Works on the Floor online symposium

Richard Long’s Quantock Wood Circle (1981) is currently installed in the Yale Center for British Art’s Library Court, where it will be on view through February 19, 2023. The floor sculpture consists of 285 weathered and broken pine branches the artist collected from the Quantock Hills in Somerset, near his hometown of Bristol, England. In Quantock Wood Circle, materials collected while walking are brought into the museum, activating the floor and raising questions about our relationship with space, place, and nature.

Taking Long’s work as a provocation, this online symposium will explore how artists from around the world have exploited the floor to interrogate ideas of embodied viewership, identity, land, and modern sculpture. In doing so, the program aims to offer new frameworks for understanding the conceptual decision to place works on the floor.

Visit our website for more details and to register. 

Schedule (all times EST):
8:50–9am
Welcome remarks

9–10:30am
Panel one: The Body and the Floor
Chair: Joanna Fiduccia, Assistant Professor, Department of the History of Art, Yale University
Panelists: Pepe Karmel, Professor of Art History, New York University; Shruti Parthasarathy, PhD Student, University of Madison-Wisconsin; Michael Tymkiw, Senior Lecturer in Art History, University of Essex, UK

10:45am–12:15pm
Panel two: Land, City, and the Planet
Chair: Alexis Lowry, Curator, Dia Art Foundation, New York
Panelists: Joy Sleeman, Professor Art History and Theory, Slade School of Art; Elyse Speaks, Associate Professor of the Practice, Modern & Contemporary, Notre Dame; Marin Sullivan, Independent Art Historian

1–2:15pm
Panel three: Sculptural Dialogues
Chair: Molleen Theodore, Associate Curator of Programs, Yale University Art Gallery
Panelists: John J. Curley, Associate Professor Contemporary Art and Rubin Faculty Fellow, Wake Forest University; Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, Associate Curator, Dia Art Foundation; Jonathan Vernon, Associate Lecturer, Courtauld Institute of Art

3–4–pm
Artist conversation
Karla Black talks with Rachel Stratton, Curatorial Postdoctoral Associate, YCBA