New York: Between Art and Life

The Task of the Critic

Talk

Thursday, November 3, 2022
6:30 – 7:30 pm EDT
YouTube Video Premiere

Co-presented with Judd Foundation

Learn more about Donald Judd’s legacy as an art critic in New York City during the early 1960s and reflect on how art criticism has changed relative to culture at large. This conversation features Flavin Judd, Artistic Director, Judd Foundation, writers and critics, Johanna Fateman and Wayne Koestenbaum, and is moderated by Sarah C Bancroft, Executive Director of the Rosenquist Foundation. The speakers will illuminate connections between artists represented in the museum’s current exhibition New York: 1962-1964 and Judd's work as a critic, especially his writing about the artists Lee Bontecou, Sally Hazelet Drummond, Yayoi Kusama, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist and Frank Stella. Additionally, Fateman and Koestenbaum will discuss the state of art criticism and the nature of their work in this field.

About the Speakers:

Flavin Judd is artistic director of Judd Foundation and the son of Donald Judd. He oversees art installations, book designs, and architectural design for Judd Foundation. He is codesigner and coeditor of the recent publications Donald Judd Writings (2016), Donald Judd Interviews (2019), and Donald Judd Spaces (2020).

Johanna Fateman is a writer, art critic, musician, and owner of Seagull Salon in New York. She is a contributing editor for Artforum and writes art reviews weekly for the “Goings On About Town” section of the New Yorker. She also writes for 4Columns regularly. With Amy Scholder, she edited the anthology Last Days at Hot Slit: the Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, published by semiotext(e) in 2019. Recently, she contributed essays to monographs for Hilary Pecis and Donald Judd. And Le Tigre, her band with Kathleen Hanna and JD Samson, returned after a seventeen-year hiatus to play a reunion show last August; they will perform more in 2023.

Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, fiction-writer, artist—has published 22 books, including Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). In 2020, he received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired his literary archive in 2019. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Sarah C. Bancroft is Executive Director of the James Rosenquist Foundation, and President of the Board of Directors of the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation. An art historian and curator, Ms. Bancroft held curatorial positions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Orange County Museum of Art. She specializes in modern and contemporary art, and her critically-acclaimed exhibitions include James Rosenquist: A Retrospective (2003, cocurated with Walter Hopps), Richard Diebenkorn at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2015), Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series (2011–2012), Two Schools of Cool (2011), and the 2010 California Biennial.

Free with RSVP
While this program is presented free with RSVP, the optional purchase of a ticket helps support the Museum’s virtual programming.
This program is presented with captions.

Installation view of New York: 1962-1964 at the Jewish Museum, NY, July 22, 2022-January 8, 2023. Photo by Nicholas Venezia courtesy of Selldorf Architects