Symposium Participants

 
 
Suzanne Anker is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. She works in a variety of mediums ranging from digital sculpture and installation to large-scale photography, and plants grown under LED lights. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally in museums and galleries including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Smithsonian Institution and the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; MoMA P.S.1, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Mediznhistorisches Museum der Charite, Berlin; the Center for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin; the Pera Museum, Istanbul and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. Her books include The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, co-authored with the late sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, published in 2004 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, and Visual Culture and Bioscience, co-published by University of Maryland and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Chairing SVA’s Fine Arts Department in New York since 2005, Ms. Anker continues to interweave traditional and experimental media into her department’s new digital initiative.
 
 
Laura Battle is an artist and Professor of Studio Arts at Bard College. Among numerous other venues, her work has been shown at Lohin Geduld Gallery in New York, Pace University Gallery, Albany Center Gallery, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Franklin Furnace, and Vassar College. Her awards include a grant from the Peter S. Reed Foundation, a Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a residency at the MacDowell Colony. Battle holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale School of Art. She is represented by Lohin Geduld Gallery.
 
 
Connie Beckley is a visual artist, composer, and performance artist. She has presented her work in both commercial and public cultural institutions throughout Europe and North America, including the New Music America Festivals, the Venice Biennale, the Paris Biennale, and the Museum of Modern Art. Reviews and articles appear in publications including The New York Times, Art in America, Arts, Artforum, Tel Quel, Flash Art, and Art Press. Her awards include grants from the Norman and Rosita Winston Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She studied at West Chester University, Hunter College, and Columbia University. Beckley teaches in the Art History, Visual and Critical Studies, and Fine Arts Departments at the School of Visual Arts.
 
 
Anney Bonney is a visual artist, writer, and curator. She is a former contributing arts editor at Bomb and Video and Performance Curator at The Kitchen. She studied at Wellesley College and holds a BA from Empire State College and two MFAs from the School of Visual Arts. Her videos have been shown at a number of festivals, including: the Tribeca Film Festival; Lincoln Center; The American Film Institute; Brooklyn Museum; Oberhausen Short Film Festival; Rotterdam International Film Festival; Sao Paolo Museum (Fluxus Festival); and Rio Cine Festival. Her awards include grants from Creative Time, Franklin Furnace, New York State Council on the Arts, and artist residencies from Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada, and the Experimental Television Center. She teaches at Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts.
 
 
Deirdre Boyle is a media historian, critic, curator, and psychotherapist. She has published eight books, including a history of 1970s video documentaries. Currently on the faculty at The New School, she has also taught at New York University, City College/CUNY, Fordham University, Rutgers University, and Moscow State University. Boyle has been guest curator for the Hong Kong Arts Centre, Brussels Video Festival, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others, and has programmed independent film and video series for public and cable television.
 
 
Nathaniel Dorsky is a filmmaker who works in the tradition of devotional form. He defines devotion as "the opening or the interruption that allows us to experience what is hidden, and to accept with our hearts our given situation."
 
 
Jeff Edwards is a writer and faculty member in the undergraduate Visual and Critical Studies and Art History departments at the School of Visual Arts. He has an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from SVA, and a Master’s Degree in Public and Private Management from the Yale School of Management.
 
 
James Elkins is Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Head of the History of Art at University College, Cork, Ireland. Among his numerous books are: On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art; Pictures and Tears; Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction; What Painting Is; and The Domain of Images.
 
 
Max Gimblett is a New York-based artist whose work has been shown extensively throughout his native New Zealand, the United States, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan. Among numerous other institutions, his work has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia.
 
 
Tom Huhn is a philosopher, critic, and curator, and Chair of the Art History Department and BFA Visual and Critical Studies Department at the School of Visual Arts as well as coordinator of the school’s Honors Program. He holds an AB from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA and PhD from Boston University. His books include: Imitation and Society: The Persistence of Mimesis in the Aesthetics of Burke, Hogarth, and Kant; The Cambridge Companion to Adorno; The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste; and The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. His awards and honors include: Getty Scholar; Fulbright Scholar; First Prize, American Society for Aesthetics Essay Contest; New York State Council for the Humanities.
 
 
Atta Kim is a South Korean photographer whose work has been shown widely throughout his native country and internationally. In 2002 he was selected to represent his country in the twenty-fifth Sao Paulo Biennial, and since then he has had shows at the International Center of Photography, Yossi Milo Gallery, and the Rubin Museum of Art, among numerous other venues. Kim’s work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including: The Museet for Fotokunst (Denmark), EARLLU Gallery (Singapore), the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Gwacheon, South Korea), the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, Texas), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Kim lives and works in Seoul and New York City.
 
 
Roger Lipsey is an independent scholar who has taught at many institutions across the country, including Princeton University and the University of Texas at Austin. His books include An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art (reprinted under the subtitle by Dover Books); Angelic Mistakes: The Art of Thomas Merton (the first exploration of Merton's abstract calligraphy and monoprints of the 1960s); and Coomaraswamy: His Life and Work.
 
 
Enrique Martínez Celaya is a visual artist, lecturer, and poet. He has lectured on art at venues around the world, and his essays have appeared in numerous publications. His artwork is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and others. For his work as an artist, he has received many awards and prizes including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Young Talent Award, the California Community Foundation Fellowship, J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts and the Anderson Ranch National Artist Award. After studying applied physics and quantum electronics at Cornell and the University of California, Berkeley, Martinez Celaya received his MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He lives and works in Miami, Florida.
 
 
Joseph Nechvatal is a post-conceptual digital artist and theoretician. He holds a PhD in the philosophy of art and new technology from the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA), University of Wales College, Newport, UK. He has exhibited his work widely throughout the United States as well as in Paris, Cologne, Aalst, Belgium, Turin, and Munich. His book, Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality, was published in 2009.
 
 
Daniel A. Siedell teaches modern and contemporary art history, theory, and criticism at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. He has a B.A. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, an M.A. from SUNY-Stony Brook, and a Ph.D. from The University of Iowa. His publications include Weldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), God in the Gallery (Baker Academic, 2008), and An Excavation of Tenth Street: Essays on the History of Abstract Expressionism (Whale & Star, Forthcoming 2011). He is at work with theologian of culture William Dyrness on a book on religion and modern art.
 
 
Charlene Spretnak is author of several books on cultural history, spirituality, and modernity and its discontents, including States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age (1991); The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World (1997); and Relational Reality (Spring 2011). She is a professor in the philosophy and religion department at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a graduate institute in San Francisco. For several years, she has been working on a book on the role of spiritual interests in the life and art of numerous modern and contemporary artists (1800 to the present), focusing on a spiritual biography of each artist.
 
 
David Levi Strauss is the author of From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999). Strauss was a Guggenheim fellow in 2003 and received the Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography in 2007. He is now Chair of the graduate program in Art Criticism & Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
 
 
Alan Wanzenberg is the owner and principal of Alan Wanzenberg Architect, PC and Alan Wanzenberg Design, LLC, an Architectural and Interior Design firm based in New York City, which has executed work throughout the United States and abroad. After graduating from both the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University, he worked at the office of IM Pei and Partners for three years. In 1982, Mr. Wanzenberg founded the firm of Johnson & Wanzenberg with his longtime collaborator, the late Jed Johnson. Mr. Wanzenberg is a member of the American Institute of Architects and certified by the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards. The firm's work has received several awards for design excellence and has been published repeatedly in the New York Times and several professional journals, including Progressive Architecture as well as Architectural Digest, Metropolitan Home, House & Garden, and Vogue. Mr. Wanzenberg has been included in numerous Architectural Digest's Top 100 Designers and Architects issues.
 
 
Pawel Wojtasik is a video artist and filmmaker whose work ranges from short films to multi-channel installations. His 360° cyclorama Below Sea Level, on the theme of New Orleans and the Louisiana Wetlands (with sound by Stephen Vitiello) was shown at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA in 2009. Next Atlantis, a collaboration with composer Sebastian Currier, had its premiere at Carnegie Hall in January 2010. In March 2010, At the Still Point, a 5-channel installation filmed in India was presented at Smack Mellon, in Brooklyn, NY (with soundscape by Stephen Vitiello). Wojtasik‘s short films have screened at numerous venues and festivals, including Anthology Film Archives, the Robert Flaherty Seminar, New York Film Festival (Views from the Avant-garde), Berlin International Film Festival (Forum Expanded), Oberhausen, and Hong Kong International Film Festival. He is represented by Priska C. Juschka Fine Art.
 

ENTER SYMPOSIUM

SYMPOSIUM TRANSCRIPT