Exhibition curator Robert Wiesenberger introduced Paul Goesch, the subject of the Clark’s spring exhibition in the Eugene V. Thaw Gallery for Works on Paper. Goesch (1885–1940) produced one of the most inventive, peculiar, and poignant bodies of work to emerge from Weimar Germany.
n this Research and Academic Program lecture, Shawn Michelle Smith (School of the Art Institute of Chicago / Critical Race Theory and Visual Culture Fellow) considers Alison Ruttan’s artwork The Four Year War at Gombe (2009–2011). In light of recent scholarship on multispecies relations, this lecture contemplates the promises and risks of multispecies imaginings while reflecting on what it means to think about species historically and today.
Acclaimed furniture designer Jomo Tariku discusses his design process and his relationship to the history of design, including the use of drawings like those by eighteenth-century designers, like those seen in the Promenades on Paper: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France exhibition, on view through March 12, 2023.
In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Jonathan Flatley (Wayne State University / Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow) discusses liking trees. He argues that liking (as distinct from love) is a feeling capable of motivating collective opposition to the ongoing, massive, catastrophic destruction of forests. It makes that case through an examination of two distinct projects: Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory (2018) and Zoe Leonard’s photographs of trees that have grown into, around, or through fences.
Jeremy Melius (Oxford University), the Michael Ann Holly Fellow in the Clark Art Institute's Research and Academic Program, explores the aesthetic and ethical parameters of John Ruskin's watercolor practice.
