A “Case in Point” Series Event by Artis and the CCA Free. Advance registration required by emailing rsvp@artiscontemporary.org HaMidrasha Gallery, HaYarkon St 19, Tel Aviv-Yafo
Thursday, June 28 at 7 pm
In 1974, Artforum published Terry Smith’s seminal article, “The Provincialism Problem,” which outlined how artists outside New York City might wrongly perceive themselves and their work as subservient, or secondary, to what takes places in what was considered the art world’s center. Smith called for a radical reimagining of this inequity, but almost half a century since then, while today’s art world might have several centers rather than just one, the dichotomy of center and periphery remains largely problematic.
Inspired by Smith’s article and the discussions it has spurred, Artis and the CCA present a panel discussion in the “Case in Point” series focusing on art and art writing practices and how they relate to the center-periphery divide. Three international curators, Beth Citron, Fionn Meade, and Leah Triplett Harrington, will share research and curatorial projects that will be followed by a roundtable discussion moderated by Amy Zion and Chen Tamir.
Beth Citron will discuss the modern and contemporary art programming of the Rubin Museum is in New York that focuses on the art and culture of the Himalayas and neighboring regions, including India. She will focus specifically on an exhibition of newly-commissioned work by Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh as well as the series of exhibitions about Modernist Art from India (2011-2013).
Fionn Meade will discuss his upcoming exhibition, “Becoming American,” an international group show sited on the grounds of the American and English camps on San Juan Island, WA, and satellite venues in Seattle. Meade will also discuss his work with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN (USA).
Leah Triplett Harrington will focus on The Rib, a recently-launched publication and platform striving to connect and cultivate contemporary art communities thriving along the so-called periphery. Focused on artist-run and decentralized projects, The Rib’s interest in place reacts to the rise of “local” biennials as well as the evolution of gallery space from physical to digital and nomadic.
The event will be held in English and will be moderated by New York based curator and writer Amy Zion and Chen Tamir, Artis’ Curatorial Associate and the Curator at the CCA.
About the Speakers Beth Citron is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York. She is the organizer of the ongoing exhibitions “Chitra Ganesh” and “A Lost Future: Shezad Dawood/The Otolith Group/Matti Braun,” both of which opened at the Museum in February 2018. Previously for the Museum she organized “Genesis Breyer P-Orridge” (2016) and “Francesco Clemente” (2014), and the three-part exhibition series “Modernist Art from India” (2011-2013). She also served as organizer of a series of artist performance lectures for the 2018 Dhaka Art Summit and as curatorial advisor and co-organizer of the exhibition “Rewind” concerning modernist art from South Asia at the 2016 Dhaka Art Summit. She has published widely on modern and contemporary South Asian art including in ArtJournal and Artforum. She received her PhD on Contemporary Art in Bombay, 1965-1995, from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009.
Fionn Meade, is an independent curator based in New York and Seattle. He has served as Artistic Director (2015-17) and Senior Curator, Cross-Disciplinary Platforms (2014-15) at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, where he headed the Visual Arts Department. He has been a faculty member at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2009-2014) and in the MFA Program for Visual Arts, Columbia University (2009-2014). He also oversaw commissions of public artworks for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Walker campus by Theaster Gates, Nairy Baghramian, and Philippe Parreno. He has previously been a curator at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA, and at SculptureCenter, New York. The recipient of an Arts Writer Grant from Creative Capital (2009) and the Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship (Fall 2014), Meade holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Columbia University (1999) and an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from CCS Bard (2009), and received his B.F.A from Evergreen State College.
Leah Triplett Harrington is a writer and independent curator focused on contemporary art from the 1980s to the present. She is senior editor of The Rib, a publication and platform dedicated to contemporary art and its communities along the so-called periphery. Her writing has most recently appeared in Flash Art, The Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic. Upcoming curatorial projects include “Under Dismal Boston Skyline,” an exhibition that explores the human impact of social conditions in the 1980s and draws parallels to the present moment that will be on view this fall at the Boston University Art Galleries. Triplett Harrington has lectured at Boston University, Montserrat College of Art, Stonehill College, Tufts University Art Gallery, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 2017, she was a finalist for the Rabkin Prize for Arts Journalism. She is currently critic-in-residence for Now + There, a Boston-based public art project.
Chen Tamir is Curator at the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel-Aviv and Curatorial Associate at Artis. She was recently listed by artnet as one of 25 women curators on the rise and Artslant named her one of 15 curators to watch in 2015. Her independent exhibitions have been presented at venues including Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic (G-MK) in Zagreb; Art in General, the Jewish Museum, and White Box in New York; the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Saskatchewan, the University of Toronto’s Justina Barnicke Gallery, and Gallery TPW in Canada, and the Israeli Center for Digital Art and Museums of Bat Yam in Israel. She has published by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, The Exhibitionist, FlashArt, C Magazine, BlackFlash, Prefix, Hyperallergic, and various monographs.
Amy Zion is a curator and writer living in New York City. She is faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, where she is co-editor of the student-led online journal, accessions.org. Zion has worked on numerous exhibitions internationally including the Danish Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, and “Tell it to My Heart—Collected by Julie Ault” at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel. She co-organized Frieze Talks New York in 2018 with Tom Eccles. She is curating an exhibition for the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, which will open in 2019. She is a regular contributor to Frieze and has written for Art Journal, Art in America, Flash Art, Witte de With Journal, and more. She has texts forthcoming in catalogues for the New Museum (Sept 2018) and the Rubell Collection (Summer 2018).
Image: David L Jones, Truck Stop for the Interstate that Never Was, 2018.