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This summer at the Guggenheim Museum, artist talks, performance, film, and conversations around urgent topics enhance opportunities for visitors to engage with the museum and the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building, which celebrates 60 years as an architectural icon in 2019. Extended hours until 9 pm on Summer Tuesdays, from June 18 through September 3, offer music and refreshments in the museum rotunda in addition to expanded opportunities to view exhibitions in the galleries.
Guggenheim Tuesdays: Conversations
Reflections on Artistic License
Select Tuesdays, June 18–December 17, 6:30pm
In this series of conversations organized by Nancy Spector, Artistic Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator, each of the six artist-curators of Artistic License reflects on their interpretations of the collection and the themes that informed their selections.
June 18: Cai Guo-Qiang
July 30: Jenny Holzer
September 24: Julie Mehretu
October 8: Paul Chan
November 19: Carrie Mae Weems
December 17: Richard Prince
Summer of Know
Select Tuesdays, June 18–September 3, 7pm
Guggenheim curators and educators moderate informal discussions pairing contemporary artists with practitioners and thought leaders at the forefront of today’s most urgent social, political, environmental, and legal issues. Engaging with current affairs through the generative lens of art, participants and topics include: Ad Minoliti and Adam Eli on LGBTQIA+ rights in a global context (June 18); Yve Laris Cohen and Alexes Hazen on the health and care of bodies in transition (June 25); Hank Willis Thomas and Naureen Akhter on youth civic engagement (July 9); Allison Janae Hamilton and Elizabeth Yeampierre on environmental justice (August 6); and Anna Puigjaner and Jessica Katz on housing activism (September 3).
Performance
Tarek Atoui: Organ Within
Thursday, June 27, 7pm
As part of the Guggenheim’s Middle Eastern Circle Presents series, musicians and artists improvise on a hybrid sculptural object by Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui in the museum’s iconic rotunda. This new work builds on Atoui’s collaboration with instrument makers Léo Maurel and Vincent Martial and their research into historical church pipe organs, modular synthesizers, and the sonic experiences of the deaf, engaging the museum’s acoustics to create a unique aural environment. A moderated conversation with Atoui and his collaborators will precede the performance. Performers include Chuck Bettis, C. Lavender, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Victoria Shen, Keith Fullerton Whitman, and C. Spencer Yeh.
Guggenheim Tuesdays: Films
Basquiat’s “Defacement”: The Untold Story in Cinema
Tuesdays, July 9–30, 6pm
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Basquiat’s “Defacement”: The Untold Story, this film series provides additional context by expanding on the cultural climate of 1980s New York City, Basquiat’s life and work, and how artists responded to police brutality. Free with museum admission.
Titles include:
Who Killed Michael Stewart? (1984), directed by Franck Lazare Goldberg, 30 minutes
Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2017), directed by Sara Driver, 78 minutes
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2010), directed by Tamra Davis, 93 minutes
Do the Right Thing (1989), directed by Spike Lee, 120 minutes
Guggenheim Tuesdays: Talks
Kobena Mercer: “Blackness, Flesh, and Vision”
Tuesday, September 17, 6:30pm
In the thirty-second annual Hilla Rebay Lecture, Kobena Mercer considers the Guggenheim’s simultaneous presentations of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Robert Mapplethorpe as an opportunity to examine cross-cutting entanglements of race, masculinity, and the gaze. Drawing on the distinction that black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers makes between “flesh” and “the body,” a range of contemporary and historical examples are examined to reveal how intersections of blackness, flesh, and vision circulate at the most intimate level of our erotic lives even as they also erupt in the violence that results in endless cycles of racialized death. With the focal shift in Black Atlantic visual arts from representation to performance, what fresh insights arise with regard to critical perspectives on the black body? Free, sign up for updates.
Credits
“Reflections on Artistic License” programs are part of the Elaine Terner Cooper Education Fund Conversations with Contemporary Artists series.
Summer of Know is supported in part by Moleskine.
Tarek Atoui: Organ Within is supported by members of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Middle Eastern Circle.
Kobena Mercer: “Blackness, Flesh, and Vision” is made possible through the generosity of The Hilla von Rebay Foundation.
For a full list of our education funders, visit our website.
