Adam McEwen with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

Artist Adam McEwen will discuss their work and creative life in the context of our new social reality with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, senior art critic of the Brooklyn Rail. We will conclude with a reading from poet Chris Martin.

Adam McEwen’s work resides somewhere between the celebratory and funereal. After writing obituaries for the Daily Telegraph in London, he began producing obituaries of living subjects such as Bill Clinton and Jeff Koons, highlighting the blurred line between history and fiction. In a reverse Midas-effect, McEwen has answered to the shimmering claims of Minimalist art by creating contemporary work that is freighted with the leaden melancholy of modern history. As a meditation on the many lives and deaths of art, he has created a space that conflates a beleaguered present with the afterlife of a potent and contentious moment in art history, in much the same way as his obituaries narrate the future-perfect of the rich, the famous, the beautiful, and the notorious. McEwen’s dead zone of dark relics and faded memories confronts us, literally and metaphysically, with the filthy lucre of our past and present. Adam McEwen was born in 1965 in London, England. He received his B.A. in 1987 from Christ Church, Oxford, and then received his B.F.A. in 1991 from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. He lives and works in New York City.

Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, PhD, is an art writer and hobby cartoodlist who writes “with” rather than “on” contemporary art and artists. Her interests range across art as a “structure of feeling”, human/nonhuman animal ontologies, the natural fantastic, the aesthetics of wonder, theories and practices of writing, the interview as essay, the history of modernism(s), surrealist methodologies, dystopias and utopias, and the metaphysics of technology. She has published in the Brooklyn Rail, Art Agenda, Artforum, Art in America, and numerous artist’s catalogs, Ellen Gallagher, (Anthony d’Offay,1999; Tom Friedman (Gagosian, 2008) Hadieh Shafie, (Leila Heller, 2012 and 2015); Joan Waltemath (C. Grimaldi, 2015). She has a Masters in Cinema Studies from NYU, and a PhD from The History of Consciousness Program at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of How Like A Leaf: A Conversation with Donna Haraway (1999) and is working on an updated forthcoming edition, and compiling her collected writings titled, No Wound Ever Speaks for Itself: Writing, Art, Vulnerability, Conversation, Attitude with a preface by Avital Ronell. From 2017-2019 she served as the Senior Art Editor of the Brooklyn Rail.

See Thyrza’s contributions in the Rail »

Chris Martin’s fourth book of poetry, Things to Do in Hell, will be published by Coffee House Press in the fall and his first book of essays,May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Futureis forthcoming from HarperOne. He is the recipient of grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Minnesota Humanities Center.He is the co-founder and executive director of Unrestricted Interest, an organization dedicated to helping neurodivergent learners transform their lives though writing. He lives in Minneapolis, where he also teaches at Hamline University and Carleton College.

The New Social Environment — Daily conversations with artists, writers, filmmakers, poets around the world where we discuss creative life in the context of our new social reality.