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Thu, Mar 18, 2021
On Monday, March 29 at 7 PM ET, the Wexner Center for the Arts will present the 2021 Lambert Family Lecture. This year’s edition of the annual program promoting dialogue about global issues and contemporary culture features a virtual discussion about the work of Taryn Simon between Simon and writer Teju Cole.
Cole, author of Known and Strange Things and Every Day is for the Thief, encountered multimedia artist Taryn Simon’s exhibition Paperwork and the Will of Capital at Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels in the fall of 2016, and was struck by the work. A short time afterward and just after the 2016 election, Cole found himself in deep dismay and unable to write; Simon’s art, however, continued to inform his thinking during that time. Through reflection, Cole’s ability to craft language slowly returned, and he wrote about Simon’s work in the essay “Capital, Diplomacy, and Carnations” for The New York Times Magazine.
Four years later, in the wake of both another election and Simon's Assembled Audience (2016) being exhibited at the center this past fall, the Wex's Lambert Family Lecture brings the two together to reflect on Simon's practice, the creative process, and the critical act of making. They’ll consider how art might comfort or offer an antidote, insight, or resistance to what Cole described four years ago as “disillusionment or grief,” or how a photograph, as Simon said in a 2016 interview, can “preserve something that is otherwise lost.”
The lecture will be free to view online, but an RSVP is required. To register, sign up here.
This program will be live captioned. If you have questions about accessibility or require additional accommodations to participate in this event, please contact Accessibility Manager Helyn Marshall at accessibility@wexarts.org or (614) 688-3890.
Established in 2004, the Lambert Family Lecture is made possible by generous support from the Lambert Family Lecture Series Endowment Fund.
Taryn Simon directs our attention to familiar systems of organization—bloodlines, circulating picture collections, mourning rituals, ceremonial flower arrangements—making visible the contours of power and authority hidden within them. Incorporating mediums ranging from photography and sculpture to text, sound, and performance, her works are informed by research on and with institutions including the US Department of Homeland Security, the Central Zionist Archives, the International Commission on Missing Persons, Smith & Wesson, The Walt Disney Company, and the Fine Arts Commission of the CIA.
Her books and projects include The Picture Collection (2013–2020), A Cold Hole (2018–2019), Assembled Audience (2018–2019), An Occupation of Loss (2016, 2018), Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2016), Image Atlas (2012), A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I–XVIII (2008–2011), Contraband (2010), An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), Black Square (2006– ), and The Innocents (2002).
Simon produced The Innocents (2002) with the support of a fellowship in photography from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunstmuseum Luzern; Museum für Monderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and was included in the 56th Venice Biennale (2015).
Teju Cole is a novelist, critic, and photographer who was born in the US and raised in Nigeria—a biographical fact that informs much of his work. His first novel, Open City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award. His second, Every Day Is for the Thief, was named a Book of the Year by The New York Times. Most recently, Cole produced Blind Spot—a synthesis of written observations and travel photography.
Cole is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard. He was the photography critic for The New York Times Magazine from 2015 to 2019 (a position he originated). In both writing and photography, Cole combines his eye for beauty with his capacity to perceive human and civic truth.
His 2016 book Known and Strange Things collects a series of essays that span art, literature, and politics, with topics ranging from the White Savior Industrial Complex and Black Lives Matter to Snapchat and Shakespeare.
Recently, Cole was invited by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago to curate an exhibit, titled Go Down Moses, after the well-known spiritual song. The exhibit explores themes of freedom, suffering, the environment and the future—and marks Cole’s major curatorial debut.
