Autumn at Yale School of Art: 112 days (more or less) in New Haven…

All lectures and events take place at E.I.K., 36 Edgewood Avenue, New Haven, CT, and are free and open to the public.

Monday, September 25 at 7PM

1971: A Year in the Life of Color

A Conversation with Darby English

Author of such important books as How to See A Work of Art in Total Darkness (MIT Press, 2007) and Consulting Curator at MoMA, Professor Darby English has a conversation with the Yale School of Art’s Assistant Dean, Mark Gibson, on topics raised in his book such as the role that a political movement can play in an artistic movement, specifically speaking to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s and how that influenced the “Black Art Aesthetic” of the 1970’s (and beyond?). They will also explore the role that abstraction plays in describing the Black Experience, and what roles do institutions play in curating the “Black Art Aesthetic?”

Darby English is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago and Consulting Curator at MoMA.
[Full information >>](http://art.yale.edu/1971AYearintheLifeofColor)

Monday, October 2 at 7PM

Crisis as Form

Peter Osborne

The London based scholar in the field of aesthetic and contemporary art practice, Peter Osborne, approaches how the field of contemporary art since the 1960s has been characterized by both the attempted dissolution and the reflective expansion of the concept of artistic form. According to Professor Osborne, “recently, in the wake of the revisionist historiography of the exhibitions of that time, the motif of something ‘becoming form’ has been revived and applied in new critical contexts. What, if anything, delimits this expansion of the concept of artistic form? Might it be extended all the way to the crisis-ridden form of historical present? How today might we conceive crisis as form?”

Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London. [Full information >>](http://art.yale.edu/CrisisasForm)

Wednesday October 11 at 7PM

I Even Spotted One Woman Wearing a Hat

Ariella Azoulay

Ariella Azoulay, author of Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012) and a scholar in the field of visual culture and photography, focuses her research on how history is told through visual mediums — photographs, film, drawings, and other visual elements — and how these provide a level of detail and context not provided solely by the written word. In her lecture at the Yale School of Art, Professor Azoulay will use the 1950s text A Woman in Berlin as a point of departure for tracing the visual record of massive rape taking place in Berlin at the end of World War II, creating a key to read certain photographs previously overlooked as related to rape.

Ariella Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University. [Full information >>](http://art.yale.edu/IEvenSpottedOneWomanWearingaHat)

Wednesday October 25 at 7PM

De-Pixellation

An Artist Talk by Thomas Hirschhorn

Thomas Hirschhorn addresses his decision “to see and look at the world as it is, and to insist in doing so.” Hirschhorn notes: “I believe blurring or masking and furthermore censorship or self-censorship, is a growing and insidious issue, also in the social media today. I don’t accept that, under the claim of ‘protecting’ - protecting me, protecting the other - the world is pixelated in my place. I want, I can, I need and I must use my own eyes to see everything in our world, as act of emancipation. ‘De-pixelation’ is the term I use to manifest that pixelating no longer makes sense. Pixels, blurring, masking, and censorship in general, can no longer hold back or conceal fake-news, facts, opinions or comments. Fake-news, facts, opinions, comments entirely take part in the “Post-Truth”. We have definitely entered the post-truth world. Pixelation stands for the form of agreement in this post-truth world. I want to insist heavily on what makes me work in a kind of urgency and necessity: The world has to be ‘de-pixelated’.”

An acclaimed visual artist and writer, Thomas Hirschhorn has had his work shown in numerous museums, galleries and exhibitions. His most recent book, “Gramsci Monument,” was published in 2015 by Dia and Koenig Books. [Full information >>](http://art.yale.edu/De-Pixelation)

Tuesday, November 7 at 5:30PM

The Optics of The Racial Imaginary

Claudia Rankine

Poet, author, essayist and playwright, Claudia Rankine addresses The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII), which she co-founded in 2016 to seek to change the way we imagine race in the U.S. and internationally by lifting up and connecting the work of artists, writers, knowledge-producers, and activists with audiences seeking thoughtful, innovative conversations and experiences. Rankine will consider how issues of white dominance are expressed through the visual arts by looking at artists such as Alexandra Bell, Nona Faustine, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Hew Locke, and others.

Claudia Rankine is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. [Full information >>](http://art.yale.edu/TheOpticsofTheRacialImaginary)

Thursday, November 9 at 7PM

Public (Re) Assembly

Shannon Jackson

Author of Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Routledge, 2011), Shannon Jackson gives a talk on what does it mean to assemble in public in our present moment? And what does it mean to assemble public sector systems? Is there a relation between the public appearance of the former and the systematic operations of the latter? The concept of assembly is resonant, multivalent, and fraught in our current moment. Assembly recalls theories of democracy and freedom as well as modern and contemporary art movements of assemblage. It also invokes industrial (and post-industrial) processes of production, arrangement, service, and labor. Can the re-imagining of Public Re-Assembly help us to re-imagine how social practice is performed?

Shannon Jackson is a professor and researcher focusing on collaborations across art forms and the role of the arts in social change. In addition to several faculty appointments at UC-Berkeley, she is also Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts Design. [Full information >>](http://art.yale.edu/PublicReAssembly)

Wednesday, November 15 at 7PM

WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER

A Performance by Susan Howe and David Grubbs

This is the 4th collaboration from poet Susan Howe and musician/composer David Grubbs. Veering away from the stuttering, profoundly fragmented seance of their Frolic Architecture (2011), Howe and Grubbs present a sound work that germinates from text collages and other material published in Howe’s recent collection Debths (New Directions, 2017). This performance work was created while the material (Tom Tit Tot, Childe Roland, Paul Thek, W.B.Yeats, Isabella Stewart Gardner, etc.) in Debths was being arranged and combines Howe’s reading with the resonant sounds and represented spaces of Grubbs’s piano playing and field recordings made in Boston’s Gardner Museum.

Poet and writer Susan Howe received the 2017 Robert Frost award for distinguished lifetime achievement in American poetry. Howe has also had her word collages exhibited at the Yale Union in Portland, Oregon, and in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. [Full information >>](http://art.yale.edu/WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER)

David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording and the forthcoming Now that the audience is assembled (both titles on Duke University Press). [Full information >>](http://art.yale.edu/WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER)

Monday, November 27 at 7PM

What We Mean When We Ask Permission

An Artist Talk by Naeem Mohaiemen

Since 2006, Naeem Mohaiemen has explored defeated utopias in an ongoing project – The Young Man Was, a history of the 1970s revolutionary left. As part of this, in Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), a critically acclaimed three-channel film recently premiered in Documenta 14 in Kassel, Mohaiemen emphasizes the left in state power, and henceforth, to its eventual failure through misrecognition. In this artist talk at YSoA, Mohaiemen poses what different stories may have come out if the form were autobiography. In his conversations with Dutch journalist Peter Custers, the protagonist of Last Man in Dhaka Central (2015), “unrequited love” surfaces as a metaphor for the 1970s left as a movement that attempted to, unsuccessfully, revive itself in later years.

Writer and Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at Columbia University researching left histories outside state patronage, Naeem Mohaiemen combines films, installations, and essays to research failed left utopias and incomplete decolonizations–framed by Third World Internationalism and World Socialism. [Full information >>](WhatWeMeanWhenWeAskPermission)