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Alexandra Munroe | Utopia in Action
In anticipation of the Guggenheim Museum’s fall show, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, lead exhibition curator Alexandra Munroe will discuss an aspect of the show as it relates to Watermill’s ambitions. Since the early 2000s, several multi-year, communal projects led by artists, critics, curators, and activists emerged around China. Artists and collectives from Second Life creator Cao Fei, to activist Ai Weiwei created their own asylums, sanctuaries, and laboratories to carry out direct action to effect real change. In doing so, they were at the crest of a broad international current of artist-activists pushing for participatory, process-based, archive-intensive, and socially-engaged practices beyond the white-cube gallery to launch real-world change. As with earlier revolutionary programs in China’s modern history, each destroying one order to erect a more just one, the countryside was where it all unfolded. The common medium was now the Internet, a newly ideal space to act out new kinds of social orders.
Alexandra Munroe, Ph.D. is an Asia scholar and museum professional focusing on art, culture and institutional global strategy. She is a pioneering authority on modern and contemporary art from Asia and a leading scholar of world art history and transnational art studies. In 2006, Munroe was appointed Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York – the first curatorial post of its kind in an international art museum. Munroe convenes the Asian Art Council, a curatorial think tank comprised of leading global art museum professionals, academics, and cultural theorists. Munroe currently serves on the advisory boards of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; LEAP, Beijing; Jnanapravaha Mumbai; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. Munroe is internationally recognized as one of the most influential scholar-curators of her generation.
Members of The Watermill Center receive free admission for two throughout our 2017 Summer Lecture Series and an invitation to a members only summer cocktail party in August. If you have not yet received the lecture series discount code, please email membership@watermillcenter.org.
Not a member of The Watermill Center? Memberships start at just $50 and include perks such as a Watermill artist designed tote bag, a signed copy of The Watermill Center – A Laboratory for Performance: Robert Wilson’s Legacy and exclusive access to The Center’s Artists-in-Residence. Click here for more information and to join today!
The Summer Lecture Series is curated by Robert Wilson and administered & co-curated by Almond Zigmund and Brian O’Mahoney, both independent artists and staff at The Watermill Center and Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation.
The Watermill Center is committed to providing accessible programs and services for all patrons and artists with disabilities. For further information about any accessibility issues or needs, please contact us at +1 212 253 7484 or email us at info@watermillcenter.org
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