The New Social Environment#107

A Tribute to Paul Kasmin

Thursday, August 13, 2020

1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

Artist Elliott Puckette, Guggenheim Director, Richard Armstrong, and gallerist, David Nolan will discuss the life and work of Paul Kasmin with Rail Artistic Director and Publisher, Phong Bui. We’ll conclude with a poetry reading from Lauren Russell.

In this talk

Elliott Puckette

Elliott Puckette’s delicate and ethereal paintings are a continual exploration of the dynamic possibilities of the line. Evocative of written music and ancient script, her linear abstraction is rendered either by etching into the prepared ground with a razor blade or drawing meticulously with ink on an expanse of paper. Puckette received her BFA from Cooper Union in New York in 1989. Her works are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Public Library, the Fogg Museum, and the Huntsville Museum of Art. She has been represented by Kasmin since 1993. Elliott was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Richard Armstrong

Richard Armstrong has been the Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation since 2008, leading the Guggenheim Foundation and its constellation of museums, in addition to serving on the Guggenheim Foundation Board of Trustees. Previously, Armstrong was the Henry J. Heinz II Director at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1996-2008). He has also held curatorial positions at Carnegie Museum of Art (1992-96), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1981- 1992), and the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in California (1975-79). A native of Kansas City, Missouri, Armstrong graduated from Lake Forest College in Illinois with a BA in art history, having studied at the Université de Dijon and the Université de Paris, Sorbonne.

David Nolan

David Nolan founded David Nolan Gallery in 1987 in Soho, specializing in modern and contemporary works by an array of international artists working in a variety of media. The gallery’s original mission was to exhibit contemporary works on paper along with painting and sculptures by American and European artists, and to produce monographs together with tightly curated historical exhibitions. The first solo show at the gallery – an exhibition of early drawings by Sigmar Polke - was followed by presentations of now-canonical German artists, including Georg Baselitz, Martin Kippenberger, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Richter, Rosemarie Trockel and Albert Oehlen. In Spring 2020, the gallery announced its newest location on the Upper East Side in a historic townhouse built in 1902 by architectural firm Buchman and Fox, inaugurated with an exhibition of works on paper by Jorinde Voigt.

Phong H. Bui

Photo of Phong Bui taken by Nicola Delorme — Photo by Nicola Delorme

Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and former Curatorial Advisor at MoMA PS1 (2007-2010). He is the Co-Founder, Publisher, and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, the River Rail, the publishing press Rail Editions, Rail Curatorial Projects, and the Host/Producer of “Off the Rail” on Art International Radio. Since 2000, he has curated nearly 60 one-person and group exhibits. In 2013 he founded Rail Curatorial Projects, which aims to curate group exhibits that respond specifically to location, cultural moment, and economic conditions.

All aspects of his activities, from publishing, writing, editing, curating, to art practice, including executing large-scale installation, making portraits of featured interviewees in the Rail and other forms of social activism are integral parts of his “social environment,” a consequential step following Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture and Nicholas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics.

He is a trustee of Studio in a School, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Anthology Film Archives, the Third Rail, the Miami Rail, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Second Shift Studio Space of Saint Paul, International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA 2007-2020), among others. He is also a member of the Art Advisory Council of Fountain House Gallery, Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of The Monira Foundation, a non-profit which aims to curate ongoing exhibitions and public programming at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City and beyond. He was a Senior Critic at Yale MFA, Columbia University MFA, and University of Pennsylvania MFA from 2012 to 2015. He has taught graduate seminars in MFA Writing and Criticism and MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts from 2012 to 2016. He has received numerous awards, including an Honorary Doctorate of University of the Arts (2020), the Jetté Award for Leadership in the Arts, Colby College Museum of Art (2019), The Lunder Fellowship, The Lunder Institute for American Art (2019), The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation Prize in Fine Art Journalism (2017), The Esther Montanez Leadership Award, Fountain House (2016), Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters (2003), and The Eric Isenburger Annual Prize for Installation, National Academy Museum (2003), among others.

In the Rail: Phong H. Bui

More on Phong H. Bui

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Lauren Russell reading.

Lauren Russell

Lauren Russell is the author of Descent, and What’s Hanging on the Hush. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. This fall she joins the faculty of Michigan State University.

In the Rail: Lauren Russell