92Y & MacDowell | Across the MacDowell Dinner Table: Excellence, Aesthetics, and Value
Nell Painter’s conversation with Linda Harrison, Director of the Newark, NJ, Museum of Art, distinguished visual artist Joyce Kozloff, and pathbreaking gallerist Garth Greenan will deconstruct the abstract art terms excellence, aesthetics, and value. These are lofty terms, but what are the actual decisions, the actual steps, that move art from the studio to the gallery to the museum where we see art, when White and male artists seemed for so long to monopolize excellence, aesthetics, and value, and engaged art, especially by artists of color and White women, was dismissed as mere illustration?
Clockwise, from top left: Nell Painter by Dwight Carter, Garth Greenan courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery, Linda C. Harrison by Ira L. Black, and Joyce Kozloff by Grace Roselli
Program Participants
Nell Painter, after a fulfilling career as a publishing Princeton historian (most notably as the author of The History of White People), began again in art school, a move eliciting a great deal of curiosity. In residence at MacDowell in 2016, she completed a memoir entitled Old in Art School, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle autobiography award. In 2017 she completed the series "You Say This Can't Really Be America" and in 2018 she published an art review of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power in the New York Review Daily. In residence at MacDowell in 2019, Painter created "Ancient Hair Book" and four installations on her studio wall for a project that will ultimately become an artist's book with the working title Were the Ancients White? Painter was appointed Chairman of the Board of Directors of MacDowell in 2020.
Garth Greenan is an art historian, art dealer, and the owner of Garth Greenan Gallery in New York City. Primarily through his work at his New York gallery, Greenan re-presents and recontextualizes the work of a multigenerational group of established artists who deserve greater recognition. His gallery currently represents 27 such artists working in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. For decades, Garth Greenan has questioned the prevailing narrative of contemporary art history, drawing attention to its blind spots and encouraging its revision.
Linda C. Harrison, the head of The Newark Museum of Art—a large, complex, urban museum campus—plays a strategic and unifying role for the organization and the city, she communicates the work and mission of the organization. Linda works with the Board, staff, and community to identify and implement priorities and tactics to further the Museum’s goals. Linda currently serves on the following Board of Trustees, Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), American Alliance of Museums (AAM) Regional Planning Association, Art Pride, NJ, Newark Alliance Collaborative and Rutgers University - Newark Advisory Group.
Joyce Kozloff, beginning in 1970 and energized by participation in the feminist art movement, was originating figure of the Pattern and Decoration movement, exploring applied and decorative arts, especially visual cultures of the nonwestern world, as source and inspiration. During the 1980s, Kozloff concentrated on ambitious public commissions in the US and abroad, many in transportation centers, executed in ceramic tile and/or glass and marble mosaic. By the 1990s, maps had become the foundation for Kozloff’s private work, structures into which she would insert the role of cartography in human knowledge and as an imposition of imperial will. Her map and globe works, which image both physical and mental terrain, employ mutations to raise geopolitical issues. Recently, she completed two large-scale public artworks: at the 86th St and Central Park West subway station, MTA Arts in Transit Program, 2018 and the new federal courthouse in Greenville, SC, GSA Art in Architecture Program, to be opened this summer, 2021.