An evening lecture/dialogue with Suzi Gablik, the acclaimed author, environmental theorist, social activist and Black Mountain College alumna.
Thursday, November 13, 7:30 p.m.
Co-sponsored by the UNC Asheville Humanities Program
UNCA Humanities Lecture Hall
Admission: $7 for BMCM+AC members + students with ID/ $10 for non-members
Free for UNCA faculty + students
On Art Without The Isms
“It is basically about a defining moment in my career 20 years ago that seems even more relevant to a civilization currently facing collapse. I am hoping that my personal story of this defining moment in my past will be inspiring and a catalyst for others right now.”
—Suzi Gablik
Praise for Suzi Gablik
“An explosive indictment of modern art. This thought-provoking book [Has Modernism Failed?] should be read by everyone who browses in museums and galleries.”—Publishers Weekly
“I treasure those moments when we can speak together without barriers, telling how the Mystery came into our lives and whispered its guidance through signs, dreams, and intuition. I found these sublime moments on page after page of Suzi Gablik’s book [Living the Magical Life: An Oracular Adventure]…”—Dianne Skafter, Ph.D., author of When Oracles Speak
On Thursday, November 13 at 7:30 p.m., Suzi Gablik will appear at the UNC Asheville Humanities Lecture hall to present Art Without the Isms a talk that springs from a defining moment in her career 20 years ago that today strikes her as extraordinarily relevant to a civilization facing deep difficulties. This lecture coincides with BMCM+AC’s yearlong series of exhibitions dedicated to the women of Black Mountain College. The first of three exhibitions, The Shape of Imagination: The Women of Black Mountain College, opened October 3, 2008 and will run through February 14, 2009.
Suzi Gablik, born in New York City in 1934, came to BMC for the Summer Session of 1951. After attending Black Mountain College, Suzi studied under Robert Motherwell, a major figure in the American Abstract Expressionist movement and former professor at BMC, at Hunter College in NYC, where she received her B.A. in 1955. Early in her career, she worked primarily as a painter and visual artist, having her first one-women exhibition in 1966.
Her professional focus began shifting from artist, to art critic, lecturer and philosopher in the in the early 1970’s, as Gablik explored the aesthetic, ethical and philosophical responsibility of the artist as an agent for social change. Her book Has Modernism Failed? came out in 1984 and addressed her concerns about the failure of modernism to uphold socially constructive ideals as the movement entered the 1980’s and deteriorated into an exploitative, for-profit enterprise. Gablik authored another book, Re-enchantment of Art, in 1991 that asserted the importance of art’s role as a cultural healing mechanism and that this role required the opposition of artists towards working within established trends.
Working as an art critic for Art in America for almost a decade, and publishing several books in addition to Has Modernism Failed? (1984) and Re-enchantment of Art (1991), including Conversations Before the End of Time (1995) and the recently published Living the Magical Life: An Oracular Adventure (2002), Suzi Gablik has contributed extensively to other publications and enjoyed a long history as a teacher and university lecturer.
