Forum Lectures #15: Julia Bryan-Wilson

Pattern as Politics

Pacita Abad, Endless Blues: Life in the Margins, 2002, oil, printed cloth, painted cloth stitched on canvas

Julia Bryan-Wilson considers how patterned needlework and embellishment served as a political strategy for two artists (Philippines-born Pacita Abad and Brazilian Madalena Santos Reinbolt) whose work blurred the lines between function and décor. Though located in distinct geographies and rooted in different identifications, these two artists have much in common, and this talk takes seriously their decision to adorn the objects of domestic life. In doing so, Bryan-Wilson speculates about how their patterned handcrafted practices open onto more expansive art histories.

About Julia Bryan-Wilson

Julia Bryan-Wilson is Professor of Contemporary Art and LBGTQ Art History at Columbia University and Adjunct Curator at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. She curated Louise Nevelson: Persistence, an official collateral event of the 59th Venice Biennale and her book on Nevelson is forthcoming from Yale University Press. Her most recent book Fray: Art and Textile Politics was published in 2017 and was awarded the ASAP Book Prize, the Frank Jewett Mather Award, and the Robert Motherwell Book Award.

Forum Lectures

Forum Lectures is a series of lectures by Danish and international thinkers and cultural workers reflecting on how art co-forms communality. Forum Lectures brings thinking and shared study back to the university and invites for public lectures the last Tuesday every month at 17:00 - 19:00. 

The initiative is hosted by the research group of the New Carlsberg Foundation research center Art as Forum. Our researchers are occupied by a.o. the infrastructures of the arts, collective modes of production, the entanglement of political theory and aesthetic theory, assembling strategies of curation, dematerialized art, acts of strategic separatism and temporality in digital art.

The lecture is for free and open for everyone interested.