Art and Architecture: The Artist's Museum | Carol Bove, Dan Byers, Anna Craycroft, Sara VanDerBeek | An Art Book Series Event

FREE — Auditorium doors open to public at 5:30 p.m.

On the occasion of the publication of the catalog for The Artist’s Museum, an exhibition on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston from November 16, 2016–March, 26, 2017, the artists in the exhibition Carol Bove, Anna Craycroft and Sara VanDerBeek are joined in conversation by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator at the ICA/Boston.

The Artist's Museum presents immersive artworks that bring together art, artifacts, and natural materials to create distinct models from each artist’s world. Employing the language of museum display, the artists chart the recurrence of forms and themes across cultures and history, to reveal unexpected relationships and affinities. The artists engage a variety of disciplines and subjects, such as dance, music, design, gender, sexuality, and technology. Among the artists included are Rosa Barba, Carol Bove, Anna Craycroft, Christian Marclay, Mark Leckey, Pierre Leguillon, Rosemarie Trockel, Goshka Macuga, and Sara VanDerBeek. The book’s essays offer new scholarship, extensive documentation and analysis of each artist's works, and a compendium of historical exhibitions and artworks that serve as important precedents for the exhibition.

Copies of The Artist's Museum (Prestel, 2016) are available for purchase and signing at the end of the event.

Carol Bove’s (b. 1971) sculptural practice makes re-use of materials that come with readymade histories: rusted metal beams, seashells, and driftwood. She is a devoted student of art, art history, and exhibition history, and has devoted bodies of work to the formal and institutional legacies of Constantin Brancusi and the Venetian architect and exhibition designer Carlo Scarpa. Rather than adhering to a single formal vocabulary, she uses cubes, grids, curlicues, and organic forms to forge affective relationships between her present moment and sculpture-making idioms of her historical precursors. These historical relations translate into relations in space, as large sculptures draw viewers into a meticulously staged environment. The vitrines and pedestals Bove uses to support her sculptures, found objects, and limited edition journals, become integral parts of the installation.

Dan Byers is the Mannion Family Senior Curator at The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. His recent ICA exhibitions include The Artist’s Museum, Diane Simpson, Geoffrey Farmer, and upcoming exhibitions of Steve McQueen and Ron Nagle. Before his move to Boston in January 2015, Byers was the Richard Armstrong Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Carnegie Museum of Art, where he oversaw acquisitions of modern and contemporary art and was co-curator, with Daniel Baumann and Tina Kukielski, of the 2013 Carnegie International. In addition to the International, his projects at the Carnegie included solo exhibitions of Cathy Wilkes, Ragnar Kjartansson, and James Lee Byars. Prior to the Carnegie, he was Curatorial Fellow at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Assistant to the Directors at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Byers has published essays on artists such as Jeronimo Elespe, Michelle Grabner, Joachim Koester, Catherine Murphy, and Gedi Sibony.

Anna Craycroft (b. 1975) has explored theorists of pedagogy such as Rudolf Steiner and Maria Montessori in works such as Agency of Orphan (2008) and C’mon Language (2013). These projects encompass a range of media, from ceramics and installations, to portraits of figures like Annie, Oliver Twist, and Harry Potter. At the heart of these explorations is an inquiry into the formation and expression of individuality. With scholarly rigor Craycroft has investigated fractal geometry, photography, art history, childhood psychology, and literature. In her most recent work, she has conducted archival research on the avant-garde photographer Berenice Abbott and has conceived an installation that brings together Abbott’s wide ranging work with works by her own peer group of artists.

Testing the limits of photography and sculpture, Sara VanDerBeek (b. 1976) stages sculptural tableaux for the explicit purpose of photographing them. Although trained at the Baltimore School for the Arts and the Cooper Union, history and archives have equally served as her teachers. Her art-historical subjects range from antiquities from the British Museum to Frank Stella, René Magritte, László Moholy-Nagy, and her father, Stan VanDerBeek. Importantly, she has used her visual practice of recycling and abstracting to recuperate the legacies of women artists, specifically Anne Truitt’s totemic sculpture, Anni Albers’s collection of Peruvian textiles, Eileen Gray’s room dividers, and Sonia Delaunay-Terk contributions to Orphism. Between 2003 and 2009 she operated the gallery Guild & Greyshkul in SoHo with her brother Johannes VanDerBeek and the sculptor Anya Kielar. Although she merges her photographic and sculptural practices in immersive installations, she conspicuously transfers the qualities of materials such as fabric and marble sculpture, into photography, and in the process offer a new, and specifically intermedial, way of framing the past.

In its eighth year the program series An Art Book, initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni, is a celebration of the essential importance and beauty of art books. The events showcase book presentations and discussions by world 
renowned artists, critics, curators, gallerists, historians and writers.

Events at The New York Public Library may be photographed or recorded. By attending these events, you consent to the use of your image and voice by the Library for all purposes.

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