and Co-Director of the Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies; Juan José Lahuerta, Professor, History of Art, Escola Técnica Superior d'Arquitectura, Barcelona; Susan Laxton, art historian (PhD, Columbia University); David

March 30, 2007 6:30 p.m. Sze Tsung Leong was born in Mexico City and now lives and works in New York. His photographs depict international urban landscapes and the creation and destruction of cities in China, while his paintings are drawn from historical photographs. Leong has received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University.

April 25, 2007 6:30 p.m. Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi has expanded the medium of drawing to include both installation and performance. In the last decade, Perjovschi has conceived his political drawings spontaneously within museum spaces, allowing global events to inform the final result. Following an introduction by Roxana Marcoci, curator of Projects 85: Dan Perjovschi, the artist discusses his work.

Artists Speak: Conversations on Contemporary Art with Glenn D. Lowry Open Source January 20, 2009 6:30 p.m. This program explores contemporary art in the age of YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia, online resources that connect people and information in countless ways and through immeasurable distances. Artists Cory Arcangel and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer discuss the ways in which they utilize electronic databases to create works of art. Glenn D. Lowry, director of The Museum of Modern Art, moderates a discussion.

September 24, 2009 06:30 PM Theater 3 This conversation examines the international networks that developed among Conceptual artists in the 1960s and 1970s. Three such artists—Ger van Elk, Allen Ruppersberg, and Lawrence Weiner—focus the discussion on their respective cities of Amsterdam, Los Angeles, and New York, each of which served as a major center of artistic production at the time. Christophe Cherix, Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, The Museum of Modern Art, and organizer of the exhibition In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976, moderates the discussion.

To celebrate the MoMA's publication Alfredo Boulton and his Contemporaries: Critical Dialogues in Venezuelan Art, 1912–1974, on September 25, 2008, Luis Pérez-Oramas, The Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art at MoMA, moderated a panel discussion on Venezuelan art and architecture of that time period. The panel brought together Hugo Achugar, poet, essayist and professor of Spanish at the University of Miami; Carlos Brillembourg, architect; Sofia Vollmer de Maduro of the Alberto Vollmer Foundation in Caracas; and Edward Sullivan, professor of Fine Arts at New York University, to provide an overview of Venezuelan art, architecture, and cultural history in relation to the period addressed by the publication and the writings of Alfredo Boulton and his contemporaries.

On October 30, 2008, to celebrate MoMA's publication of Modern Swedish Design: Three Founding Texts, Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, moderated a panel discussion at MoMA on the intellectual background and influence of modern Swedish architecture and design and the critical role of manifestos in architectural discourse. Participants included the coeditors and coauthors of the new publication: Lucy Creagh, architect and PhD candidate at Columbia University; Helena Kåberg, curator at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Stockholm; and Barbara Miller Lane, Emeritus Professor at Bryn Mawr College.