Department of Art History

"Woven Histories: A curatorial optics"

The impetus for Woven Histories is the efflorescence, in recent decades, of art practices that engage materially, conceptually, and technologically with textile. Retrospection is intrinsic to that outpouring. Contemporary artists variously invoke part precedent, above all, the pioneering work in a range of mediums and materials created by vanguard women artists during the interwar years, and later, in the wake of the civil rights movement, feminist and countercultural revolutions of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Shaped and governed by different historical contexts, such moments of dynamic interchange between textile and modernist abstraction structure the exhibition, which unfolds in a loose chronology. Distinct in content and form, each section—the ensemble of works in each gallery—is nonetheless impacted by the recursive, intragenerational, transhistorical networks and economies that mark this period.

This talk will focus on the curatorial processes that frame and give form to Woven Histories. Exhibition making requires more, Cooke will argue, than the materialization of narratives based in theoretical, critical, and art-historical research and analyses. Conceptualization and realization are interdependent processes; curatorial protocols and display strategies can serve in the construction of embodied viewers; and modes of apprehension rooted in the tactile, haptic, and dimensional are required to amplify the kinds of optical scrutiny routinely applied to painting, photography et al.

Lynne Cooke is senior curator at the National Gallery of Art, a role she has held since 2014. Prior to this, She held a two-year appointment as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the National Gallery’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, where her research focused on the interface between mainstream and self-taught art in the US in the 20th century. This appointment followed her time as the deputy director and chief curator at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain (2008–2012) and as curator at the Dia Art Foundation in New York City (1991–2008).

Cooke has organized major exhibitions for a number of notable artists, including Rosemarie Trockel, Blinky Palermo, Richard Serra, and Wexner Center Artist Residency Award recipient Zoe Leonard. She also cocurated the 1991 Carnegie International exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

She will be giving her Smart Lecture on Woven Histories.

The public lecture is sponsored by the Department Art History and generously supported by the Smart Family Foundation.

Reception will follow.

Persons with disabilities who need an accommodation in order to participate in this event should contact the event sponsor for assistance.