Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University

Spring 2021 Conversations
February 18–May 6, 2021

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The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts presents its spring season of online programming, with conversations between Renée Green and Gloria Sutton; Candice Lin, C. Riley Snorton, and Hentyle Yapp; Wanda Liebermann and David Serlin; and Diedrick Brackens and Katherine Bradford.

In addition to its upcoming programs, the Carpenter Center presents Carpenter Center Conversations, a free publication series available by mail. For each virtual program, the Carpenter Center will publish a limited-edition booklet with an edited transcript of the exchange. These booklets will be made available for free as digital downloads and in hard copy upon request. In this time of online gathering, this publication series is meant to serve as a material record of Carpenter Center programming and an art historical resource for future scholars and artists.  

Subscribe to Carpenter Center Conversations today and receive the next booklet in the series, In Conversation: Ja’Tovia Gary and Frank B. Wilderson III, as well as all subsequent booklets. For an overview of upcoming booklets and to explore past conversations in the series, visit the Carpenter Center website.

Sign up for the Carpenter Center’s email list to stay up to date on exhibitions and public programs.

Conversation: Renée Green and Gloria Sutton
Thursday, February 18, 2021, 7:30–9pm EST

Artist Renée Green will discuss her recent book Renée Green: Pacing (Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts / Free Agent Media, 2021) with art historian Gloria Sutton. Over two years as artist-in-residence at the Carpenter Center, Green produced a series of site-specific interventions that culminated in the exhibition Within Living Memory (February 1–April 15, 2018). Renée Green: Pacing is the book that grew from this multiyear project. Green will be joined in conversation by Sutton, catalogue contributor and scholar-in-residence for the duration of Green’s Pacing residency.

Conversation: Candice Lin, C. Riley Snorton, and Hentyle Yapp
Thursday, March 25, 2021, 7:30–9pm EST

Join us for a conversation with C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp, editors of Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (MIT Press/New Museum, 2020), and Candice Lin, artist and book contributor.

Controversies involving race and the art world are often discussed in terms of diversity and representation—as if having the right representative from a group or a larger plurality of embodied difference would absolve art institutions from historic forms of exclusion. Saturation offers another approach, taking into account not only questions of racial representation but also issues of structural change and the redistribution of resources. In essays, conversations, discussions, and artist portfolios, contributors confront in new ways questions at the intersection of art, race, and representation.

Conversation: Wanda Liebermann and David Serlin
Thursday, April 15, 2021, 2:00–3:30pm EST

Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts is one of the most important examples of modernist architecture in the United States. Despite the aspirational ideals embedded in its architecture, however, the building does not take into account the diversity of bodies that use its space. As we assess the ways we’d like the Carpenter Center to be more accessible to all in our community, scholars Wanda Liebermann and David Serlin will consider some of modernist architecture’s intersections with disability politics, as well as progressive approaches to modernism’s historic preservation.

Conversation: Diedrick Brackens and Katherine Bradford
Thursday, May 6, 2021, 7:30–9pm EST

Join us for a conversation between artists Diedrick Brackens and Katherine Bradford, whose joint exhibition Diedrick Brackens and Katherine Bradford will be on view at the Carpenter Center July 16–December 23, 2021. With parallel interests in materiality and the act of making, Brackens and Bradford create ambiguous pictorial spaces that frame the relationships between bodies. Their scenes seem to exist both outside and deeply embedded within this uncertain time, evoking cautions, questions, and desires about our bodies in relation to each other.

Support
Generous support for Carpenter Center programs is provided by the Division of Arts and Humanities, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Harvard University; and the Friends of the Carpenter Center: Fotene and Tom Coté, John Morace and Thomas Kennedy, and John R. and Barbara Robinson.