Department of Art History

Roundtable on the Artist Interview: 

Maria Kokkori, Christine Mehring, and Jessica Stockholder

Conversations with artists conducted by scholars, conservators, and curators are an increasingly integral component of textual and object-based research and museum practices, particularly when investigating recent histories and marginalized practices. Whether we publish these interviews as standalone texts or use them as evidence in our writings (dissertations, books, and articles), we are creating a new historical record. The prevalence of this practice stands in stark contrast to the absence of discussion about best practices for conducting, editing, and presenting/framing interviews with artists, as well as a lack of conceptual inquiry into the interview as a form. This series aims to provide a critical space for those engaged in interviews to workshop our concerns and learn new approaches, as well as to provide a point of entry for those who have not yet engaged in interviews. 

Maria Kokkori is Associate Conservation Scientist for Scholarly Initiatives at the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chicago, where she teaches the Suzanne Deal Booth Seminars in Conservation and Conservation Science. She works on early twentieth-century European art, with a special interest in Russian modernism, artists’ materials and techniques, and the intersections among art, science and technology. Her research and teaching consider how artist interviews expand knowledge in material studies and object-driven inquiry in art history. Author and co-editor of Utopia: Russian art and culture 1900-1989 (2013), she is currently working on a book project on Kazimir Malevich and the Unovis group.

Christine Mehring is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, where she teaches and writes on modern and contemporary art. Her work focuses on abstraction, particularly the ways in which non-mimetic forms, colors, and non-traditional materials signify in relation to specific historical contexts, and on postwar European art, especially the impact of World War II and the transformation from an international art world to a global one. In recent years, she has directed the project Material Matters, which included the research, conservation, and siting of Wolf Vostell’s 1970 public sculpture Concrete Traffic. Conversations with artists, curators, dealers, and conservators are integral to her research and writing processes.

Jessica Stockholder is a Chicago-based artist and the Raymond W. & Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. She was previously Director of the Sculpture Department at the Yale School of Art for twelve years. Her work at the intersection of painting and sculpture has been exhibited widely in North America and Europe, and is represented in various collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Her writing on fellow artist/educator Laura Letinsky recently appeared in Painters on Paintings.

This series is sponsored by the University of Chicago's Department of Art History.

Lunch will be provided, but is limited. All are welcome. Please email any questions to Zsofi Valyi-Nagy at zsvn@uchicago.edu.