studio_art
Department of Art and Art History

2012 Viewpoint Series

The Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin is pleased to announce that Viewpoint 2012 will be presented for the twenty-first consecutive year. This series of concentrated visits, lasting several days, are spread throughout the semester. Viewpoint guests are leading curators, critics, and scholars involved in the diverse and multifaceted contemporary art world.

Sina Najafi and Jeffrey Kastner, this year's invitees, will present public lectures, conduct seminars, and give individual critiques to the fine art graduate students.

Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet magazine and the editorial director of Cabinet Books. Najafi has also curated or co-curated a number of exhibitions, including "Philosophical Toys" (Apex Art, 2005), "The Museum of Projective Personality Testing" (Manifesta 7, Trento, 2008), "Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark's Fake Estates" (White Columns and Queens Museum of Art, 2005), and the traveling exhibition "The Paper Sculpture Show" (2003-2007). He has taught at Cooper Union, Yale, and RISD, and studied Comparative Literature at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University.

Jeffrey Kastner is a New York-based critic and journalist and the senior editor of Cabinet magazine. The editor of books including Land and Environmental Art (Phaidon, 1998), and Nature (MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, 2012), Kastner is a regular contributor to Artforum, and his writing has appeared in a variety of news and cultural publications, including Afterall, Bookforum, the Economist, Frieze, and the New York Times. His essays have been published in exhibition catalogs for artists such as Doug Aitken, Jeremy Blake, Luca Buvoli, Willie Doherty, Tomas Saraceno, and Sarah Sze, and in books including Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook (Royal Society, 2006) and Experimental Geography (Melville House, 2008). The recipient of a 2009–2010 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant, Kastner has lectured widely on contemporary art and writing practice, and has served on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

 

Viewpoint Events Calendar

Map to Art Building (ART)

  • Thursday, February 2
    Public Lecture
    4–6 p.m. — Art Building, Room 1.102
  • Friday, February 3
    Seminar, 3–5 p.m. — Art Building, Room 3.206
  • Saturday, February 4
    Private Graduate Student Critiques – Contact Sarah Canright for appointment
  • Thursday, March 22
    Public Lecture
    4–6 p.m. — Art Building, Room 1.102
  • Friday, March 23
    Seminar, 3–5 p.m. — Art Building, Room 3.206
  • Saturday, March 24
    Private Graduate Student Critiques – Contact Sarah Canright for appointment
  • Thursday, April 12
    Public Lecture
    4–6 p.m. — Art Building, Room 1.102
  • Friday, April 13
    Seminar, 3–5 p.m. — Art Building, Room 3.206
  • Saturday, April 14
    Private Graduate Student Critiques – Contact Sarah Canright for appointment

Past Viewpoint programs have included the following pairs of art critics or curators:

  • Thomas Y. Levin and Carrie-Lambert-Beatty
  • Phung Bui and Leah Ollman
  • Katy Siegel and Wade Saunders
  • Johanna Burton and Tim Stokes
  • Lowery Stokes and Ralph Rugoff
  • Michael Duncan and Marcia E. Vetrocq
  • Chrissie Iles and Tom Eccles
  • Robert Storr and Ingrid Schaffner
  • David Pagel and Nancy Princenthal
  • Lisa Liebmann and Brooks Adam

For further information contact:

Sarah Canright at 471–0907 or rococo@mail.utexas.edu