A Conversation about Chris Burden and “California Art”

Associate Professor of Art History at George Washington University, Alexander Dumbadze is the author of Bas Jan Ader: Death Is Elsewhere (University of Chicago Press, 2013) as well as co-editor and co-author of Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). He is currently writing Jack Goldstein: All Day Night Sky. His essays and criticism have been published in a variety of national and international publications. A recipient of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Dumbadze was a Visiting Professor of Art History at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis in 2012. He is also a co-founder and former president of the Society of Contemporary Art Historians. He teaches courses on contemporary art, theory, and historiography.

Art historian, curator, and writer Sydney Stutterheim joined Gagosian in 2018. Her scholarly research focuses on postwar and contemporary art, with a focus on performance practices of the 1970s and 80s. She is the co-editor of Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden (Gagosian, 2022), and is completing a book titled Accomplices, developed from her doctoral dissertation about networked authorship in the 1970s and 80s—which features Chris Burden as one of four main case studies. She has lectured on Burden and other artists’ work in various contexts and currently serves as Gagosian’s resident art historian.

As Executive Director to the Estate of Chris Burden and the Studio of Nancy Rubins, Yayoi Shionoiri is responsible for stewarding Burden’s art historical legacy and promoting Rubins’s artistic practice. She contributed to Poetic Practical, the first examination of Chris Burden’s unrealized work, featuring sixty-seven projects of varying scope and ambition that the artist was unable to complete during his lifetime, published by Gagosian. She also serves as U.S. Alliance Partner to City Lights Law, and as an Outside Board Director to Startbahn. She is a published specialist on art law and an US-Japan Leadership Program Fellow and an Asia Society Asia 21 Young Leader. She serves as an Advisory Panelist to the Serpentine Gallery’s Legal Lab.