Symposium C6
The Art World is Flat: Globalism—Crisis and Opportunity
April 26-28, 2007
Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, Chicago
www.symposiumc6.org
Symposium C6 will explore how the forces of globalism are challenging traditional cultural hierarchies, redistributing capital, creating powerful collaborations, and generating new hybrid cultural practices. It will feature keynotes, presentations, panel discussions, and performances by an international group of innovative and socially engaged artists, entrepreneurs, technologists, writers, designers, curators, patrons, and collectors.
Conference highlights include a keynote by Peter Sellars, world-renowned theatre director and professor of World Arts and Culture at U.C.L.A., a private screening of Lynn Hershman Leesons new film Strange Culture, and a very special closing performance by award-winning playwright, actress and MacArthur Foundation fellow Anna Deavere Smith.
Unlike any other gathering in the art world, Symposium C6 is bringing together people not just from the arts, but from a variety of disciplines and practices who can generate new ideas, collaborations and solutions to the challenges we face, according to Lynne Sowder, conference organizer with Victoria Burns of Burns Sowder Arts Advisory. We hope this gathering helps create new connections between participants and attendees and points the way toward new, vital, engaged cultural practices.
The three-day conference will feature over 30 speakers working across various disciplines. Topics and speakers will include:
New Capital(s), looks at new models of cultural activism, production and distribution with presenters including:
Stanley Hainsworth, Vice-President Global Creative for Starbucks Coffee Company; Rick Lowe, artist and founder of Project Row Houses; Anne Pasternak, president and artistic director of the cultural production agency Creative Time; and Ruby Lerner, director of Creative Capital, an arts foundation modeled on venture capital concepts.
No Borders Here? explores the relationships between cultural practice and international nomadism, ubiquitous technology and new political alliances, with presenters including:
Artist, pilot, and award winning film maker Simone Aaberg Kærn; artist, engineer, former Director of the Experimental Product Design Initiative at Yale University Natalie Jeremijenko; designer Stephen Burks, whose is presently collaborating with crafts people in the developing world for Artecnicas Aids to Artisans initiative; and Lu Jie, whose Long March Project is designed to interrogate Chinese visual culture and revolutionary memory.
Green World, examines how cultural practices are shaping and responding to a global ecological crisis, with artists, architects and designers including:
David Buckland, artist and creator of the Cape Farewell climate change project; Ed Gillespie, Creative Director and Co-Founder of Futerra, a consultancy developing creative communications for sustainability; Bruce Mau, visionary designer whose recent Massive Change project positions design as one of the worlds most powerful forcesin a period were all economies and ecologies are becoming global, relational and interconnected; and artist and designer Lucy Orta whose Fluid Architecture and Refugee Wear blur the boundaries separating art, fashion and architecture.
Symposium C6 was conceived and developed by Lynne Sowder and Victoria Burns of Burns Sowder Arts Advisory in collaboration with independent curator and critic Bruce Ferguson, and is produced by Merchandise Mart Properties, Inc.
Registration in advance is required; passes for single day and all three days are available.
For more detailed information: www.symposiumc6.org
