George Washington U. Partners With Phillips Collection

George Washington University and the Phillips Collection, a museum of modern art in Washington, are jointly organizing art-history courses, artist visits, postdoctoral fellowships, and an internship program. The three-year partnership has started with a course titled “The Performative Impulse in American Art,” taught by GW professor Virginia B. Spivey.

The cosponsored “Conversations With Artists” series, also underway and with speakers scheduled through May, features artists John Simon, Jr., Jim Sanborn, Mark Dion, Walid Raad, Matthew Ritchie, and Alice Aycock as they explore the theme “Systems of Knowledge.” (See schedule of remaining “Conversations” below.)

In early 2011, the Phillips Collection and GW will award two postdoctoral fellowships to support emerging scholars and further teaching and research on modern and contemporary art.

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Remaining 2010-2011 “Conversations With Artists”:
Talks are on Wednesdays at 5:30 p.m.; $10; $5 for members; free for students with ID
Registration required: www.phillipscollection.org/calendar

Mark Dion
December 8, 2010
Dion’s cabinets of curiosities appropriate scientific methods to investigate ideology.
Walid Raad
April 13, 2011
Through textual analysis, video, performance and photography projects, Raad explores the issues surrounding the Lebanese civil wars. He also leads the Atlas Group, a nonprofit research foundation in Beirut, which documents the contemporary history of Lebanon.

Matthew Ritchie
April 27, 2011
Ritchie aims to recreate the vastness of our universe and the structures of knowledge that we use to understand and visualize it. He deals explicitly with how information is exchanged and delivered.

Alice Aycock
May 4, 2011
Influenced by objects of minimalism and conceptual language, Aycock relies on paradigms, cybernetics, psychoanalysis, scientific thinking and computer programming to create architectural and sculptural structures that deal with the interaction of material and site, and the psychophysical responses of the viewer. Aycock’s work invites the viewer to experience sculpture with the entire body and mind.