The New Social Environment#235
Art School Confidential, Part 2
to
1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
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Vincent Katz, Christine Kuan, Nato Thompson, and Robert Storr will discuss the history and future of art schools and possible alternatives. The conversation will be led by Dore Bowen. We’ll conclude with a poetry reading from Meilani Clay.
In this talk
Vincent Katz
Poet, translator, and hybrid-form prose writer Vincent Katz is the author of the poetry collections Broadway for Paul (2020), Southness (2016), Swimming Home (2015), and the book of translations, The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (2004). His writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. As curator of the Readings in Contemporary Poetry series at Dia:Chelsea from 2010-2021, Katz edited the anthology Readings in Contemporary Poetry (Dia Art Foundation, 2017). In 2021, pieces from an opera in collaboration with composer Sarah Sarhandi were performed at the Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival in London. He lives in New York City.
Christine Kuan
CEO of Sotheby’s Institute of Art & Director of Sotheby’s Institute of Art-New York. Prior to this, Kuan was Chief Curator and Director of Strategic Partnerships at Artsy. She has also served as Chief Curatorial Officer and Vice President of External Affairs at Artstor, and Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Art Online/Grove Art Online at Oxford University Press. In addition, Kuan has worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Department of Asian Art, and has taught at The University of Iowa, Peking University, and Rutgers University. She has lectured and published extensively on digital strategy, museum policy, and new technologies for the art world. Kuan sits on the History of Collecting Advisory Committee at the Frick Collection, and she serves on The Brooklyn Rail Steering Committee.
Nato Thompson
Author, curator and “cultural infrastructure builder” Nato Thompson is the founder of The Alternative Art School. With over 20 years of experience in the art world, he served as Artistic Director at Philadelphia Contemporary, Chief Curator at Creative Time, and Curator at MASS MoCA. He has written two books of cultural criticism, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (Melville House, 2015) and Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life (Melville House, 2017), among many other publications.
Robert Storr
Preeminent art critic, curator, artist, and educator Robert Storr is the former Dean of Yale School of Art and senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has written numerous catalogues, articles, and books on major 20th and 21st-century artists. He was the first American to serve as visual arts director of the Venice Biennale and has been researching and writing on Philip Guston for more than three decades.
Dore Bowen
Dore Bowen, PhD, writes on modern and contemporary art, focusing on perceptual practices that probe the texture of ordinary life. She publishes in journals, such as Art in America, Afterimage, Culture & Musées, Square Cylinder, and Camerawork, on an international group of artists, including Yael Bartana, Dan Graham, Akram Zaatari, Elin Hansdottir, and Lydia Ourahmane. In 2019 Bowen published Bruce Nauman: Spatial Encounters (with Constance M. Lewallen, University of California Press), and is currently completing a monograph on the diorama from the 19th century to contemporary installation art. She is Research Professor in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Meilani Clay reading.
Meilani Clay
Meilani Clay is a conscious writer, educator and poetry slam champion from the San Francisco Bay Area. She emerged as part of Youth Speaks, a youth performance poetry and creative writing program founded in 1996, and served on SPOKES (Selected-Poets-Organizing-Kreating-&-Expanding-Spoken Word), a Youth Advisory Board and paid internship program. Clay also taught in an academic enrichment program, formerly known as Summerbridge National, which caters to urban youth with high potential but limited resources. She was a Bay Area representative at the Ninth Annual Brave New Voices (BNV) International Youth Poetry Slam Contest in New York City. Clay graduated from Howard University with a degree in English, and was a contributing editor for the university’s Amistad literary magazine.
❤️ 🌈 We'd like to thank the The Terra Foundation for American Art for making these daily conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive.