Proximate Objects: Large Contemporary Artworks and their Territorial Claims

Frick Fine Arts Auditorium (Room 125)
A light reception will follow in the Cloister 

Carnegie Museum of Art and the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh are pleased to welcome Dr. Malik Gaines for the Annual Terry Smith Lecture in Contemporary Art.

This lecture draws on new writing for a book-in-progress that takes up monumental-scale artworks and situates their historical and political effects. Recent works by artists including David Hammons, Simone Leigh, and Pope.L have appeared beyond the confines of disciplinary art-space and take up the social dynamics of "the public," offering ambivalent critiques of power and its projection.

BIO:

Malik Gaines has written articles and essays about art and performance in journals, periodicals such as Artforum, and for museum books and artist monographs published by MoMA, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and many others. His book, Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left (2017) followed routes of radical political ideas through performances of the 1960s. He is working on a second book dealing with contemporary art performances that act against the limits of U.S. sovereignty. Gaines has performed and exhibited extensively with several collaborations including the group My Barbarian, whose 2021 survey exhibition and performance series toured from the Whitney Museum in New York to the ICA Los Angeles. He is co-artistic director of The Industry opera company, where his opera Star Choir premieres in fall 2023. Gaines holds a PhD in Performance Studies from UCLA, an MFA in Writing from CalArts, and a BA in History from UCLA. He is an associate professor of Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego.