San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) are organizing a museum retrospective of the work of Suzanne Lacy, scheduled to open in San Francisco in April 2019. ICI has partnered with the two Bay Area institutions to organize a research convening with 16 national and international curators, theorists, and artists who will discuss curatorial questions related to collecting and presenting socially engaged art. Some of the questions include:
In what ways can a history of collective actions be exhibited? What does it mean to ‘look back’ at these projects, that were the work of so many, and to find ways to experience today what this work has meant? How should those participants be involved now? How can an art that has been so diffuse and ephemeral be presented to museum visitors many years later? When is it meaningful to reactivate past projects? How can the political contexts that animated those past projects be related to political contexts today? How should an exhibition of an artist such as Suzanne Lacy be reinvented as it moves to different venues, different contexts?
Core Participants:
Nancy Adajania (cultural theorist & curator, Mumbai)
Tania Bruguera (artist)
Julia Bryan-Wilson (Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, UC Berkeley)
María del Carmen Carrión (Director of Public Programs & Research, ICI)
Anne Ellegood (Senior Curator, Hammer Museum at UCLA)
Rudolf Frieling (Curator of Media Arts, SFMOMA)
Larissa Harris (Curator, Queens Museum of Art)
Jeanne van Heeswijk (artist)
Pablo Helguera (artist and Director of Adult and Academic Programs of the Education Department, MoMA)
Trude Schjelderup Iversen (Senior Curator, KORO / Public Art Norway)
Suzanne Lacy (artist)
Fionn Meade (curator & writer, Minneapolis)
Glenn Phillips (Curator, Getty Research Institute)
Renaud Proch (Executive Director, ICI)
Stephanie Rosenthal (Chief Curator, Hayward Gallery)
Lucía Sanromán (Director of Visual Arts, YBCA)
Amanda Sroka (Assistant Curator of Contempoary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Dominic Willsdon (Leanne and George Roberts Curator of Education & Public Practice, SFMOMA)
Catherine Wood (Senior Curator, International Art, Tate)
