Visiting Artists Program: November/December 2002

Lectures begin at 6:00 p.m. in the School Auditorium, 280 South Columbus Drive. Admission is $5 per person for the general public, $3 per person for SAIC Alumni, students and seniors and free for students, faculty and staff of the Art Institute of Chicago.

November/December Schedule

"After the End of History: Rethinking The Image of the Past"

This series will include artists and scholars whose works address the problem of historical representation.

Wednesday, November 6, 6:00 p.m.
Eleanor Antin
SAIC Auditorium (280 South Columbus Dr.)

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Eleanor Antin: An artist/filmmaker working for many years in installation, photography, video, film, performance, drawing and writing, Antin has an international reputation. She has solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, as well as a major 30 year retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has exhibited major installations at the Hirschhorn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. Within her performance work she has appeared in venues around the world including the Venice Biennale and the Sydney Opera House. Several of her mixed media, groundbreaking works such as "100 BOOTS", "CARVING; A Traditional Sculpture", "The Angel of Mercy", "Recollections of my Life with Diaghilev," "The King of Solana Beach", "The Adventures of a Nurse," are frequently referred to as classics of feminist postmodernism. She has written several books, such as BEING ANTINOVA, ELEANORA ANTINOVA PLAYS, 100 BOOTS and the forthcoming "MAN WITHOUT A WORLD" and has written, directed and produced narrative films, among them the feature, "The Man Without a World", 1991, and "The Last Night of Rasputin," 1989, Antin has received awards such as the Guggenheim Fellowship,1997 and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture Media Achievement Award in 1998. Antin is an Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California at San Diego.

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Monday, November 11, 6:00 p.m.
Glenn Ligon
SAIC Auditorium (280 South Columbus Dr.)

"Keith, Alexis and Glenn in front of the Flavin, 1998"

Gleen Ligon is an installation artists who lives and works in Brooklyn. ?His Documenta 11 work, "A Stranger in the Village," is an ongoing series started in 1998 of large coal dust paintings. Inscribing socially charged paragraphs of James Baldwinís 1935 essay "A Stranger in the Village" onto horizontally oriented scroll-like canvases, Ligon resuscitates lost beliefs in the medium of painting by opening an unforeseen communicative dimension. In a process of working through issues of gay black identity by making the space of the literary his own, Ligon takes recourse to poetic and artistic explorations of the concrete qualities of language. Coming out of an identity conscious generation of American artists from the 1970s and 1980s, concerned with issues of the representation of gender, race and sexuality, Ligon directs attention to the imagery of the gay, black male as an indicator of the conditions of society at large.

Ligon received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 1997 and National Endowment for the Arts Grants in 1991,1989, 1982. Glenn has had solo shows such as,Stranger, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY. Catalogue; Colored, D'Amelio Terras, New York, NY ; Portraits and Not Portraits, Kunstverein Munich, Germany ;Currents 81, St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Coloring, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. Catalogue; Unbecoming, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. Catalogue; Glenn Ligon, ArtPace, San Antonio, TX; Glenn Ligon, Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY; Matrix 120, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. Brochure, White, Max Protetch Gallery, New York. Glen Ligon has been in numerous group exhibitions such as Subject Plural, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. Catalogue; Take Two, Ottawa Art Gallery, Ontario, Canada. Catalogue; Points of Departure: Connecting with Contemporary Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; AutoWerke, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany. Catalogue; Age of Influence: Reflections in the Mirror of American Culture, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The American Century: Art and Culture 1900-2000, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

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Monday, November 18, 6:00 p.m.
James Young
SAIC Auditorium (280 South Columbus Dr.)

James E. Young Photo courtesy of the artist.

James E. Young is Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he has taught since 1988, and currently Chair of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies. He has also taught at New York University as a Dorot Professor of English and Hebrew/Judaic Studies (1984-88), at Bryn Mawr College in the History of Religion, and at the University of Washington, Harvard University, and Princeton University as a visiting professor. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California in 1983.

Professor Young is the author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (1988), The Texture of Memory (Yale University Press, 1993), which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1994, and At Memory's Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (Yale University Press, 2000). He was also the Guest Curator of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York City, entitled "The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History" (March - August 1994, with venues in Berlin and Munich, September 1994 - June 1995) and was the editor of The Art of Memory (Prestel Verlag, 1994), the exhibition catalogue for this show. In 1997, Professor Young was appointed by the Berlin Senate to the five-member Findungskommission for Germany's national "Memorial to Europe's Murdered Jews," to be built in Berlin.

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Monday, November 25, 6:00 p.m.
Jeremy Deller
SAIC Auditorium (280 South Columbus Dr.)

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Jeremy Deller: Politically and socially charged, Deller's works, such as the internationally celebrated political/performance works Battle of Orgreave and Unconvention, incorporate complex formal and performative elements in a manner that undermines, among other conventions, notions of authorship and hierarchy. With the work, Battle of Orgreave, Deller organized a historical reenactment of a seminal event in recent British history. Originally the conflict was, in effect an attempt by the Thatcher Administration to destroy the class struggle and growing political power of the Unions in Great Britain, which, in turn led to a violent clash between police and coal miners in the city of Orgreave, South Yorkshire. With the equally ambitious work, Unconvention, Deller, inspired by Che Guevara, set out to find a "relationship between love and revolution, aesthetic and political radicalism, visual art and social history." (Polly Staple, Art Monthly, Exhibitions, pg. 233). Deller managed to forge a connection between, among other things, Andy Warhol, booths set up for political organizations such as Amnesty International and Situationalist International, Jenny Saville, Jackson Pollock, fans of the band Manic Street Preachers, Martin Kippenburger, Documentary photographers Robert Capa and Kevin Carter, Picasso, the 80 member Pendyrus Male Choir and a lecture by social activist Arthur Scargill. Curator and critic, Matthew Higgs provides succinct illumination on the event, "Each organization, each artwork, each document, each individual accorded an emotional equanimity, unburdened by the usual hierarchies, the usual distinctions between cultural artifacts that art galleries so commonly reinforce. Jeremy Deller's art is an art of democratization, one that demystifies and liberates the construction of meaning, empowering both its audience and participants alike" (Matthew Higgs, Unconvention, A True Revolutionary is Motivated by Great Feelings of Love, pg. 4)

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Wednesday, December 4th
Panel Discussion: "Representing History"
Moderated by Dan Eisenberg

Call for more information regarding times and ticketing, 312-443-3711

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For more information and a schedule of events call (312) 443-3711.