The New York Public Library

presents

An Art Book Series Event

 

Art and Words - ArtSpeak

Robert Atkins in conversation with

Jordan Crandall, Pablo Helguera, Mireia Sentís

 

Wednesday October 30, 2013

6:00 p.m. 

Margaret Liebman Berger Forum
Room 227 (2^nd Floor)

 

The New York Public Library

Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

5^thAvenue at 42^nd Street

New York, NY 10016

917-275-6975

 www.nypl.org

(directions)

 

 Room 227 opens to public at 5:30 p.m.
All events are FREE and subject to last minute change or cancellation

Translation? Interpretation? Mediation? What do we mean when we talk about art? Join art historian Robert Atkins and artists Jordan Crandall, Pablo Helguera and Mireia Sentís for a wide-ranging discussion of the relationship between art and language today, and the thorny task of choosing the words to encapsulate the last quarter-century of contemporary art. This event celebrates the publication of the revised and updated twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Atkins's best-selling ArtSpeak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords, 1945 to the Present.

 

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of its original publication, the best-selling ArtSpeak (Abbeville Press 2013)returns in a fully redesigned third edition, featuring nearly 150 alphabetical entries—30 of them entirely new, and others updated—that explain the who, when, where, and what of postwar and contemporary art, from Abstract Expressionism to zeitgeist. These concise essays on key artistic terms are written with wit and common sense by veteran art historian and critic Robert Atkins, who also provides a year-by-year timeline of world and art-world events from 1945 to the present. Some 80 images, most in full color, illustrate iconic works of the movements discussed, making ArtSpeak a visual as well as a textual reference.

 

Copies of the book are available for purchase and signing at the event after the audience Q&A. 

Robert Atkins is an art historian, writer and curator. He is a frequent contributor to Art in America and a former staff columnist for the Village Voice. In addition to ArtSpeak, he is the author of ArtSpoke: A Guide to Modern Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords 1848-1944 and Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression. A Research Associate (Fellow) at Carnegie Mellon’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, he is a pioneering digital media producer who has created online resources including Artery: The AIDS-Arts Forum, and, in 2011, ArtSpeak China.org, the first bilingual wiki devoted to contemporary Chinese art. He has organized exhibitions at far flung venues ranging from the Sao Paulo Bienal to the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. A founding member of Visual AIDS, creators of Day With(out) Art and the Red Ribbon, he is currently producing AIDS Over Time/Time Over AIDS, a forum to be held throughout New York in 2014.

Jordan Crandall is a media artist, theorist and Professor in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego. In 2011, he received the Vilém Flusser Theory Award for outstanding theory and research-based digital arts practice from the Transmediale and the Vilém Flusser Archive of the University of Arts, Berlin. His current project, UNMANNED, blends performance art, political theater, philosophical speculation, and intimate reverie and explores the status of the human in a militarized landscape increasingly dependent on technology and new ontologies of distributed systems. Developed in residency at Eyebeam center for art and technology, it was performed most recently at V2_ Institute in Rotterdam. Crandall is founding director of the Active Structures + Materials research studio at UCSD, an interdisciplinary test-site for new theories of materiality and new forms and methods of material practice, and founding editor of the online journal VERSION.

Pablo Helguera is the Director of Adult and Academic Programs in MoMA’s Department of Education and an artist whose show Libreria Donceles is currently up at Kent Gallery in Chelsea.

 

Mireia Sentís is a writer, photographer and curator. Born in Barcelona, she grew up in Paris and studied at Oxford and in Florence. She has directed and anchored cultural radio and TV programs in Spain and the UK, and has written for El País, the Spanish newspaper. She started working at United Nations headquarter in 1972 and since then has been living and working in New York, Barcelona and Madrid. In 1983, she began exhibiting her photographic work throughout Europe, South America and New York, and was the recipient of a retrospective exhibition at the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, 2008) and at Arts Santa Mònica (Barcelona, 2010). She is the author of Al límite del juego (To the Limit of the Game, 1994), a portrait of SoHo in the 1960’s and 70’s, and En el pico del águila: una introducción a la cultura afroamericana (In the Eagle's Beak: An introduction to African American Culture, 1998). She is the founder/director of BAAM (Biblioteca Afro Americana in Madrid), which publishes previously untranslated writings in Spanish.

 

In its fifth year the program series An Art Book, initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni, is a celebration of the essential importance and beauty of art books. The events showcase book presentations and discussions by world renowned artists, critics, curators, gallerists, historians and writers.