Art and Architecture: One Lump or Two - Amy Sillman, Helen Molesworth - An Artist Dialogue Series Event

FREE - Berger Forum doors open at 5:30 p.m.

Artist Amy Sillman and curator Helen Molesworth have an in-depth discussion about the new book Amy Sillman: One Lump or Two, published in conjunction with a major museum exhibition of Amy Sillman’s work at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. 

Fatso, 2009, oil on canvas, 90 1⁄2 x 84 1⁄2 inches. © Amy Sillman 2013Accompanying a major museum retrospective of the acclaimed American painter, this book traces Amy Sillman’s diverse body of work that includes drawings, cartoons, paintings, and animated videos produced on an iPhone. From her early small-scale cartoon figures to her later enormous abstract paintings, Amy Sillman’s artistic vision shines through in this beautiful volume that covers the period from 1995 to the present. Filled with drawings, paintings, and zines, as well as stills from the artist’s recent forays into animated films, the book traces the development of Sillman’s work from her early use of cartoon figures and a vivacious palette through her exploration of the diagrammatic line, the history of Abstract Expressionism, and a growing concern with the bodily and erotic dimensions of paint. This book also examines the importance of drawing in Sillman’s practice as well as the intensity with which she has embraced the dichotomy between figuration and abstraction. It celebrates her raw emotion, curiosity, erotic power, and humor.

Copies of the book are available for purchase and signing at the event after the audience Q&A.

S, 2007, oil on canvas, 45 x 39 inches. © Amy Sillman 2013Amy Sillman is a painter who lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her work deals actively with complex negotiations of painting process, drawing, abstraction, language, color, humor, and time, among other things. She has exhibited widely over the past two decades in the United States and, more recently, internationally. In 2008 her solo exhibition Third Person Singular originated at The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, and One lump or two, her mid-career survey curated by Helen Molesworth, opens in October 2013 at the ICA Boston. Her paintings, drawings and animations are held in numerous collections, both public and private, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Boston Museum of Fine Art, among many others. Sillman has been the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship, and Fellowships from The American Academy in Berlin and The Radcliffe Institute. Sillman’s bibliography includes a monograph on her drawings, Amy Sillman: Works on Paper, published in 2006 by Gregory R. Miller & Co. She earned a BFA at The School of Visual Arts in NYC in 1973, her MFA at Bard College in 1995, and in 2011 was awarded an honorary doctorate from Montserrat College in Beverly, Mass. Since 2005 she has been the Co-Chair of the Painting Department at Bard College's MFA Program in Annandale, NY.

The Egyptians, 2003, oil on canvas, 72 x 84 inches. © Amy Sillman, 2013Helen Molesworth is the Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Boston. Formerly head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary art as well as the Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museum, she presented an exhibition of photographs by Moyra Davey and ACT UP NY: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis 1987-1993. From 2002 to 2007 she was the Chief Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts where she organized the first US retrospectives of Louise Lawler and Luc Tuymans, as well as Part Object Part Sculpture which examined sculpture produced in the wake of Marcel Duchamp’s erotic objects and hand made readymades of the 1960s. From 2000-2002 she was the Curator of Contemporary Art at The Baltimore Museum of Art, where she organized Work Ethic, which traced the problem of artistic labor in post-1960s art. She is the author of numerous articles and her writing has appeared in publications such as Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. Her research areas are concentrated largely within and around the problems of feminism, the reception of Marcel Duchamp, and the socio-historical frameworks of contemporary art.

Initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni in 2004, Artist Dialogues Series provide an open forum for understanding and appreciation of contemporary art. Artists are paired with critics, curators, gallerists, writers or other artists to converse about art and the potential of exploring new ideas.

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