Special Lecture: Recollecting LeWitt and Photography

by Jae Emerling, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, College of Arts and Architecture, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Tuesday, October 13, 2015 | 6 – 7 pm
The Fralin Museum of Art

This talk will reconsider how Sol LeWitt thought and created alongside photography. It is impossible to answer these questions without experiencing both LeWitt’s photographic work and his personal collection of photography, a part of which is on display here. LeWitt collected works by renowned photographers such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Hiroshi Sugimoto, August Sander, and On Kawara. His collection encourages us to reconsider his own work because the collection itself reveals the extent to which he valued and studied photographic images that experiment with temporality, durational experience (archival practices), and ontology (far beyond the removal of artistic subjectivity). This reconsideration requires us to question both LeWitt’s own writings and the received historical explanation of conceptual art.

Jae Emerling is an associate professor of modern and contemporary art in the College of Arts +Architecture at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. In 2011 he was visiting professor of contemporary art in the Faculty of Arts at VU Amsterdam. He received his Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Theory for Art History (2005) and award-winning Photography: History and Theory(2012), both published by Routledge. His work has also appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture, History of Photography, CAA Reviews, Journal of Art Historiography, and the Los Angeles based magazine X-TRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly. He is currently working on a book about the aesthetic-historiographic concept of transmissibility. Some of this work has recently appeared in two anthologies Contemporary Art about Architecture (2013) and Bergson and The Art of Immanence: Painting, Photography, Film (2013).

The Fralin Museum of Art’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Office of the Provost & the Vice Provost for the Arts, U.Va. Arts Council: Enriching the Arts on Grounds, Ray A. Graham Endowment Fund, the Studio Art Department, WTJU 91.1 FM, albemarle Magazine, and Ivy Publications LLC’s Charlottesville Welcome Book.