Art Talks: Meme Machines | Siri Hustvedt, Ellen K. Levy | An Artist Dialogue Series Event

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Registration does not guarantee admission. For free events, we generally overbook to ensure a full house. All registered seats are released 15 minutes before start time, so we recommend that you arrive early.

That libraries can mirror the mind and its idiosyncrasies of thought is an old idea. Novelist Siri Hustvedt and multi-media artist and scholar Ellen K. Levy discuss the complex interplay between books, ideas, and emotions on the occasion of Levy’s exhibition, Meme Machines, created specifically for Art Wall on Third Exhibition Series at Mid-Manhattan Library.

They explore how particular libraries and collections can capture their ephemeral ghosts, reconnect us with basic fears and hopes, and represent the collective memory. While doing so, they raise questions about writing, art-making, and their contingencies. Hustvedt asks: “Why one story and not another?” while Levy asks “What makes a form feel right?” Attempting to avoid habits of mind, the conversation encompasses art’s shifting boundaries between the inner self and outer environment and between the animate and inanimate as information assumes physical and emotional dimensions. Both look at culture and its transmission through multiple lenses, particularly neuroscience.

Copies of Siri Hustevdt's latest book A Woman Looking At Men Looking At Women (Simon & Schuster, 2016) are available for purchase and signing at the end of the event.

Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, three collections of essays, two works of non-fiction, and six novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her novel The Blazing World was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won The Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. She is most recently the author of A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind (2016). She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical School in New York. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. 

Ellen K. Levy, a New York-based artist and independent scholar, is currently Special Advisor on the Arts and Sciences at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, and she is past President of the College Art Association (2004-2006). She earned her doctorate from the University of Plymouth (2012) and received her diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) following a BA in zoology from Mount Holyoke College. Levy has shown extensively in the US and abroad, including the New York and National Academy of Sciences, Associated American Artists, and Michael Steinberg Fine Arts (both NYC). Honors include an arts commission from NASA (1985) and an AICA (Art Critic) award (1995-1996), and she was Distinguished Visiting Fellow of Arts and Sciences at Skidmore College (1999). She has published widely on art and complex systems. 

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.

The event is free and advanced registration is recommended. 

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