ASTRA & School of Fine Art & Music Visiting Artists and Speakers Series presents Lawrence Weschler
"Art and Science as Parallel and Divergent Ways of Knowing"
Monday November 14, 2011
War Memorial Hall at 7pm
Sponsored by ASTRA and the School of Fine Art and Music's Visiting Artists and Speakers Series
LAWRENCE WESCHLER, for twenty years (1981-2002) a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies, is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award (for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992) and was also a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award (1998).
Weschler’s books of political reportage include The Passion of Poland (1984); A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with
Torturers (1990); and Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas (1998). His “Passions and Wonders” series of books currently comprises Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982); David Hockney’s Cameraworks (1984); Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995) which was shortlisted for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; A Wanderer in the Perfect City:
Selected Passion Pieces (1998) Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999); Robert Irwin: Getty Garden (2002); Vermeer in Bosnia (2004); Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences (2006), which received the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticsm; True To Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney (2008); Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin (Expanded Edition, 2008); and just released this fall, Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative.
Weschler has contributed to recent museum and gallery catalogues focused on the work of Tara Donovan, Deborah Butterfield, Liza Lou, The Art Guys, Michael Light and Mark Dion, among others. He is a contributing editor to McSweeney’s The Threepenny Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review; curator at large of the DVD quarterly Wholphin; former chair of the Sundance Documentary Film Fund; and director of the Ernst Toch Society, dedicated to the promulgation of the music of his grandfather, the noted Weimar emigre composer.
Lawrence Weschler has taught, variously, at Princeton, Columbia, UCSC, Bard, Vassar, New York University, and Sarah Lawrence. He currently serves as the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and artistic director emeritus of the Chicago Humanities Festival.