Distinguished curator Helen Molesworth—“the art world’s most beloved provocateur,” according to VOGUE magazine—sits down for an invigorating conversation with artist Harmony Hammond. These two art world icons will engage in a freewheeling discussion of topics and themes addressed in Hammond’s current exhibition, FRINGE, and further examine the role of contemporary art in a shifting political and social landscape.

Helen Molesworth is a writer, podcaster, and curator based in Los Angeles and Provincetown. In 2023 Phaidon published Open Questions, Thirty Years of Writing About Art, an anthology of her essays. Her podcasts include Death of an Artist a 6-part podcast about the intertwined fates of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta and the inaugural season of Recording Artists with The Getty.She is also the host of DIALOGUES, a podcast that features interviews with artists, writers, fashion designers, and filmmakers hosted by the David Zwirner Gallery.

Her major museum exhibitions include: One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art; Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957; Dance/Draw; This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s; Part Object Part Sculpture, and Work Ethic. She has organized one-person exhibitions of Ruth Asawa, Moyra Davey, Noah Davis, Raoul De Keyser, Louise Lawler, Steve Locke, Anna Maria Maiolino, Josiah McElheny, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, Amy Sillman, and Luc Tuymans.

She is the author of numerous catalogue essays and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2021 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2022 she was awarded The Clark Art Writing Prize.

Learn more and register here.

Copies of Harmony Hammond: Crossings + Accumulations and Harmony Hammond: Against Seamlessness will be available for purchase at SITE.

Arion Artist Talk: Ala Ebtekar & Kim Stanley Robinson

Arion Press is pleased to host a genre-spanning conversation between artist Ala Ebtekar and celebrated science-fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson.

The talk will draw inspiration from Ebtekar's upcoming edition of Isaac Asimov's Nightfall which he is creating as the second King Artist in Residence at Arion Press, developing cyanotype prints during the lunar eclipse on March 13th. Their conversation will explore the work of Asimov and the creative connections across science, nature, and both the literary & visual arts.

Following the talk, please join Arion for a reception, exhibition, and mingling at The Interval at Long Now and the new Arion Press Gallery and Showroom.

Tickets available here.

Ala Ebtekar (b. 1978, Berkeley, CA) has situated his practice as a leveling and collapsing of time and space. His work frequently orchestrates various orbits and cadences of time, bringing forth sculptural and photographic possibilities of the universe and time observing humanity. Exploring time, exposure, and light as both medium and metaphor, he uses sunlight, moonlight, and starlight to create durational works—sometimes taking an entire night to expose—which he views as collaborations with the sun, moon, and stars. Ebtekar, throughout his practice, has employed the tactile traditions and properties of bookmaking, page and illumination in bound manuscripts, and classical training in Iranian coffeehouse painting. His alchemy of combining these legacies weaves into his commitment and work alongside enduring centuries of reclaimed text & image archives, poetry, and translation.His work has been widely exhibited across the globe at institutions such as the British Museum, Xinjiang Biennale, California Biennial, Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah, Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. His works are held in leading public and private collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, British Museum, de Young Fine Arts Museum, Microsoft Art Collection, Devi Art Foundation in India, and Berkeley Art Museum, among others.

Kim Stanley Robinson (b. 1952, Waukegan, Illinois) is an American science fiction writer. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the international bestselling Mars trilogy, and more recently Red Moon, New York 2140, Aurora, Shaman, Green Earth, and 2312. He was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers’ Program in 1995 and returned in their Antarctic media program in 2016. In 2008 he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine. He works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and UC San Diego’s Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. His work has been translated into 25 languages, and won a dozen awards in five countries, including the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. In 2016 asteroid 72432 was named “Kimrobinson.”

Feminist icon and New Mexico-based artist Harmony Hammond engages in a thought-provoking conversation with curator and writer Jarrett Earnest on the themes explored in her latest exhibition ranging from reimagining craft in fine art to gendered politics to her role in the emergence of feminist and queer art.

Jarrett Earnest is a writer, curator and editor living in New York City. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) as well as the host of "Angelic Transmissions" an art talk show on East Village Radio. His essays have appeared in publications and exhibition catalogs around the world, and regularly in the New York Review of Books.

Learn more and register here.

Copies of Harmony Hammond: Crossings + Accumulations and Harmony Hammond: Against Seamlessness will be available for purchase at SITE.

Friends Lecture: Deborah Roberts

Spend an evening with the Friends and Deborah Roberts, a mixed-media artist celebrated for her artworks that explore topics of Black childhood. Roberts is joined in conversation by MIA’s Associate Curator of Global Contemporary Art Leslie Ureña. This lecture provides a unique chance to hear Roberts share her artistic journey, techniques, and the motivations behind her powerful work.

Capacity is limited; reserve your spot here.

Copies of Deborah Roberts: Twenty Years of Art/Work will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

Artist Vincent Valdez joins critic and art historian Max Tolleson for a conversation. 

Vincent Valdez blends large, representational paintings—the scale of which recall Western traditions of history painting as well as mural painting and cinema—with contemporary subject matter. He focuses on subjects that explore his observations and experience of life in the twenty-first century. The results are powerful images of American identity that confront injustice and inequity while imbuing his subjects with empathy and humanity. Valdez states, “My aim is to incite public remembrance and to impede distorted realities that I witness, like the social amnesia that surrounds us all.” Exhibitions and Collections include: The Ford Foundation, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, among others. He lives and works in Houston and Los Angeles.

Max Tolleson is a Critic-in-residence at the CORE Program in Houston, Texas and has published scholarship and art criticism with Artnet News, ASAP/J, Glasstire, and Panorama. While living in Marfa, Texas, he researched and wrote about the history of the Chinati Foundation in relation to minimalism, environmental theater, critical regionalism, and the politics of display; he has presented his research at the Getty Foundation and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Max received a PhD in art history from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2023 and was a 2022-2023 Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City.

This event is co-sponsored by The Brooklyn Rail, Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

Register here

Inside the Mind and Heart of a Collector:
David Arment and South African Telephone Wire Art

Sunday, January 19 | 2 PM
Reception / Doors open at 1:30 PM

Since at least the 16th century, the African continent has been home to intricate creations fashioned from copper and brass wire; but the art form known today as telephone wire art has its more recent origins in the wire embellishments on sticks and beer pot covers (izimbenge) first fashioned by Black workers during the Apartheid decades. Employing coated wire that became available with the advent of telephone lines, these unidentified artists produced pieces from salvaged telephone wire, creating desirable items, sought by travelers in search of “Zulu” souvenirs. After Apartheid, the pioneering work of the Bartel Arts Trust and Nedbank Arts and Culture Trust opened the door for an emerging contemporary art form—telephone wire art—that combines innovation and experimentation with traditional methods, motifs, and forms.
 
This presentation will focus on David Arment’s life as a major collector of South African telephone wire art: How he got started, what keeps him going, how extensive the collection is at this point, how he lives with a major collection. He will talk about why he and his husband Jim Rimelspach have gifted part of the collection to a museum while they are still actively building the collection. For the FOFA audience that is passionately interested in the handmade, the traditional arts, innovation in tradition, this glimpse into the mind and heart of a collector is sure to be an enlightening and entertaining event. In preparation, please come to MOIFA and tour the exhibition before this event!

Seating is limited. Please reserve your spot here. Registration is free for FOFA Members.

Wired: Contemporary Zulu Telephone Wire Baskets

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.