2018-2019 Theme: “Minor & Minority”
“Minor & Minority” is partly based on theoretical inquiries into what it might mean to “minoritize,” to borrow a term from the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, populations and points of view. In a moment of all-or-nothing politics, of visual, cultural, and expressive bombast, of, even, the reduction of our complex emotional lives to 140 characters or cartoon emojis, the CVC’s year – long theme of “Minor & Minority” brings together a diverse range of speakers to address what gets lost under the rhetoric of the emphatic, the major, or the majority. In this way, minority is a political category that speaks with acuity to the margin and the center. Additionally, the term minor is concerned with aesthetic, affective, and philosophical categories outside the cathartic, the sublime, and the seemingly important. With either term – minor or minority – the concern is not only with nuance, but with those subjects that, or who, resist easy classification.
Please join us for our exciting program of lectures, artist talks, and workshops!
Tavia Nyong’o
American Profanations: Something of Value, oath-taking, and the problem of black indigeneity
October 11, 2018 @ 5:00PM, Elvehjem L140
Miriam Posner
Seeing Data: Information in Culture and Commerce
October 25, 2018 @ 4:00PM, Vilas 4070
Ellis Hanson
Shame & the Ideologies & Affects of Sex Addiction
Considering the Minor: Mood, Affect, Tone. Theory-in-Practice Lab, Part I
November 2, 2018 @ 6:00PM Elvehjem L140
Affiliate Events
Loren Kruger
“Theatre is not part of our [African] vocabulary”? Performance practices in South Africa and beyond”
Thursday, September 27th @ 4:30 PM
in the main room of Special Collections at Memorial Library.
Kruger’s most recent book, Imagining the Edgy City, brings together film and fiction, public art, architecture, and history with previous work on theatre and other performances in Johannesburg. The book shows how apparently new claims for Johannesburg as global city hide a long history of images of Johannesburg as the wonder city of Africa and the world, with comparisons both pertinent and impertinent with other cities from Chicago to Paris, Berlin to Bogotá, Sydney to Sāo Paulo. Johannesburg has been called the “Chicago of South Africa” partly because of gangster culture in both places, but Johannesburg also owes a lot to the influence of Chicago architects and urbanists.
Theron Schmidt
Public Lecture:
“What kind of work is this? Performance and materialisms in the Biennale of Sydney”
Thursday, 8 November 2018, 5pm-7pm, 6191 Helen C. White
Sponsored by University Lectures and Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies
Co-sponsored by Art, Art History, Dance, and the Center for Visual Cultures
Workshop:
“How we talk about the work is the work: Creative approaches to critical art writing”
Friday, 9 November 9am-12pm, Humanities 6321
Advance registration required
Contact: michael.w.peterson@wisc.edu
Block print mat by Virginia Demetrios, a Folly Cove Designer
Gift from the Estate of Professor Helen Louise Allen, Accession Number: P.D.US.0065
MARINA MOSKOWITZ
Ruth Ketterer Harris Lecturer
Public Lecture:
“Gossips, Garlands, and Thirty-Four Cows: The Modern Fold Aesthetic of the Folly Cove Textile Designs”
Thursday, November 1, 2018 @ 7:00 PM
Room 2235, Nancy Nicholas Hall
1300 Linden Drive, Madison
LECTURE TOPIC:
During the 1940s through 1960s, in the small community of Folly Cove in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a network of artists and designers produced block-printed textiles for the mid-century American home. Drawing on the landscapes and cultural icons they saw around them in rural New England, the Folly Cove Designers often incorporated these everyday images into strikingly modern graphics. Started by Virginia Lee Burton, the writer and illustrator of popular children’s books, the Folly Cove Designers worked as a collective, critiquing one another’s work and encouraging attention to detail in design and craftsmanship. The Folly Cove Designers sought to bring fine art to the home, in their case primarily through hand-printed table linens; they also supplied designs to regional and national department stores and fabric companies. The discussion of the Folly Cove Designers will focus on examples collected by Helen Louise Allen and now housed in the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection.
Cultivating Citizens with Art
Lecture by Prof. Lauren Kroiz
University of California, Berkeley
Thursday, November 8, 2018
6:30 PM
Auditorium, Chazen Museum of Art
Reception to Follow
Sponsored by the James Watrous fund of the Dpartment of Art History with Co-Sponsorship from the Chazen Museum of Art
