Tuesday, September 20, 2016, 6:30–8 pm

By Dr. Cathleen Chaffee, Senior Curator

The Albright-Knox acquired Lucas Samaras’s groundbreaking Room No. 2 in 1966, the same year it was created. Room No. 2 (popularly known as the Mirrored Room) was one of the earliest installation artworks designed for viewers to walk into, rather than simply to look at from a distance, and it was the first such immersive environment to enter a museum collection. Before its creation, Samaras had become well known for a series of small Box sculptures encrusted with materials atypical in 1960s art, such as yarn, bones, pins, synthetic hair, pencils, razor blades, and taxidermy birds. These mysterious boxes referred to the human body and also contained autobiographical elements, in the manner of reliquaries. The Mirrored Room represented a departure from these fetish boxes, to a room-sized cube that contained little except a mirrored table and chair. Fifty years later, the Mirrored Room remains a treasured example of the Albright-Knox’s long tradition of acquiring challenging new work by emerging artists. This lecture will provide greater insight into the work’s importance and trace the vital precedent it set for installation-based practices in contemporary art.

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Tuesday, October 18, 2016, 6:30–8 pm

By Dr. Joe Lin-Hill, Deputy Director

The Harlequin was a common theater character who was usually the victim of unrequited love and frequently played the guitar. In this painting he is a guitar, with the diamond-patterned shirt associated with the character, along with other traditional features like the mustache, beard, admiral’s hat, and pipe. The painting may refer to Mardi Gras, the Catholic celebration that begins the fasting of Lent, but it is certainly an idiosyncratic rendition of a carnival scene. Much of Miró’s thinking about the work is suggested in his following statement on its creation:

“I tried to capture the hallucinations that my hunger produced in me. It’s not that I painted what I saw in my dreams, as Breton and his lot predicated in those days, but that hunger provoked in me a sort of trance . . . . After long meditation on what I proposed to do, I began to paint, and as I painted I introduced all the changes I believed to be appropriate. I recognize that I was very interested in [the fifteenth-century painter] Hieronymus Bosch, but I wasn’t thinking of him when I was working on the ‘Carnival.’ In the canvas certain elements already appear that will be repeated later in other works: the ladder, an element of flight and evasion, but also of elevation; animals and, above all, insects, which I have always found very interesting; the dark sphere that appears to the right is a representation of the globe, because in those days I was obsessed with one idea: ‘I must conquer the world!’”

A joyous painting with all kinds of hybrid creatures playing, singing, dancing, and celebrating, Harlequin’s Carnival is categorically recognized as among Miró’s greatest works.

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016, 6:30–8 pm

By Dr. Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elfvin Director

In the summer of 1886, Paul Gauguin visited the small village of Pont-Aven in Brittany where he became fascinated with the history of peasant life and its traditional costumes, customs, and rituals. Over the course of the next several years, he painted numerous scenes of peasant life and the countryside, including The Yellow Christ. Gauguin said he chose the color yellow to convey how he felt about the isolated life and piety of the peasants, several of whom are depicted dressed in their distinctive regional costume and kneeling at the foot of the cross. The simplicity and directness of Breton peasants greatly appealed to Gauguin, who made his famous protest against Western sophistication by exiling himself to the South Seas not long after completing this painting. Brittany was Gauguin’s first step away from Paris, and his works completed during this time mark a major stylistic departure from Impressionism and a significant contribution to late-19th-century art.

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Tuesday, February 7, 2017, 6:30–8 pm

By Dr. Cathleen Chaffee, Senior Curator

This immersive series of drawings by Hanne Darboven offers a striking example of the artist’s daily artmaking practice. Often using the current calendar date as her starting point, Darboven produced systematic charts and sequences of numbers as well as long strands of looped forms that evoke handwriting. Both serve as methods of counting and marking time as well as giving material form to its passage. While the artist’s drawings often explore the many possible relationships that can exist between integers, her use of numbers in no way represents an interest in mathematical logic, as Darboven herself warned, “I only use numbers because it is a way of writing without describing. . . I choose numbers because they are so constant, confined, and artificial.”

In 1966, Darboven moved from her native Germany to New York, where she met and exhibited with many artists of the burgeoning Minimalist and Conceptual art movements, including artists in the Albright-Knox’s collection, such as Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt (who was an early supporter of her work and remained a lifelong friend). Although she lived in New York for only two years, it was a formative experience and established writing and numbers as the building blocks for her work in the 1970s. This group of drawings was acquired from the Panza collection in 2015, and this lecture will be the first opportunity to learn about the work’s importance in relation to the art of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the Albright-Knox’s collection.

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Tuesday, April 4, 2017, 6:30–8 pm

By Dr. Joe Lin-Hill, Deputy Director

Martin Wong arrived on New York’s Lower East Side in 1978. Over the next fifteen years, his gritty, realist visions would come to represent this dynamic neighborhood more as an extended portrait series than as the cityscapes they appear to be. The people and incidents Wong portrayed, and the architectural settings that play leading roles in his work, are central to the local milieu that gave rise to Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Wojnarowicz, Keith Haring, and many others whose work defines the period. Wong’s work is definitive in a similar way; he documents a moment when gentrification began to displace the bodegas (corner stores), iglesias (churches catering to Spanish-speaking communities), gay bars, and drug dens that had given the neighborhood its character.

Wong is best known for his loving depictions of chained storefront facades and the brick walls of Lower East Side tenement buildings, although these buildings were often teeming with local life. Liberty Mourning the Death of Her Sister—Beijing features the tenement buildings and brickwork that are quintessential Wong, but the central allegorical character here is unusual. The figure depicted in Liberty Mourning grieves over the events of June 4, 1989, when the Chinese government suppressed the student democracy movement in Tiananmen Square. The ‘sister’ referred to in Wong’s title is the ‘Goddess of Democracy’ statue that students of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing erected in Tiananmen Square. That statue faced off against the giant portrait of Chairman Mao that hangs on the so-called Gate of Heavenly Peace. Although this work was made in 1989 it is a very recent acquisition of the Albright-Knox, and this will be the first opportunity to hear about its importance in the context of the museum’s collection and art of the period.

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Tuesday, April 18, 2017, 6:30–8 pm

By Dr. Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elfvin Director

The history of America’s long struggle for civil rights is one of Theaster Gates’s predominant themes. He directly approaches this subject in a series of objects and paintings (2010–onward) fashioned from decommissioned fire hoses. The fire hoses employed by Gates are well used, but traces of text—specifying where they were fabricated, their gauge, and compliance with various fire codes—are sometimes still legible. In the context of Gates’s work, these practical details take on a variety of connotations. The hoses in Civil Tapestry 5, for example, read “1962,” and “Compton, Calif.,” a hub of African American culture as well as gang violence. 1962 was the year deadly riots erupted over racial integration of the University of Mississippi, and President Kennedy was forced to deploy Federal Marshals to ensure the safety of James Meredith, the lone African-American student admitted there. Theaster Gates pictures a world in which this moment in American history has infiltrated everything—even works of apparent abstraction. This lecture will be the first opportunity for an in-depth discussion of the true importance of this recent acquisition and of Gates’s international prominence in contemporary art.

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