/Dialogues 2015
Friday, September 18, 2015
Collecting for the Next Generation
Featuring Evan Beard, U.S. Art and Finance Coordinator | Deloitte Consulting LLP; Tim Bresnahan, Vice President, Wealth Planning Advisory Services | Northern Trust; Kelly Huang, Zlot Buell + Associates / Art Advisors; and Elizabeth Szancer, ESKart. Moderated by Wendy Cromwell, Art Advisor and Founder of Cromwell Art LLC.
This panel will provide an in-depth examination of resources art advisors can provide for emerging contemporary art collectors and multi-generational collections. Navigating the continuously expanding global art market requires dedicated knowledge from the collectors’ standpoint. Focusing on several essential concerns that art advisors can address—such as collection management, appraisal and valuation, insurance, tax, and financial advice—the experts will broach questions related to the immaterial aspects of building an art collection; providing advice on the education and critical thinking required in order to build a comprehensive collection of twenty-first century work. Presented by Northern Trust in partnership with the Association of Professional Art Advisors (APAA).
Bad at Sports: One on Ones
Featuring Laylah Ali, Artist, and Nancy Lupo, Artist. Moderated by Bad at Sports’ Duncan MacKenzie
Bad at Sports is a forum on multiple platforms, known for their weekly podcasts and daily blog. Featuring artists, curators and gallerists, among others, Bad at Sports will broadcast live from the /Dialogues stage and their Special Exhibitions booth on the main floor of the exposition. For this panel, hosts Duncan MacKenzie and Amanda Browder will field interviews and commentary from artist Laylah Ali, whose small, figurative paintings resemble comic-book serials, while simultaneously containing stylistic references to hieroglyphics and American folk-art traditions. The discussion will also include a talk with Nancy Lupo, whose sculptures highlight the emotional associations elicited by objects and materials. Both artists’ work will be on view as part of ASSISTED, an exhibition curated by Jessica Stockholder at Kavi Gupta Gallery. A full list of Bad at Sports booth talks will be announced.
Contemporary Art in Italy: Today
Featuring Artist Diego Perrone and Director of MUSEION Letizia Ragaglia. Moderated by Editor-in-Chief of THE SEEN, Stephanie Cristello
Is there such a thing as a national context in an increasingly globalized world? This panel presents a united statement concerning the status of contemporary art in Italy for the first time in recent years in the United States, featuring some of today’s most influential voices on Italian culture working today. Focusing on the influence of international exhibitions within a European context, this conversation will generate questions on what defines an Italian voice in the twenty-first century. Working toward a non-anachronistic view of what it means to examine a region in today’s contemporary moment, this panel will interrogate ways in which a contemporary Italy operates both in and outside of historical movements.
Presented in partnership with the Italian Cultural Institute and ItalCultura.
Museum Models: The Global Impact of Public Collections
Featuring Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem Thelma Golden, Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Renaissance Society Solveig Øvstebø and Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art of LACMA Franklin Sirmans. Moderated by Curator of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society Jacob Proctor
Art history is one of the most easily identifiable methods of how we visually record history. Whose voices are we listening to through the images we collect and exhibit? Often defined as encyclopedic institutions, museums are responsible for collecting and exhibiting history, while often writing it in the process. How can contemporary museum collections and kunsthalle models change or alter certain histories once they have been written? Looking at both public collecting and non-collecting institutions and exhibitions through the lens of various museum models, each of the panelists will offer the various ways that their associated institution handles the global responsibility of collecting and exhibiting contemporary work.
Chicago Architecture Biennial: The State of the Art of Architecture
Featuring Joseph Grima, Co-Artistic Director | Chicago Architecture Biennial; and Sarah Herda, Co-Artistic Director | Chicago Architecture Biennial
In anticipation of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial, North America’s largest
international survey of contemporary architecture launching in October 2015, Co-Artistic Directors Sarah Herda and Joseph Grima will provide a detailed overview of the Biennial’s program and ambitions for the city, given Chicago’s significance in the history of modern architecture. Through its constellation of exhibitions, full-scale installations, and program of events, the Biennial will invite the public to engage with and think about architecture in new and unexpected ways, and to take part in a global discussion about the future of the field. The Biennial’s current list of 63 participants includes architects and artists based in more than 25 countries around the world.
Saturday, September 19, 2015
Aperture Foundation: Photography is Magic
Featuring John Houck, Artist; Matt Lipps, Artist; Phillip Maisel, Artist; and Kate Steciw, Artist. Moderated by Charlotte Cotton, Independent Curator and Author
This panel will feature artists John Houck, Matt Lipps, Phillip Maisel and Kate Steciw in conversation with writer and curator Charlotte Cotton on “Photography Is Magic.” Published by Aperture Foundation, this critical book surveys the practices of over eighty artists engaged with experimental approaches to photographic ideas. Set within the contemporary image environment framed by Web 2.0, the more than three hundred image sequence represents the scope of photographic possibilities at play within contemporary creative practices—and how artists are consciously reframing photographic practices in the post-Internet age. Aperture Foundation will have a booth at EXPO CHICAGO as part of the Special Exhibitions program.
Biennale | Biennial
Featuring Dan Cameron, Independent Curator, Founder | Prospect New Orleans; Anthony Elms, Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; and Irene Hofmann, Phillips Director and Chief Curator | SITE Santa Fe. Moderated by Bruce Altshuler, Director | Program in Museum Studies, New York University
This panel will address the differences between a globalized model of international exhibitions—what makes them singular, how do they operate? Does the difference between a biennale and a biennial go beyond simple translation? The conversation will focus on current examples of biennales and biennials through the voices of various curators and artistic directors, moderated by Bruce Altshuler, author of “Salon to Biennial — Exhibitions that Made Art History, Volume 1: 1863–1959” and “Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions That Made Art History: 1962–2002,” published by Phaidon. Both titles will be available for a book signing with Bruce Altshuler directly following the panel at the Phaidon booth on the main floor EXPO CHICAGO.
French-American Curatorial Exchange | Leaving the Canvas: Abstract Art and Architecture
Featuring Artist Daniel Buren, Collector Nicolas Cattelain, and Artist Felice Varini. Moderated and organized by Independent Art Historian, Critic and Curator Matthieu Poirier
This panel will feature a keynote address on the state of abstract art, conceived and moderated by Independent Art Historian, Critic, and Curator Matthieu Poirier as part of the French-American Curatorial Exchange, a yearlong collaboration between France and the United States, in partnership with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States and the Institut français. In anticipation of the first Chicago Architecture Biennial, this conversation will feature Artists Daniel Buren and Felice Varini, whose works both straddle boundaries of radical abstraction by spreading the latter into the real time and space experience of architectural sites. They will be joined by Nicolas Cattelain, whose collection focuses on art from the 1960s through now—including works that initiated this "environmental" logic by expanding abstract art into an architectural dimension—by artists of the seminal Perceptual, Kinetic and Optical art trends: ZERO, GRAV or Light & Space.
Hans Ulrich Obrist: In Conversation with the Hairy Who
Featuring Artists Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, and Karl Wirsum
Internationally renowned curator and co-director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, Hans Ulrich Obrist will speak with members of the legendary Hairy Who, a group of young, eccentric artists that began working in the 1960s after meeting at SAIC. Now categorized into a larger group known as the Chicago Imagists—known for thriving outside of New York’s Pop Art scene—this panel anticipates the fifty-year anniversary of their first Hairy Who exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1966, examining its importance in art history in Chicago and beyond. The voices of three Hairy Who members working today—Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, and Karl Wirsum—will speak alongside Obrist on the impact and significance of the group’s work in a contemporary context.
EXPO VIDEO | Alfredo Cramerotti In Conversation
Featuring Alfredo Cramerotti, Director | MOSTYN and 2015 EXPO VIDEO Curator Malerie Marder, Artist and Cauleen Smith, Artist. Moderated by Duncan MacKenzie, Bad at Sports
Internationally acclaimed curator in film, video and new media Alfredo Cramerotti will be in conversation with Bad at Sports discussing the 2015 EXPO VIDEO program. Based in the UK, Cramerotti's work explores the relationship between reality and representation across TV, radio, publishing, critical writing, photography and curatorial exhibitions. His research includes the theory and practice of “aesthetic journalism,” a concept he created to investigate the relationship between contemporary exhibitions and elements of interview, documentary and reportage. EXPO VIDEO will be on view at the west end of Festival Halls A & B.
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Celebrating 150: SAIC Alumni Panel
Featuring SAIC Alumni Caitlin Cherry, Jeanne Dunning, Aspen Mays, Kori Newkirk, Carrie Schneider, and Chris Ware. Moderated by Lisa Wainwright | Dean of Faculty, SAIC and James Yood | Professor, SAIC.
In celebration of its 150th anniversary, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) brings together a panel of distinguished alumni artists (to be determined). Moderated by SAIC Dean of Faculty Lisa Wainwright with critic and professor James Yood, artists will reflect on the development of their practices and experiences in Chicago’s art scene. Participating artists will also be featured in SAIC’s anniversary exhibition on view at the Sullivan Galleries (33 S State St.), “Civilization and Its Discontents: Selections from 1985–2015,” curated by Scott Reeder and Tyson Reeder.
Contemporary Ceramics
Featuring the Haas Brothers: Simon and Nikolai Haas, Artists; JJ PEET, Artist; and Bettina Pousttchi, Artist. Moderated by Andrea Mellard, Director of Public Programming and Community Engagement | The Contemporary Austin
This panel will look at the increased interest in ceramics practices within the context of contemporary art. How have the terms of clay as a medium transformed in the twenty-first century? Addressing the high-low dilemma of ceramics today—its historic ties to craft and utilitarian intentions in the vernacular of functional design, while being simultaneously present in gallery and museum exhibitions—this panel will interrogate the poetics of contemporary ceramic sculptures, and how they are employed as a vehicle for conceptual art today.
When and Where is Design Criticism?
Featuring Zesty Meyers, Principal, R & Company; Alice Twemlow, Chair, SVA MA Design Research, Writing & Criticism; and Tanner Woodford, Executive Director, Chicago Design Museum. Moderated by Michael Golec Associate Professor of Art and Design History, Department of Art History, Theory & Criticism and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
This panel will explore the impact of design criticism and its discourse through the lens of institutional support—from the perspective of museums, galleries and private collections—for design. The panel will feature leading voices in the field of contemporary design criticism through academic, institutional and commercial standpoints to address the “intensifications” of designed objects, and the magnifications of design's affective programs in a twenty-first century context. Presented in collaboration with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects.