Refiguring the Spiritual

Columbia University School of the Arts, in conjunction with Columbia University Institute for Religion, Culture, & Public life, presents Refiguring the Spiritual, a yearlong series of conversations with leading contemporary artists on the implications and influence of the changing spiritual landscape for the visual arts.


Lynda Benglis
Thursday, April 7, 6:30 pm
Miller Theatre (2960 Broadway at 116th St)

A conversation with American sculptor Lynda Benglis, who has been at the forefront of contemporary art, raising ongoing challenges to the rigors of Modernism and Minimalism. A retrospective of Benglis' work has been exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; Le Consortium, Dijon; and Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. The New Museum is currently exhibiting a retrospective of Benglis' work.
 
The talk is moderated by Gregory Amenoff, Chair, Visual Arts Program and Jan Avgikos, Visiting Critic, Visual Arts Program.

Refiguring the Spiritual is a yearlong series of conversations with leading contemporary artists on the implications and influence of the changing spiritual landscape for the visual arts.
 
FREE and open to all


 

Laurie Anderson ('72SOA)
in conversation with Irving Sandler
Thursday, February 10, 7 pm
Moderated by Gregory Amenoff, Chair and Professor, Visual Arts Program, School of the Arts
and Mark C. Taylor, Chair, Department of Religion, Columbia University

Laurie Anderson was born in Chicago in 1947. One of eight children, she studied the violin and, while growing up, played in the Chicago Youth Symphony. She graduated in 1969 from Barnard College in New York, and went on to study at Columbia University, working toward a graduate degree in sculpture. The art scene of the early 1970s fostered an experimental attitude among many young artists in downtown New York that attracted Anderson, and some of her earliest performances as a young artist took place on the street or in informal art spaces. In the most memorable of these, she stood on a block of ice, playing her violin while wearing her ice skates. When the ice melted, the performance ended. Since that time, Anderson has gone on to create large-scale theatrical works which combine a variety of media - music, video, storytelling, projected imagery, sculpture - in which she is an electrifying performer.

As a visual artist, she is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery and her retrospective of sound works entitled "Record of the Time: Sound in the Work of Laurie Anderson" toured museums in Europe and Japan from 2002 - 2005.  Her work has also been shown at the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo, New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Anderson has released seven albums for Warner Bros., including Big Science, featuring the song "O Superman," which rose to number two on the British pop charts. In 1999, she staged "Songs and Stories from Moby Dick," an interpretation of Herman Melville's 1851 novel. Anderson was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA in 2002 which inspired her acclaimed solo performance "The End of the Moon." Other recent projects include a commission to create a series of audio-visual installations and a high definition film, "Hidden Inside Mountains," for the World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan.

Her recent work "Homeland" toured the U.S. and Europe in 2008 and was released as an album on Nonesuch Records in June, 2010 to critical acclaim and Anderson was recently nominated for a Grammy for the album's closing track "Flow." Anderson's newest solo performance "Delusion" debuted at the Vancouver Winter Olympics in early 2010, recently headlined the BAM Next Wave Festival in New York and continues to tour internationally.

In early October, 2010, Anderson opened a major new artwork exhibition entitled "I in U" at the CCBB in Sao Paulo, Brazil which will travel to Rio de Janeiro in March, 2011. Laurie Anderson lives and works in New York City.

Irving Sandler received a BA at Temple University and an MA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1950 for American history and his PhD in Art History at New York University in 1976. Throughout the 1950s, Irving Sandler was involved in several different artist organizations; he was the director of the artist-run Tanager Gallery, the Program Chairman for the Artists’ Club and worked as a reviewer for Art News and Art International. During the 1950s, he also independently interviewed artists and worked as an art critic. In the 1960s he taught at New York University and SUNY-Purchase. Mr. Sandler has been published several times for his books on interviews with artists, reviews and surveys of contemporary art. Some of his work includes The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970), The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (1978), American Art of the 1960s (1988), Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (1996) and A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir (1993). Throughout his career, Irving Sandler has also held several influential positions at various curatorial organizations as well as larger foundations such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Sharpe Art Foundation.

Listen to a podcast of the conversation