December 11, 2019, 7pm
47-49 East 65th Street
New York, NY
USA
The Department of Art and Art History at Hunter College is pleased to announce a public lecture by Zabar Visiting Artist Polly Apfelbaum, Wednesday, December 11, at 7pm at Hunter’s Roosevelt House Auditorium, 47-49 East 65th Street in Manhattan.
Polly Apfelbaum is best known for her “fallen paintings”: large, colorful, floor-bound works composed of hundreds of petals of brilliantly dyed fabric. She has exhibited steadily since her first one-person exhibition in New York in 1986, exploring the boundaries between high art and handicraft, in particular the varieties of quilting and weaving that modern art dismissed as decorative, as craft, or as women’s work. Her most recent works, woven rugs and printed wallpapers, move color and pattern across the floor and onto the wall. They evoke both a history of modern color painting and mid-century interior design, and the handmade work of older craft traditions.
Polly Apfelbaum is represented by Galerie Nächst St. Stephen in Vienna and Frith Street Gallery in London, and her work was the subject of a major mid-career survey that opened in 2003 at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and traveled to the Kemper Museum in Kansas City and the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati. She has received numerous grants and awards, including the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Richard Diebenkorn Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Fellowship, an Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, an Anonymous Was a Women Award, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. Her work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of Art of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, and other museums nationally and internationally.
About the Judith Zabar Visiting Artists Program
In November 2007, Hunter College received a generous commitment to establish the Judith Zabar Visiting Artist Program Fund. The Fund has allowed Hunter to bring a series of internationally recognized artists to campus to work directly with students in the MFA program, in master classes, critical seminars, and private tutorials, providing students with the unique opportunity to interact with top practitioners in the field. Zabar Visiting Artists also present public lectures where they discuss their work, engage in conversation with members of Hunter’s faculty, and with Hunter’s broader student community and the general public. Past Zabar artists have included: Vito Acconci, Janine Antoni, Julie Ault, Robert Barry, Dawoud Bey, Tania Bruguera, Mel Chin, Peter Doig, Nicole Eisenman, Rochelle Feinstein, Charles Gaines, Alfredo Jaar, Joan Jonas, Martin Kersels, Jeff Koons, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Robert Longo, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Christian Marclay, Kerry James Marshall, Tracey Moffatt, Matt Mullican, Wangechi Mutu, Gabriel Orozco, Laura Owens, Trevor Paglen, Elizabeth Peyton, Paul Pfeiffer, William Pope L., Walid Ra’ad, Yvonne Rainer, Allen Ruppersberg, Doris Salcedo, Shahzia Sikander, Michael Smith, Frances Stark, Fred Tomaselli, Nari Ward, Carrie Mae Weems, and Stanley Whitney.