Art and Architecture: All at Once | Arlene Shechet, Janine Antoni, Ian Berry, David Levi Strauss | An Art Book Series Event

September 23, 2015

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FREE - Auditorium doors open at 5:30 p.m.

To celebrate the publication of her new book All at Once, sculptor Arlene Shechet discusses her work with artist Janine Antoni and writer David Levi Strauss. The conversation is moderated by Ian Berry, Dayton Director of The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.​ 

Installation view, Arlene Shechet, Slip, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., NYC (2013). Photo credit Alan Wiener
Arlene Shechet, Slip, installation view, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., NYC (2013).
Photo credit Alan Wiener

Published by Prestel in association with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Arlene Shechet: All at Once accompanies the first museum survey of sculptor Arlene Shechet and surveys over 20 years of work in a diversity of materials, from plaster to cast paper, and from glass to ceramic. Over the last decade, the sculptor has generated a body of work remarkable for its embrace of clay—a medium often overlooked because of its associations with craft—resulting in a body of work that shows an artist at the top of her form and which has been described by the New Yorker as “grotesque, hilarious, lovely.” The recipient of broad recognition and numerous awards, Shechet’s entire oeuvre is examined here in one stunning volume.

Copies of Arlene Shechet: All at Once are available for purchase and signing at the end of event.

Arlene Shechet, The Possibility of Ghosts, 2013, in process at Woodstock studio. Photo credit Prithi Gowda
Arlene Shechet, The Possibility of Ghosts, 2013,
in process at Woodstock studio. Photo credit Prithi Gowda

New York-based sculptor Arlene Shechet's diverse body of work draws on balance, breath, humor, and failure. Corporeal yet transcendent, her work explores the friction when categories start to slip, giving way to subliminal play. Arlene Shechet: All at Once, a twenty-year survey of the artist's work curated by Jenelle Porter, opened in June 2015 at the ICA Boston. Recent solo museum exhibitions include Meissen Recast at the RISD Museum, Providence, RI, which focused on the 2012-2013 series of works featured in this book; the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. Shechet's work is included in numerous museums and public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She lives and works in New York City and upstate New York.

Janine Antoni employs an amalgam of mediums. Her body is both her tool for making and the source from which her meaning arises. Antoni was born in Freeport, Bahamas, and received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, the New Media Award from ICA Boston, a Creative Capital Artist Grant, an Anonymous Was A Woman Grant, and a grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Antoni is represented by Luhring Augustine in New York.

Ian Berry is Dayton Director of The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. He has organized over seventy museum exhibitions with artists including Terry Adkins, Kathy Butterly, Nancy Grossman, Jim Hodges, Nina Katchadourian, Nicholas Krushenick, Arturo Herrera, Kara Walker, and in 2009, the exhibition and catalogue Arlene Shechet: Blow by Blow.

Arlene Shechet, Because of the Wind, 2010, in process at Woodstock studio. Photo credit Cathy Carver
Arlene Shechet, Because of the Wind, 2010, in process at Woodstock studio. Photo credit Cathy Carver

David Levi Strauss is the author of Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics  (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition with a prolegomenon by Hakim Bey, 2010). Strauss was a Guggenheim fellow in 2003 and received the Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography in 2007. He is Chair of the graduate program in Art Criticism & Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he also runs the Art Criticism & Writing Lecture series

In its seventh year the program series An Art Book, initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni, is a celebration of the essential importance and beauty of art books. The events showcase book presentations and discussions by world renowned artists, critics, curators, gallerists, historians and writers.

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