Nicole Eisenman to deliver John A. Cooper Visiting Artist Lecture

Cornell AAP is pleased to welcome artist Nicole Eisenman as the fall 2024 guest speaker for the John A. Cooper Visiting Artist Lecture Series. Eisenman will deliver a public artist talk on October 29 in Milstein Auditorium on the university’s Ithaca campus, followed by a reception. View full event details.

In advance of this special event, Eisenman had a wide-ranging conversation with Art Professor and Department Chair Paul Ramírez Jonas that covered the role of narrative in the artistic process, the frustration of being pigeonholed by labels, and what they are listening to in their studios. When Ramírez Jonas recognized that Eisenman’s figures were “not just little excuses to put paint on the canvas,” they agreed. “I think there’s a part of my practice where I feel aligned with novelists in the early stages of painting,” Eisenman said, “where I have to sit at my desk and think of stories and construct narratives. It’s really the hardest part of my process…I’m jealous of writers, too. Our culture gives primacy to narrative, to words, and they’re just useful in a way that painting is utterly unuseful and in fact, probably clutters the landscape more than anything.” 

Eisenman shared that in the early years of their career, they often felt pushed into certain identity “slots,” but Eisenman resisted these labels, not finding them to be an accurate reflection of who they were or the work they were producing. “Finally, toward the end of the ’90s, my work that had been so self-reflective started growing away from that. I wanted to take myself out of my work and not have it be so autobiographical. I turned outward.”

Towards the end of their conversation, Ramírez Jonas and Eisenman connected over the ongoing hunt to find music and podcasts to listen to while working in their studios, and the significant impact those sounds and stories can have on the work itself. 

“I like having a good reader tell me a story as I’m working,” Eisenman noted. “And the story gets imprinted in the painting. I have this retrospective that’s up in Chicago now, and looking at this very old work I can remember what I was listening to. It gets locked in my brain. I remember listening to a Rachel Kushner book three years ago while I was painting this or an NPR story from 2003 in that painting. I think it goes back to when I was a kid, and I would doodle as I listened to whatever the lesson was in school. It helped me focus.”

AAP looks forward to welcoming Eisenman to campus this October. The John A. Cooper Visiting Artist Lecturer series was created with a gift from alumnus John A. Cooper (BFA ‘97) to bring distinguished artists of particular renown to engage art students and the art community through lectures, studio visits, seminars, and individual critiques with BFA students. Previous guests include Catherine Opie (spring 2021), Louise Lawler (spring 2022), and Glenn Ligon (spring 2024).