BOOK TALK | Debi Cornwall: Model Citizens

Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on December 4th at 5:30 PM for a book talk with Debi Cornwall, author of Model Citizens. The last in a trilogy of books on the American condition, Model Citizens considers the United States as a case study into a global phenomenon: How have staging, performance, and roleplay come to inform thinking about citizenship in a violent land whose people no longer agree on what is true? During the event, Cornwall will screen her work-in-progress short film, This is (Not) a Drill. She will be in discussion with Joan Kee and Cresa Pugh. This program is co-sponsored by the Grey Art Museum. 

Learn more and RSVP here.

Debi Cornwall is a multimedia documentary artist who returned to visual expression after a twelve-year career as a civil-rights lawyer. Marrying dark humor, rigorous research, and structural critique, she uses still and moving images, testimony, and archival material to examine the staging and performance of American power and identity. In 2023, Debi became the first American and first woman to be awarded the Prix Elysée, a biennial juried contemporary photography prize created by Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, to complete and publish Model Citizens. Following Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (Radius, 2017) and Necessary Fictions (Radius, 2020), Model Citizens is the last in a trilogy of photobooks about the American condition in the post-9/11 era. The project launched as a 2024 book in English (Radius Books) and French editions (Citoyens Modèles, Éditions Textuel), and as an installation including her genre-defying found-footage short, Pineland/Hollywood, at the Rencontres d’Arles festival in France. Honors also include a NYSCA Individual Artist Grant in film, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in photography, and a Leica Women Foto Project Award. Her work has been profiled in publications including Art in America, European Photography Magazine, British Journal of Photography, Photograph, Le Monde, and Hyperallergic, and is held in public and private collections around the world. A graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School, and faculty member at the ICP, Debi lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Joan Kee is the Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director and Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU as well as an Affiliated Faculty member of NYU Law School.  A specialist in modern and contemporary art and a former attorney, her books include Models of Integrity:  Art and Law in Post Sixties America (University of California Press, 2019).  She also guest-edited a special issue of Law and Literature in 2021 on contemporary art and law in a global context.  The introduction to this issue is among the most read essays in the journal’s history.  Kee is a contributing editor to Artforum and an editor-at-large for the Brooklyn Rail who has written and spoken frequently on the intersection of art and many areas of the law, including on various manifestations of national security laws in Hong Kong and South Korea.  She is also honored to have been Debi’s classmate at Harvard Law School.

Dr. Cresa Pugh is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The New School in New York City. Her research sits at the intersection of historical transnational sociology, postcolonial social theory, and critical museum studies, with a focus on the cultural, political, and economic implications of colonial-era artifact looting and contemporary movements for restitution. Central to her work is an examination of how cultural artifacts looted during colonial conquest continue to sustain imperial racial capitalism and global racial hierarchies. Her research and publications contribute to broader discussions on racial justice, reparative justice, and cultural sovereignty, with a particular emphasis on how cultural expressions and movements can serve as powerful tools for resistance and societal transformation. Dr. Pugh’s current book project, Guardians of Beautiful Things: The Politics of Postcolonial Cultural Theft, Restitution, Refusal, and Repair, critically engages with the contested history of the Benin Bronzes and ongoing struggles over their restitution. She explores how these artifacts, held in Western museums, serve as symbols of historical injustice while simultaneously functioning as tools of cultural imperialism and political power. Her broader research addresses the ways in which these objects shape contemporary global hierarchies and the persistence of colonial legacies. In addition to her work on restitution, Dr. Pugh is developing a second book project, Fela Kuti and the Postcolonial African Imagination, which examines anti-colonial and decolonial thought in postcolonial Africa through the life and activism of Nigerian Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti. Her interdisciplinary approach brings together African socialist thought, cultural heritage studies, and the role of political resistance in shaping postcolonial identities. Dr. Pugh holds a BA in Anthropology and Religion from Bates College, an MSc in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, and an MA and PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University. 

MARROW | GRAIN

Closing Reception with Performance | October 30 from 2-6 PM

MARROW  | GRAIN is an exhibition by mother and daughter, Colleen Plumb and Ruth Plumb, which endeavors to recognize the invisible forces and elements of the Earth. Through tree, rock, waters, and fire, they listen and pay attention to the more-than-human beings that entangle and connect us at this moment in time. In distant and close conversation, Colleen and Ruth acknowledge time scales beyond human perception and the experiences of natural forces that teach us to live in close connection to the Earth.

MARROW: A series of experiments with collected Sycamore tree material from the blocks where Colleen lives in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago. The exhibition includes Photograms made from many-seasons worth of shed Sycamore bark; an installation of deadfall branches skinned raw; photographs and video of bark in transition to ash; and knots like knuckle-bones—peeled, washed and charred.

GRAIN: A writing, an installation, a video, and a sound performance reflect Ruth’s ongoing consideration of the movement and transformation of sand grains as a model of the ceaseless turnover and regeneration of nature, the Earth, and the cosmos across time. The lyric essay Grain, ponders the forces that create pattern and movement while the installation Groundwind Shadow strives to acknowledge the aliveness of all earthly material. Exploring sand, ice, water, wind—geological indications of cyclic alchemy—can reveal the vast and grand interconnectedness of life, form, energy, and time.

Visitors to the space will walk through a projection of fire on glass front window, step among the grounding sand grain-ribs sculpted across the floor, view color and b&w photographic prints in surround, pass corners with branch-forests pressed dense, and enter a back space with video of a moving body of water.

Learn more here.

Prismatic Effect: A Conversation with Charles Ross

Sunday, October 27, at 1 PM | Getty Center & Online

For the second “Rotunda Commission,” a series of art installations inspired by the Getty Museum’s collection, architecture, and site, American artist Charles Ross created a site-specific work centered on natural light, time, and planetary motion. Spectrum 14 is a calibrated array of prisms that casts luminous color across the Museum’s rotunda and evolves with the seasonal arc of the sun. In this conversation with curator Glenn Phillips, Ross talks about his storied career—from early collaborations with Judson Dance Theater, to engagements with the minimal and land art movements, to his decades-long work with light and prisms.

Complements the PST ART exhibition Lumen: The Art and Science of Light at the Getty Center from September 10–December 8, 2024.

Copies of Charles Ross: The Substance of Light is available at the Getty Museum shop.

Free | Advance ticket required | Get Tickets

MARROW | GRAIN

Artist Talk & Sound Performance | October 19 from 4-6 PM

Closing Reception with Performance | October 30 from 2-6 PM

MARROW  | GRAIN is an exhibition by mother and daughter, Colleen Plumb and Ruth Plumb, which endeavors to recognize the invisible forces and elements of the Earth. Through tree, rock, waters, and fire, they listen and pay attention to the more-than-human beings that entangle and connect us at this moment in time. In distant and close conversation, Colleen and Ruth acknowledge time scales beyond human perception and the experiences of natural forces that teach us to live in close connection to the Earth.

MARROW: A series of experiments with collected Sycamore tree material from the blocks where Colleen lives in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago. The exhibition includes Photograms made from many-seasons worth of shed Sycamore bark; an installation of deadfall branches skinned raw; photographs and video of bark in transition to ash; and knots like knuckle-bones—peeled, washed and charred.

GRAIN: A writing, an installation, a video, and a sound performance reflect Ruth’s ongoing consideration of the movement and transformation of sand grains as a model of the ceaseless turnover and regeneration of nature, the Earth, and the cosmos across time. The lyric essay Grain, ponders the forces that create pattern and movement while the installation Groundwind Shadow strives to acknowledge the aliveness of all earthly material. Exploring sand, ice, water, wind—geological indications of cyclic alchemy—can reveal the vast and grand interconnectedness of life, form, energy, and time.

Visitors to the space will walk through a projection of fire on glass front window, step among the grounding sand grain-ribs sculpted across the floor, view color and b&w photographic prints in surround, pass corners with branch-forests pressed dense, and enter a back space with video of a moving body of water.

Learn more here.

Experience the New York premiere of a powerful and groundbreaking merging of music, visual art, dance, and spoken word, anchored by the visionary music of Carnegie Hall’s 2024–2025 Debs Composer’s Chair Gabriela Ortiz, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall. Inspired by James Drake’s epic drawing of the same title, Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness features The Crossing—“America’s most astonishing choir” (The New York Times)—led by Donald Nally; text by bestselling author Benjamin Alire Sáenz; a performance by flutist Alejandro Escuer; and guest collaborators who include military veterans, choreographer Harrison Guy, dancers from The Ailey School, and photographer Adam Holender. Through a journey from violence and conflict to healing and forgiveness, this unique production, directed by Stephen Jiménez, seeks to encourage hope in divisive times. Learn more and purchase tickets here.

Browse James Drake’s three Radius titles below: Tongue-Cut Sparrows (2024), 1242 (2015), and Red Drawings & White Cut-Outs (2012)

Shapiro Center Webinar: Nineteenth-Century Nature and Contemporary Photography

Contemporary voices in the exhibition “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis” bring forward questions of environmental history to the present. The conversation will cover such topics as land extraction, human influence on plants, environmental injustice, immigration, photographic technologies, and reparative histories.

The exhibition “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis” charts the emerging awareness of human impact on the environment over the course of the 19th century. The show traces varied reactions to industrialization across writing and the visual arts, as well as the emerging sciences of geology, meteorology, and ecology. The inclusion of five contemporary artists whose work references 19th-century themes and photographic techniques demonstrates an engagement with these legacies.

The Shapiro Center presents an event focused on some of the contemporary voices in “Storm Cloud” who bring forward questions of environmental history to the present. Karla Nielsen, The Huntington’s senior curator of literary collections and co-curator of the exhibition, will briefly introduce the historical materials to which these artists’ work is juxtaposed. Linde B. Lehtinen, The Huntington’s Philip D. Nathanson Senior Curator of Photography, will then lead a conversation with three of the artists, Binh Danh, Leah Sobsey, and Will Wilson.

The program will cover such topics as land extraction, human influence on plants, environmental injustice, immigration, photographic technologies, and reparative histories.

Tickets are free; learn more and reserve your spot here.

Rebecca Norris Webb: Night Calls is on view at the DeHaan Fine Arts Center at the University of Indianapolis from September 9-October 25, 2024.

Rebecca Norris Webb and Alex Webb present their lecture “Two Looks” on Friday, October 4 from 6-7:30PM.

Click here to see Radius books by Rebecca Norris Webb.

Rebecca Norris Webb: Night Calls is on view at the DeHaan Fine Arts Center at the University of Indianapolis from September 9-October 25, 2024.

A reception with the artist will be held on Thursday, October 3 from 4-6PM.
There will also be a lecture with the artist and Alex Webb entitled “Two Looks” on Friday, October 4 from 6-7:30PM.

Click here to see Radius books by Rebecca Norris Webb.

Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination welcomes Tomas van Houtryve on October 3rd, 2024 for an artist talk and book signing.

Click here to RSVP.

Above: 36 Views of Notre Dame and Lines and Lineage. Order here.

Tina Barney: Family Ties

September 28, 2024 — January 19, 2025

The Jeu de Paume will showcase the vibrant, singular work of influential American photographer Tina Barney, who is best known for exploring intergenerational familial rituals and the subtle nuances of human connection.

Spanning over 40 years of the artist’s career, the exhibition marks the artist’s first European retrospective.
Born in 1945, Tina Barney began taking photographs of her relatives and friends in the late 1970s. A keen observer of family traditions, her work focuses on cultural habits within domestic settings. Her colorful and large-scale portraits may appear as family snapshots at first glance, however many have been carefully staged by the artist, creating intricate tableaux that establish a dialogue with classical painting. This exhibition will also include work from Barney’s editorial practice in which portraits of celebrities and models for fashion magazines and luxury brands share the same complexity, sensitivity, and humor found in her fine art practice.

Spanning the breadth of Barney’s career, the exhibition will include fifty-five large-scale works from Barney’s earliest through her most recent series, including those previously unseen in Europe.

Learn more here.