Monday, March 28, 2011

International Art Curator to Share Insights Into Contemporary Exhibition at WC's Kohl Gallery


CHESTERTOWN, MD—An expert on international contemporary art and art history, Dr. Julia P. Herzberg, will visit Washington College Wednesday, March 30 for a lecture on the work of professor Monika Weiss, whose powerful exhibition “Lamentations (Sustenazo)” is installed in Kohl Gallery through mid April. Following the 4:30 p.m. lecture in Decker Theatre, Weiss will join Dr. Herzberg on stage for a conversation about her art.
Celebrated vocalist Karen Somerville will open the event by singing the spiritualMother Child and Soon Ah Will Be Doneand a reception will follow Herzberg and Weiss’s conversation. The event is free and open to the public (some content in the Kohl Gallery exhibition may not be suitable for children).
Dr. Herzberg is an art historian, independent curator and Fulbright Senior Specialist whose wide-ranging work centers on art with interdisciplinary global contexts. Since 1990 she has organized more than 25 exhibitions of artists from around the world, including Monika Weiss, Wifredo Lam, Kaarina Kaikkonen, Leandro Katz, Pepón Osorio, Ernesto Pujol, Catalina Parra, Franco Mondini–Ruiz, Leandro Erlich, and Chen Xiaoyung.
As consulting curator at the Patricia and David Frost Museum at Florida International University, she recently curated “Navjot Altaf: Lacuna in Testimony, and Nela Ochoa: DNA and Art” (2009). She has also been a consulting curator for the 8th, 9th, and 10th Havana Biennial (2003, 2006, 2009) and was curator for the Official U.S. Representation for the III International Biennial of Painting Cuenca, Ecuador in 1991.
Dr. Herzberg has taught, lectured, and published in the United States and abroad.
Monika Weiss is an internationally recognized Polish-American artist who works in drawing, projected video, musical composition, performance and sculpture, often combining these elements in her public installations. The current exhibition at Washington College includes the first U.S. showing of “Sustenazo (Lament II),” which was created as part of her 2010 solo exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Ujazdowski Castle, in Warsaw.
“Sustenazo” was inspired by an event that took place at Warsaw’s Ujazdowski Castle when it was a hospital. On August 6, 1944, during the onset of the Warsaw Uprising, the German Army forced more than 1,800 patients and medical staff to abruptly evacuate the hospital overnight. With that incident as its reference point, Weiss’s art explores visual and musical aspects of the ancient feminine ritual of lamenting. She completed the work while on sabbatical from Washington College, where she serves as an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History.
“Lamentations (Sustenazo)” is curated by Donald McColl, the Nancy L. Underwood Associate Professor of Art History at Washington College. For more information, please visit http://kohlgallery.washcoll.edu/. To read a review of the exhibition by former Washington Post art critic Mary McCoy in the Chestertown Spy, click here.
Photo: A still image from a projected video in the Lamentations exhibition, which will be installed through April 15 in the Kohl Gallery, Gibson Center for the Performing Arts, at Washington College, 300 Washington Avenue .

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