Artist Vik Muniz to Speak at Williams College
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. - Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) announced that internationally acclaimed artist Vik Muniz will deliver the Annual Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art. The lecture will take place on Thursday, October 1 at 7:00 pm at Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall on the Williams College campus. This is a free public event and all are invited to attend.Muniz subverts viewer expectations by using unusual materials to create portraits, landscapes and still lifes, which he then photographs. He uses materials like chocolate syrup, peanut butter, and sugar to explore the power of representation. Although he doesn’t mean to fool the viewer, his works remind his audience of how preconceptions can alter any experience.
WCMA recently acquired ten Memory Renderings from the artist’s 1989-2000 series “The Best of Life.” Memory Renderings are photographs of drawings that Muniz drew from his recollection of a photograph printed in The Best of “Life,” a book that featured iconic photographs from Life magazine between 1936 and 1972. Muniz photographed his drawings in soft focus to make them blurry and remove evidence of his hand. He also printed them through a half-tone screen to simulate the pixilated quality of photographs published in a magazine–the format in which most people first encountered the images. The images include a student standing in front of military tanks in Tiananmen Square, soldiers raising the American flag at Iwo Jima, and John John saluting his father’s (President John Kennedy’s) coffin.
“Students and faculty have been asking for Vik to visit Williams since his work appeared in our exhibition Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain,” explains Class of 1956 Director Lisa Corrin. “His innovative approach to conceptual photography has secured his place as a major transformative figure in the art of our time. We are fortunate to have in our collection one of his most significant bodies of work for use in teaching across the disciplines. Already, many faculty members from Political Science to American Studies have integrated his Memory Renderings into their courses.”
“We are also privileged to have as benefactors Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker and their family,” continues WCMA Director Lisa Corrin. “Their devotion to Williams and to WCMA’s special teaching mission have made it possible for us to host campus visits by distinguished artists and thinkers shaping the dialogue around contemporary art and culture.”
The Annual Family Plonsker Lecture in Contemporary Art
The Plonsker Family Lecture Series in Contemporary Art was established in 1994 by Madeleine Plonsker, Harvey Plonsker (Class of 1961) and their son, Ted Plonsker (Class of 1986), to examine current issues in contemporary art. Past lectures include the symposium "Jackson Pollock: Beneath the Surface, A Tribute to Kirk Varnedoe 1967"; and lectures by acclaimed artists Gregory Crewdson, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Carolee Schneemann, and Kara Walker.
