UNM Taos faculty member Jeremy McDonnell will be giving a public lecture at the Harwood Museum of Art next Sunday August 28th at 3 PM. The lecture is titled Call and Response - Meeting the old, Making the new. The lecture will be held in the Arthur Bell Auditorium.
Typically a lecture requires an additional cost but the Harwood is allowing a number of groups to attend for free. The lecture will be Free to currently enrolled UNM Taos Students, to Members of the Harwood Museum Alliance and free with museum admission. Museum admission is free to Taos County residents every Sunday!
A pdf flyer about the lecture is attached. Please feel free to copy and give it to anyone that may have interest. Any and all are welcome.
As for the content, the lecture will be a lively presentation of the historical forces at work within the Nod Nod Wink Wink exhibition and an illuminating look into the subtle conversation going on among artists both living and long dead. Contemporary art and ideas at play!
The exhibition is richly multifaceted. It is conceptual art but it also includes minimal and post-minimal works. Moreover - these distinctions are tested within the show. Artists clearly make objects that test these terms, pushing and pulling at the boundaries they imply, mashing them up while seeking a new way through the weight of the art history.
Jeremy will use dual images on the screen to juxtapose art works that are included in the Nod Nod Wink Wink exhibition with works that serve as inspiration or as a point of departure. I will be discussing how artists are often in dialogue with other artists - responding to the past and creating something unique, timely and new.
From The Press release- "McDonnell will explore art historical terms, minimalism, conceptualism, and post minimalism and no doubt will also throw in and discuss some other “isms” including postmodernism. These categories established by art historians to contain periods and styles can be frustrating to artists who often consider themselves and their work not to within such rigid definitions.
McDonnell adds: “I see this as an interesting feature of the show. It demonstrates that art historians work to define movements but younger generations come up and make art works that push and pull at the definitions- testing the wall for cracks and exploiting them. The new comes out of the old- in conversation and response.
It is this idea that I hope to feature. Artists often relate to the work of their predecessors much differently than one imagines. Critics and historians are concerned with understanding art. They don't make things, they talk about ideas. Artists work more arcanely- alchemically even. Artists absorb the work of earlier artists- choosing their parents along the way. They work to digest what has been left behind and to talk with other artists through their own work. Their choices- what they make and how they make it are responses across time. The complications, the apparent fence straddling, the trouble that they engender is the point. This is how artists find their own voices and carry on a conversation amongst their peers- both living and long dead. With careful looking and consideration, we can listen in on this conversation and enjoy the healthy squabble at play.”
The exhibition Nod Nod Wink Wink is on view at the Harwood Museum of Art through September 4. This program is an excellent way to gain a better understanding of the work included in the exhibition and will provide participants with an opportunity after the lecture to explore original artworks by artists discussed by McDonnell.
Jeremy McDonnell is an artist and teacher at UNM Taos. A former gallerist with a love for art McDonnell has presented popular educational and art historical lectures at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as well as other major U.S. museums. In June he taught a sold-out 2-session in-gallery program for the Harwood designed around the Nod Nod Wink Wink exhibition.
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Jeremy McDonnell
575-770-1843
mcdonnell24@gmail.com
