Sam Fox School launches Multiple Feminisms Lecture Series

Due to inclement weather, the Feb. 2 lecture by Richard Meyer has been cancelled, and will be rescheduled for the fall.

Richard Meyer, PhD, associate professor of art history and fine arts at the University of Southern California (USC), will launch the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ Multiple Feminisms Lecture Series with a talk at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 2, in Steinberg Hall Auditorium.

Art historian Richard Meyer will launch the Multiple Feminisms Lecture Series Feb. 2.

Designed to expand the conversation about what it means to be a feminist, the Multiple Feminisms Lecture Series will investigate the ongoing cultural debate over sexuality and gender, as well as the effects of that debate on modern art, visual culture and academic practice.

The series is organized by Patricia Olynyk, director of the Graduate School of Art, in conjunction with the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. It is made possible by a grant from Washington University’s Diversity Initiative.

Meyer is author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (2002). The book explores the work of homosexual artists — from Paul Cadmus and Andy Warhol to Robert Mapplethorpe and Holly Hughes — as well as the circumstances under which that work has been attacked, suppressed and censored outright.

Meyer also is author, with Anthony W. Lee, of Weegee and Naked City (2002) and, with Catherine Lord, of Art and Queer Culture, 1885 to the Present, forthcoming from Phaidon. In addition, Meyer was curator of Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered, which was seen at the Jewish Museum in New York and, in expanded form, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. He currently is writing What Was Contemporary Art?, a short history of contemporary art in the U.S.

In addition to teaching, Meyer directs The Contemporary Project and the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate program, both at USC.

The Multiple Feminisms Lecture Series will continue at 6:30 p.m. March 30 with a talk by Cornelia Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Butler has organized a number of important exhibitions for MoMA, including Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave (2009); Projects 91: Artur Zmijewski; Paul Sietsema (2009); Here is Every. Forty Years of Contemporary Art (2008); and Pipe, Glass, Bottle of Rum: The Art of Appropriation (2008). She is currently co-organizing a survey of work by Alina Szapocznikow, as well as the first major Lygia Clark retrospective in the United States.

Butler previously served as curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where her credits included WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007). She recently co-edited the book Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art (2010), a groundbreaking survey investigating the enormous, if often underrecognized, contributions of women artists to 20th-century avant-garde movements.

A third Multiple Feminisms Lecture is slated for the fall semester.

All events are free and open to the public. The talks by Meyer and Butler will be preceded by receptions at 6 p.m. Steinberg Hall is located near the intersection of Skinker and Forsyth boulevards.

For more information, call (314) 935-9300 or visit samfoxschool.wustl.edu.