Fall 2020 Lecture Series | The Allegorical Resonance of Alchemical Affect
October 26–December 7
Speaker: Stephen Prina
Respondents: Renée Green and David Joselit
Stephen Prina will present English for Foreigners, 2017; galesburg, illinois+, 2015; and As He Remembered It, 2011.
Watch the lecture on Vimeo or below.
Stephen Prina (*1954, Galesburg, Illinois) lives and works in Los Angeles, California and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is Professor, Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Harvard University.
MFA, California Institute of the Arts (1980); BFA, Northern Illinois University (1977); AA, Carl Sandburg College (1974).
Solo exhibitions include: Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, (2020); Museo Madre, Naples (2017); Museum Kurhaus Kleve (2016); Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen (2015); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2013); Vienna Secession, Vienna; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2011); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2010); Bergen Kunsthall; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville (2009); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2008); Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge; Cubitt, London (2004); Art Institute of Chicago (2001); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main (2000); Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva (1998); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1992); The Power Plant, Toronto (1991); P. S. 1., New York (1990); The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; Los Angeles Municipal Gallery (1989). Group exhibitions (selection): Mumok, Vienna; Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2015); The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2013); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2012); Whitney Biennial, New York; Yokohama Triennale (2008); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2006); Kunsthalle Basel (2002); The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2000); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (1998); Documenta IX, Kassel; Museum of Modern Art, New York (1992); Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (1991); Venice Biennial (1990); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1989); Institute of Contemporary Art and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1988); Gewad, Ghent (1984); The Art Institute of Chicago (1982); The New Museum, New York (1980).
ACT Professor Renée Green is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Via films, essays and writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series and events her work engages with investigations into circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories as well as what has been imagined and invented. She also focuses on the effects of a changing transcultural sphere on what can now be made and thought.
Her exhibitions, videos and films have been seen throughout the world in museums, biennales and festivals.
Since her arrival at MIT in 2011, Green has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, Los Angeles; Lumiar Cité, Lisbon; Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin; Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy; Prefix Institute for Contemporary Art, Toronto, and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. In addition, her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the following institutions: Whitney Museum, New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Hammer Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art, both in Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville; Museum der Moderner, Salzburg, and many others.
David Joselit is a Professor of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard. His art-historical work has approached the history and theory of image circulation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from a variety of perspectives, spanning Marcel Duchamp’s strategy of the readymade, in which commodities are reframed as artworks, to the mid-twentieth ecology of television, video art, and media activism, and the current conditions of contemporary art under dual pressures of globalization and digitization.
Joselit began his career as a curator at The ICA in Boston from 1983-1989. After receiving his PhD from Harvard in 1995, he has taught at the University of California, Irvine, and Yale University where he was Department Chair from 2006-09, and most recently at the CUNY Graduate Center. Joselit is author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (MIT, 1998), American Art Since 1945 (Thames and Hudson, 2003), Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT, 2007), and After Art (Princeton University Press, 2012). He co-organized the exhibition, “Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age,” which opened at the Brandhorst Museum in Munich in 2015. Joselit is an editor of the journal OCTOBER and writes regularly on contemporary art and culture. His most recent book is Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (forthcoming as an October Book from MIT Press in Spring 2020).
Part of the ACT Spring 2020 Lecture Series: The Allegorical Resonance of Alchemical Affect
