State of the Art: Contemporary Issues Lecture Series

State of the Art: Contemporary Issues Lecture Series
October 18 (7:00 p.m.)
November 16 (6:00 p.m.)
Frist Center for the Visual Arts - Nashville, TN Auditorium
FREE


This fall, the Frist Center presents State of the Art, a new lecture series designed to introduce the contemporary art world through presentations by nationally and internationally renowned experts in the field.

Peter Plagens—The Absolute Truth
Thursday, October 18, 7:00 p.m.
Peter Plagens, artist and contributing editor to Newsweek and Artforum, and former art critic and senior writer for Newsweek, will present an overview of the current moment in contemporary art, with a personal, philosophical, and probably quirky viewpoint.
He has had solo exhibitions at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery (New York), Jan Baum Gallery (Los Angeles), Galerie Grashey (Konstanz, Germany), as well as the Southeast Center for Contemporary Art (Winston-Salem,
N.C.) and Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.). Plagens is a former recipient of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in painting (1977, 1985) and art criticism (1973), and a senior fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program, Columbia University (1998). He has also held various teaching positions.


Katy Siegel—Contemporary Art in the Age of Extremes Friday, November 16, 6:00 p.m.
Katy Siegel is an associate professor of art history at Hunter College, CUNY, a senior critic at Yale University's School of Art, a contributing editor to Artforum, and a visiting professor at Princeton Univeristy. She is the co-author of Art Works: Money (Thames & Hudson, 2004), and more recently, the curator of the traveling exhibition "High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967-1975," which will go to Europe this fall. She is the author of a major essay on Jeff Koons for his new monograph (Taschen, 2007), and has written widely on contemporary art and artists, including Takashi Murakami, Lisa Yuskavage, David Reed, and Richard Tuttle.