Loading

Menil

Public Program

Vivian L. Smith Foundation Symposium: TRESPASS

TRESPASS: Entering the Scene of Making

This symposium explores drawings, first drafts, rehearsals, and other provisional works, exposing their role in shaping modern and contemporary art. From Yvonne Rainer’s enactments of everyday gestures that helped demystify dance, to Max Neuhaus’s sound drawings, to live digital mapping works of the present day, many works of art are now made in public and in the moment. Using “trespassing” as a model, speakers will ask critical questions about the barriers between private making and public display, drawing on a range of frameworks such as performance studies, the Anthropocene, and gender theory. We will focus on the emergent social, political, and human-object relations that can form when a work of art is “in process.”

Speakers:
Cornelia Butler, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Peggy Phelan, Stanford University
Judith Rodenbeck, University of California, Riverside
Anna Lovatt, Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University

Moderated by Katie Anania, PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin and Vivian L. Smith curatorial fellow at the Menil Collection.

The fellowship and symposium are generously supported by the Vivian L. Smith Foundation. The symposium is co-sponsored by the University of Houston departments of Art History and Interdisciplinary Practice and Emerging Forms.

Free admission. Seating limited.