Molly Nesbit | |
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Born | |
Education | Vassar College Yale University |
Occupation(s) | Art historian, professor, curator |
Molly Nesbit is a contributing editor at Artforum and a Professor of Art at Vassar College, where she writes and teaches on modern and contemporary art, film, and photography. She graduated from Vassar College in 1974 with a B.A. in Art History, and went on to receive her Ph.D. from Yale University. She taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Barnard College, and Columbia University before returning to Vassar in 1993. [1]
She has received many awards, notably from the Guggenheim Foundation, [2] the J. Paul Getty Trust, and the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. [3] In 2019 she received the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art by the College Art Association.
Nesbit's work can be followed through her many articles and books. Atget's Sevent Albums (1992, Yale), Their Common Sense (2000, Black Dog Press), The Pragmatism in the History of Art (Periscope 2013, Inventory Press 2020), [4] [5] which forms the first volume of her collected essays; Midnight: the Tempest Essays (2017, Inventory Press) is the second; a third, Sustainable Aesthetics, is planned.
In 2008 she gave the J. Kirk T. Varnedoe Memorial lectures at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, to appear in book form as Light in Buffalo. [6]
Since 2002, together with art curator, critic and historian of art Hans-Ulrich Obrist and contemporary artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, she has curated Utopia Station, a collective and ongoing book, exhibition, seminar, website, and street project, located in Poughkeepsie, New York, Frankfurt, Venice, Munich, Porto Alegre, and at the Brooklyn Museum. For information on the early stages of Utopia Station see the e-flux project site: http://projects.e-flux.com/utopia/index.html . [7] The first Utopia Station exhibition took place as part of the Venice Biennale in 2003, and later traveled to the Haus der Kunst in Munich, with additions and modifications, in 2004. [1]
In Pragmatism, the first of Nesbit's Pre-Occupations series of essay compilations, Nesbit outlines the questions modern art historians address to make sense of the changes in art and life during the early 20th century. Through a pragmatic study of the societal changes of this time period, Nesbit attempts to understand the break towards abstraction, best characterized by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque with the rise of Cubism, in which Nesbit interprets the Cubist line as an "embrace of the language of industry." She asserts that it was the introduction of rationalized methods of drawing into the French school curriculum by arts administrators Eugène Guillaume and Antonin Proust in 1881 that led to the break between representational and abstract art. [8]
She explores these inquiries by studying the writings of art historians Meyer Schapiro, Henri Focillon, George Kubler, Robert Herbert, T. J. Clark, and Linda Nochlin, the philosophies of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, and the films of Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard. Artists discussed include Vincent van Gogh, Isamu Noguchi, Lawrence Weiner, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.
In Midnight, the second of Nesbit's "Pre-Occupations" series of essay compilations, Nesbit returns the question of pragmatism to the everyday critical practice of the art historian, illustrated with case studies on Eugène Atget, Marcel Duchamp, Jean-Luc Godard, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Rachel Whiteread, Gabriel Orozco, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lawrence Weiner, Nancy Spero, Rem Koolhaas, Martha Rosler, Gerhard Richter, Mathew Barney, and Richard Serra, among others, in a continuity of investigation. [9]
The essays were originally published between 1986 and the early 2000s, and reflect Nesbit's interest in "the genealogy of ideas". [10] In an interview with Hyperallergic, Nesbit describes her approach to thinking as being based in the "set of theoretical developments that took place in art history in Europe and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s." Put simply, Nesbit believes that art historians can and should make use of philosophical questions as starting points in the quest to better understand the time and the place of the work of art.
Eugène Atget was a French flâneur and a pioneer of documentary photography, noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization. Most of his photographs were first published by Berenice Abbott after his death. Though he sold his work to artists and craftspeople, and became an inspiration for the surrealists, he did not live to see the wide acclaim his work would eventually receive.
Thaddeus John Szarkowski was an American photographer, curator, historian, and critic. From 1962 to 1991 Szarkowski was the director of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Martha Rosler is an American artist. She is a conceptual artist who works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war, as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to places of passage and systems of transport.
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ × 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notably, the Artforum logo is a bold and condensed iteration of the Akzidenz-Grotesk font, a feat for an American publication to have considering how challenging it was to obtain fonts favored by the Swiss school via local European foundries in the 1960s. Artforum is published by Artforum Media, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Media Corporation.
Rirkrit Tiravanija is a Thai contemporary artist residing in New York City, Berlin, and Chiangmai, Thailand. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961. His installations often take the form of stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, reading or playing music; architecture or structures for living and socializing are a core element in his work.
The Peace Tower was a collaborative artwork spearheaded by the artists Irving Petlin and Mark di Suvero. The Peace Tower was created in the winter of 1966 in the West Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles to protest US involvement in the Vietnam War. Forty years later, Mark di Suvero, Irving Petlin, and Rirkrit Tiravanija collaborated in revisiting the project through a new installation entitled Peace Tower (2006) for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City to protest the Iraq War.
The Getty Foundation, based in Los Angeles, California at the Getty Center, awards grants for "the understanding and preservation of the visual arts". In the past, it funded the Getty Leadership Institute for "current and future museum leaders", which is now at Claremont Graduate University. Its budget for 2006–07 was $27.8 million. It is part of the J. Paul Getty Trust.
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Federico Solmi is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York.
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Thomas Kellein is a German art historian; gallery director; author; and curator. He was the Director at Kunsthalle Basel between 1988 and 1995, and the Director of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld between 1996 and 2010. He was the Director of the Chinati Foundation between 2011 and 2012.
Barry Schwabsky is an American art critic, art historian and poet. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts, Pratt Institute, New York University, Yale University, and Goldsmiths College, among others.
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Aria Dean is an American artist, critic, and curator. Until 2021, Dean served as Curator and Editor of Rhizome. Her writings have appeared in various art publications including Artforum, e-flux, The New Inquiry, Art in America, and Topical Cream. Dean has exhibited internationally at venues such as Foxy Production and American Medium in New York, Chateau Shatto in Los Angeles, and Arcadia Missa in London. Dean also co-directs As It Stands LA, an artists project space that opened in 2015. Dean lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles. She is represented by Greene Naftali.
Barbara Steiner is an Austrian art historian, curator, author, and editor. Steiner is the director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. She served as the director of the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig from 2001 to 2011, and as the director of Kunsthaus Graz from 2016 to 2021.
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