150th Events

In celebration of the Yale School of Art’s 150th year, the School is hosting a series of public talks and engagements, as well as community events open to students and alumni.

Following Yale University guidance in response to the spread of COVID-19, the remaining public events comprising the School of Art’s 150th Spring Lecture Series have been postponed. Information regarding rescheduling will be posted here as soon as it becomes available.

POSTPONED: Karen Barad: “After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice”

Thursday, March 26, 2020

6:30pm

EIK, 32 Edgewood Avenue

Hayden Distinguished Fellow Karen Barad is Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz and also has an affiliation in Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. Barad’s Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Barad held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory. Barad’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Barad has served as both the Director and Co-Director of the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program at UCSC, which they helped found.

The Hayden Distinguished Fellowship program at the Yale School of Art is made possible through the Hayden Fund for Art and Ideas, and brings internationally renowned artists and cultural producers to the School of Art to work with students as teachers, mentors, and critics. Former Hayden Distinguished Fellows have included artists Carol Bove, Richard Hawkins, Andrea Fraser, and Hito Steyerl, and philosopher, art theorist, and critic Peter Osborne.

Following Yale University guidance in response to the spread of COVID-19, the public events comprising the School of Art’s 150th Spring Lecture Series have been postponed. This lecture has been postponed to Fall 2020.

POSTPONED: It’s About Time! Diffracting Temporalities

Discussion, Observation, Articulation, and Dimension

Curated by Marta Kuzma, Karen Barad and Elaine Gan

Friday, March 27, 2020

10am to 6pm

EIK, 32 Edgewood Ave

With: artist Tauba Auerbach; artist Sarah Oppenheimer; artist Rachel Rose; artist Aki Sasamoto with mathematician Pau Atela; mathematician Jeffrey Brock in concert with music theorist Brian Kane; computer scientist Nisheeth Vishnoi; and researcher and engineer Ramon Amaro, amongst others…

Karen Barad, feminist theorist, author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, and Professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz is joined by friend and collaborator Elaine Gan, co-editor of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, and Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at New York University, for an interdisciplinary convergence of dialogue, performances, and screenings across the arts and sciences, aimed at opening up different possibilities for thinking temporalities anew, against the grain of homogenous, empty time, breaking with telos, determinism, apocalypse, nostalgia, and progress.

The day’s events will be in dialogue with Karen Barad’s lecture: “After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice” taking place the evening before, on March 26 at 6pm.

This event is open to the Yale community.

More information >>

Following Yale University guidance in response to the spread of COVID-19, the public events comprising the School of Art’s 150th Spring Lecture Series have been postponed.

POSTPONED: Paul Mpagi Sepuya: An Artist Talk

Monday, April 13, 2020

6:30pm

EIK, 32 Edgewood Avenue

Paul Mpagi Sepuya will provide an overview of his recent work and practice, as produced for his March 2020 exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles. Sepuya lives and works in Los Angeles, where he received an MFA in photography at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2016. From 2000 through 2014 Sepuya resided in New York City, receiving a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2004. Sepuya became known for his zine series SHOOT (2005–2007) and first monograph, Beloved Object & Amorous Subject, Revisited (2008), along with contributions and features in BUTT Magazine, and participation and collaborations in the re-emergence of queer zine culture of the 2000s. He went on to participate in Artist-in-Residence programs at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Fire Island Artist Residency.

Sepuya’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the International Center for Photography, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Carnegie Museum, among others. Sepuya was recently featured in Being: New Photography 2018 at the Museum of Modern Art and Trigger at the New Museum in New York (2018). His first museum survey of work from 2006 through 2018 was hosted by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis from May through August 2019. Sepuya’s work has been covered and published in ARTFORUM, Aperture, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Art Review, Frieze, Art in America, Monocle, Osmos, and The Nation, and he is a recipient of the 2017 Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s grant for Los Angeles artists.

Following Yale University guidance in response to the spread of COVID-19, the public events comprising the School of Art’s 150th Spring Lecture Series have been postponed.

POSTPONED: Mickalene Thomas in conversation with Jasmine Wahi

with 2020 Presidential Visiting Fellow in Fine Arts, Mickalene Thomas

Thursday, April 16, 2020

6:30pm

EIK, 32 Edgewood Avenue

Mickalene Thomas is a New York-based distinguished visual artist, filmmaker, and curator who works in various mediums. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art, and her BFA from Pratt Institute. She is a recipient of the 2019 Meyerhoff-Becker Biennial Commission at the Baltimore Museum, a 2015 United States Artists Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellow, and is an alumnus of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Versailles Foundation Munn Artists Program in Giverny. Thomas is a recipient of the Aperture Award, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, the 2012 Brooklyn Museum Asher B. Durand Award, Timerhi Award for Leadership in the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Grant and the Pratt Institute Alumni Achievement Award in 2009, and the Rema Hort Mann Grant in 2007. She’s exhibited at Brooklyn Museum, The Smithsonian Museum, MoMA PS1, Seattle Art Museum, SFMoMA, National Portrait Gallery, Baltimore Museum, The Bass Museum, AGO Toronto, The Wexner Center, and Aspen Museum.

Her work is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, The Whitney Museum, The Guggenheim Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, Newark Museum, Seattle Art Museum, The Hara Museum, The Rubell Collection, The Studio Museum in Harlem, among other public and private institutions and collections. She is on the board of the Brooklyn Museum of Trustees and MoMA PS1. Thomas has also previously served on the faculty of the Yale School of Art as a Critic in Painting/Printmaking, as well as frequented the School as a Visiting Artist. Thomas is currently exhibiting at CAC New Orleans with museum shows at the Baltimore Museum and the Bass Museum this year. She is represented by Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago and Nathalie Obadia in Paris.

Jasmine Wahi is a curator, activist, TEDx speaker, and a founder and co-director of the non-profit Project for Empty Space. Her practice focuses on issues of femme empowerment, complicating binary structures within social discourses, and exploring multipositional cultural identities through the lens of intersectional feminism. She received her Masters from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where she focused on issues of intersectional narratives and authorship. In addition to running Project for Empty Space, and curating international shows independently, Wahi is also a professor at the School of Visual Arts, and a former board member of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Hyperallergic, ARTNews, Artforum, and more. Wahi lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her dog momo.

Following Yale University guidance in response to the spread of COVID-19, the public events comprising the School of Art’s 150th Spring Lecture Series have been postponed.

POSTPONED: Mary Gabriel: Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art

Monday, April 20, 2020

6:30pm

EIK, 32 Edgewood Avenue

Author Mary Gabriel will speak on her recent book Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art (Little, Brown and Company, 2018).

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A led by Elizabeth Smith, Executive Director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, which will explore points of overlap between Frankenthaler’s practice, her community of artist friends, and the dynamics which face emerging artists today.

Gabriel is the author of Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gabriel is also the author of numerous other books including Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored, and The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone. She worked in Washington and London as a Reuters editor for nearly two decades and lives in Ireland. Her lecture at the Yale School of Art is made possible through support from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, which made a generous gift in 2018 to create the Helen Frankenthaler Scholarship Fund, supporting MFA students in the Painting and Printmaking Department at the Yale School of Art.

Following Yale University guidance in response to the spread of COVID-19, the public events comprising the School of Art’s 150th Spring Lecture Series have been postponed.

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About the 150th Mark >>

Design pioneer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and designer Laura Coombs on gender, design, and identity

Wednesday, January 22

6:30pm

EIK, 32 Edgewood Avenue

In continued celebration of its 150th anniversary and its status as a co-educational institution, the Yale School of Art will launch its spring public lecture series on the evening of January 22 with a conversation between renowned designer, Caroline M. Street Professor of Graphic Design, and Woman’s Building cofounder Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and recent alumnus Laura Coombs. In a presentation of her and her students’ work, de Bretteville will touch on her seminal contributions to contemporary feminist design, engaging Coombs and audience members in conversation to reveal a range of perspectives with regard to gender, design, and the diversity of ways designers and artists find, and ultimately become themselves, through their work. The School of Art faculty and students recognize and acknowledge human differences and have created ways to bridge borders not only while here at Yale, but also through work in the space of cities here and abroad. This year marks the beginning of de Bretteville’s third decade as Director of the School’s Graphic Design program, during which time she has mentored hundreds of students who each in their own way are continuing to shape, change and develop the trajectory of this ever-expanding field. One such student was Laura Coombs, who received her MFA in 2017 and currently serves as Senior Designer at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

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Artist and Poet Barbara Chase-Riboud in conversation with Claudia Rankine and Marta Kuzma

Honorary Lecture Celebrating Yale School of Art’s 150th Year

Thursday, November 21

6:30pm

EIK, 32 Edgewood Avenue

Hosted in conjunction with the series of public events organized by the Yale School of Art in celebration of its 150th anniversary and its status as a co-educational professional school of art, acclaimed artist and poet Barbara Chase-Riboud will speak as the anniversary year’s Honorary Lecturer with Yale University’s Professor of Poetry Claudia Rankine and Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean and Professor of Art Marta Kuzma in a public conversation on the evening of Thursday, November 21st.

In 1960, Chase-Riboud became the first known African-American woman to receive an MFA from what was then the Yale School of Architecture and Design. Her return to New Haven marks a significant historical moment for the Yale School of Art. It took nearly a century—ninety-one years since the School’s opening—for the first known woman of color to be acknowledged as an artist in the way white women of privilege had enjoyed since 1869. Likewise, the School of Art was limited to male leadership until just three years ago, when Marta Kuzma was appointed the first woman dean in the School’s history in 2016. In an unflinching conversation, Chase-Riboud, Rankine, and Kuzma will discuss the overwhelming roles that race and gender have played—and continue to play—in spaces of institutional power such as Yale, and the ways in which Chase-Riboud’s practice has informed, and in many ways led, the development of abstraction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It will also pursue Chase-Riboud’s life as part of the African diaspora in Paris in the 1960s.

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Scholar and Educator Dr. Ramon Amaro: “On Machine Learning and the Collective Condition of Black Survival”

Wednesday, November 20

12:00–1:00 pm

1156 Chapel Street, Graphic Design Atrium (Room 104)

Hosted in conjunction with the public lectures organized by the Yale School of Art in tandem with its 150th anniversary and its status as a co-educational professional school of art, scholar and educator Dr. Ramon Amaro will deliver a public lecture on the afternoon of November 20th on his recent research regarding machine learning as it relates to systems of value and racialized exclusion. In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Gilbert Simondon argues that alienation in our contemporary techno-culture is caused by an imbalance in our perception and recognition of certain object as having more value than others, which is pronounced by a desire for power in a partial and biased culture. Simondon argues that this condition, or what he describes as an “inadequate rapport” between humans and technology, can be surpassed by building an authentic “awareness” of the existence of technical objects. This dynamic, according to Simondon, is a problem of language, which serves the dual function of identification and exclusion.

In this talk, Dr. Amaro argues that there are similarities between Simondon’s thoughts on human-techno alienation and Frantz Fanon’s treatise on the mastery of language, the “abandoned” racialized object, and the affordances of power. He ground these concepts in machine learning to consider what these provocations might mean in terms of racism and racialized exclusion in non-linear (and therefore, nonrepresentational) computational languages. Ultimately, Dr. Amaro questions how alternative “awarenesses” and systems of value might be achieved in the relation between machine-object-human.

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Nancy Fraser on “What should socialism mean in the 21st century?”

Monday, November 18

6pm

EIK, 32 Edgewood Avenue

Hosted in conjunction with the public lectures organized by the Yale School of Art in tandem with its 150th anniversary and its status as a co-educational professional school of art, critical theorist Nancy Fraser will deliver a public lecture on November 18th on her recent research regarding twenty-first century feminism and feminist militancy, as well as the fractured myth of progressive neoliberal capitalism.

In a talk entitled “What should socialism mean in the 21st century?,” Nancy Fraser will consider the resurgence of the term nationally and venture the beginnings of an answer to the question her lecture’s title posits: what does or should “socialism” signify in the present era? The School of Art recognizes the important thinking Nancy Fraser puts forth around the parallel development of feminism and other social movements and the rise of neoliberalism to raise important questions around what equality means today.

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Howardena Pindell, Wangechi Mutu, and Kevin Beasley in “Looking Back at 50 Years of Change in the Visual Arts”

Thursday, November 14

5:30pm

Yale University Art Gallery

The School of Art is cosponsoring an exciting panel featuring three alumni—Howardena Pindell (‘67), Wangechi Mutu (‘00), and Kevin Beasley (‘12)—in conversation with the Director of the Yale Center for British Art, Courtney J. Martin.

The event marks the 50th anniversary of African American Studies at Yale and will reflect on changing perceptions of black visual arts since 1969 and share views on how to ensure an inclusive global art world for the future. This program is cosponsored by the Department of African American Studies at Yale University, the Yale School of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery.

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Jessica Stockholder on “Hinging: How to Put It in the World”

Followed by a conversation with Lynne Tillman and Marta Kuzma

Monday, October 28

6pm

EIK, 32 Edgewood Avenue

Hayden Visiting Artist Jessica Stockholder speaks on Monday, October 28th, at the Yale School of Art with an artist talk entitled “Hinging: How to put it in the world.” Currently serving as the Raymond W. & Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts, Stockholder will speak to the range of her work over time, addressing how she consistently works with material, color, and form to embody her interest in edge, boundary, autonomy, dependence, and coherence in the face of happenstance.

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David Reinfurt: A * New * Program for Graphic Design

Thursday, October 10

7pm

1156 Chapel Street, Graphic Design Atrium (Room 104)

An independent graphic designer in New York City, David Reinfurt (MFA in Graphic Design, ‘99) introduced the study of graphic design at Princeton University in 2010. In late September, a book based on his teaching will be published by Inventory Press (Los Angeles) with D.A.P. (New York). A * New * Program for Graphic Design is a do-it-yourself textbook that synthesizes the pragmatic with the experimental and builds on mid- to late-twentieth-century pedagogical models to convey advanced principles of contemporary design. Rooted in three courses (Typography, Gestalt, and Interface) originally developed for liberal arts students, the book provides a broad introduction to graphic design and visual literacy for readers from any discipline.

Copies of A * New * Program for Graphic Design will be available for purchase.

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Mixer for School of Art, School of Architecture and History of Art Students

Wednesday, November 6

7:30–9pm

Architecture School Gallery, 180 York Street

NYC Alumni Gathering

Held on the 150th anniversary of the first day of classes at what was then the Yale School of the Fine Arts.

Tuesday, October 15

5–7pm

Houseman Restaurant, Greenwich Street