BUniverse

Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture: Carl Phillips

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:30:00 EDT

Award-winning poet and BU Creative Writing Program alumnus Carl Phillips (GRS’93) reads from his new collection, Speak Low, for the semiannual Lowell Lecture. He is joined by poets Brandy Barents (GRS’06) and Rosanna Warren, BU’s Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities.

As a young poet, Phillips “stepped forward with a voice of astonishing authority,” Warren says; since then, “he has been consistent and loyal to his talent and at the same time, in book after book, bold.” Phillips’ selections for the evening — from “The Plains of Troy,” a depiction of madness in Sophocles’ Ajax, to the ominous calm of the Mississippi River in “The Storm” — exemplify his long-time focus on the themes of “moral and psychological damage, regret, and freedom.” He also recalls his time at BU, thanking poetry professor Robert Pinsky in particular “for helping me to believe I could be this thing that is apparently called a poet.”

The Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture Series was established in 2005 to bring distinguished writers to campus to read their works alongside a member of the Creative Writing Program faculty and a recent program graduate. It honors Robert Lowell, the former BU professor who taught young poets Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and George Starbuck in the late 1950s. The series is funded by Nancy Livingston (COM’69) and her husband, Fred Levin, through the Shenson Foundation, in memory of Ben and A. Jess Shenson.

October 8, 2009, 7:30 p.m.

Photonics Center

Video Length is 00:55:43.

About the Speakers:

Brandy Barents (GRS’06) is a lecturer in the College of Arts & Sciences and at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, as well as the programs director of Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project. Her poems have appeared recently in Barrow Street.

Carl Phillips (GRS’93) is a professor of African and Afro-American studies and English at Washington University in St. Louis. He has won numerous fellowships and prizes, including the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize for his first collection of poems, In the Blood (1992). He recently published his tenth book of poetry, Speak Low (2009).

Rosanna Warren is a University Professor, the Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities, and a College of Arts & Sciences professor of English and Romance studies at Boston University. The author of several books of poetry and criticism — most recently Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry (2008) — she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Out of the Blue: Order from Chaos

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Award-winning English poet Simon Armitage reads several of his poems, including a commemorative of September 11, 2001, and his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a well-known poem written before 1400 by an unknown author. After his reading, Armitage entertains questions about his poetry style and his thoughts on the craft from moderator Mark Feeney, Boston Globe Living/Arts reporter and winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and from audience members.

Armitage says that while poem translation can be constraining at times, it also helps him bring “freshness” back into his poetry voice and gives him a new writing style. He also gives his opinion on the difference between poetry in the United Kingdom and in the United States, saying that a common reader still exists in the United Kingdom and that poetry is very much a part of modern, everyday culture. In the United States, he says, the common reader has been replaced by a special group of poetry enthusiasts and a wide poetry audience may no longer exist.

September 21, 2009, 7 p.m.

Photonics Center

Video Length is01:25:37.

About the Speaker:

Simon Armitage has published fourteen volumes of poetry, including Killing Time, Selected Poems, Out of the Blue, and The Not Dead. Armitage has received many of England’s top awards for his work, including the Sunday Times Young Author of the Year, a Gregory Award, and a Forward Prize. He has written a number of books, including Little Green Man and The White Stuff, and a best-selling memoir, All Points North. He has also authored a number of translations. He has also worked in film, radio, television, and theater. He has taught at the University of Leeds and the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, and he is currently a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Creative Writing Program Annual Faculty Reading

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:30:00 EDT

Maggie Dietz (GRS’07), a CAS lecturer in creative writing, reads from a selection of poems in her 2006 collection, Perennial Fall. Leslie Epstein, a CAS professor and director of the Creative Writing Program, reads from his novel-in-progress about the childhood of one of his well-known fictional characters, Leib Goldkorn. David Ferry, a CAS lecturer in creative writing, reads two passages of translation from Virgil’s Georgics, and two of his own poems. Kathleen Foster (GRS’00,’09), a graduate of the program, reads an excerpt from a short story titled “Admission.” CAS lecturers Allegra Goodman and Daphne Kalotay (GRS’94,’98) both read from recent work, Goodman’s The Other Side of the Island and Kalotay’s Calamity and Other Stories. CAS professor Ha Jin reads from his forthcoming novel, A Good Fall, and Robert Pinsky reads recent poems and selections from his collection, Gulf Music.

April 28, 2009, 7:30 p.m.

Photonics Center

Video length is 01:25:54.

About the speakers:

Maggie Dietz (GRS’97), who coedited Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology (1999) with Robert Pinsky, is the former director of the Favorite Poem Project and has taught in Boston University’s Creative Writing Program, of which she is an alumna. She published her first collection of poetry, Perennial Fall, in 2006.

CAS professor Leslie Epstein has published 10 books of fiction: P. D. Kimerakov; The Steinway Quintet Plus Four; King of the Jews; Regina; Goldkorn Tales; Pinto and Sons; Pandaemonium; Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail; San Remo Drive; and his most recent, The Eighth Wonder of the World. He has received many fellowships and awards, including a Rhodes Scholarship and an award for Distinction in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Epstein has been the director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University for more than 20 years.

David Ferry is a CAS lecturer. His books of poetry and translation include the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize–winning Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations; The Eclogues of Virgil; The Odes of Horace: A Translation; Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations; Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse; Strangers: A Book of Poems; On the Way to the Island; and The Limits of Mortality: An Essay on Wordsworth’s Major Poems. Ferry’s other awards include the Sixtieth Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the Teasdale Prize for Poetry, and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley College. In 1998 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Kathleen Foster (GRS’09) holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and an MA in English from Boston University. She is a recipient of BU’s Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction award and an Emerging Artist award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation.

Allegra Goodman, a CAS lecturer, is the author of four novels: the New York Times bestseller Intuition; National Book Award finalist Kaaterskill Falls; Paradise Park; and The Other Side of the Island. She has also published two collections of short stories: The Family Markowitz and Total Immersion. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Commentary, and Ploughshares. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review and The American Scholar. She has received the Whiting Writer’s Award, the Salon magazine award for fiction, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Ha Jin (GRS’93) studied in the Creative Writing Program and returned as a full professor in September 2002. Born in China in 1956, Xuefei Jin (Ha Jin is his pen name) was a teenager when China entered the Cultural Revolution and became a member of the People’s Liberation Army at the age of 14. His novel, Waiting, which won a National Book Award and a PEN/Faulkner Award, was based on his experiences during his five-year service in the Red Army. He earned a master’s degree at Shandong University in China, and in 1986 came to the United States to begin doctoral work at Brandeis. He received the PEN/Hemingway Award for his first collection of short stories, Ocean of Words, and the Flannery O’Connor Prize for his second, Under the Red Flag. His book War Trash won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2005. His latest book, A Free Life, is his first set entirely in the United States. Ha Jin was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.

Daphne Kalotay (GRS’94,’98), a lecturer in the Creative Writing Program, has an MA in creative writing and a PhD in modern and contemporary literature, both from Boston University. Her awards include BU’s Florence Engel Randall Fiction Prize, a Transatlantic Review Award from The Henfield Foundation, and fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the Fondation de La Napoule, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the W. K. Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts from Vassar College. Her collection of short stories, Calamity and Other Stories, was published in 2005, and a novel, Russian Winter, is forthcoming.

CAS Professor Robert Pinsky is the author of seven books of poetry: Gulf Music; Jersey Rain; The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966–1996, winner of the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone; History of My Heart; An Explanation of America; and Sadness and Happiness. He has published four books of criticism, including The Sounds of Poetry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World; and The Situation of Poetry; two books of translation: The Inferno of Dante, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass); and a computerized novel, Mindwheel. During his unprecedented three terms as U.S. poet laureate, from 1997 to 2000, Pinsky created the Favorite Poem Project to document, promote, and celebrate poetry’s place in American culture. In 1999 he coedited Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz (GRS’97), now the project’s director. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Choreographer and Filmmaker Yvonne Rainer speaks to Robert Storr

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:30:00 EDT

Yvonne Rainer, who started out as a choreographer and later focused her attention on filmmaking, reflects on her work with host Robert Storr. She shows various clips from her choreographed dances, including “Trio A” and a piece commissioned by Mikhail Baryshnikov. Rainer also shows scenes from her films, including Lives of Performers, The Man Who Envied Women, and Privilege.

Rainer started her dance career 1960s, working with Merce Cunningham who “redefined the rules” of what constituted music, according to Rainer. She focuses on the piece “Trio A,” usually performed in silence, in which the performer never looks at the audience. Rainer discusses a different version of “Trio A,” performed in 1970, in which the performers only wore American flags and danced in front of Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village to protest the Vietnam War.

Rainer then discusses the role of sexual identity in the film The Man Who Envied Women and presents Privilege, a documentary about a racially diverse group of women going through menopause.

Recently, Rainer has returned to the performing arts. In 1999, Mikhail Baryshnikov invited her to choreograph a number for his White Oak Dance Project.

April 9, 2009. 6:30 p.m
Morse Auditorium

Video length is 01:59:16.

About the speaker:
Yvonne Rainer is a choreographer and filmmaker who started with dance in the 1960s. She co-founded the Judson Dance Theatre in 1962. Rainer’s film Privilege won the Sundance Film Festival’s Filmmakers Trophy in 1990, the year in which she was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In 2006, she published her memoir, Feelings Are Facts.

Robert Storr is a curator, academic, critic, and painter; he received his M.F.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was the curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1990 to 2002. He is the consulting curator of modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2007, Storr became the first American commissioner of the Venice Biennale, a contemporary art exhibition that takes place every two years,. Currently, he is the dean at the Yale School of Art.

Then Go Beyond the Reach of Road: An Evening with Poet Peter Fallon

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:00:00 EDT

Irish poet Peter Fallon reads from his latest collection of poems, The Company of Horses, which the Poetry Book Society Bulletin lauds as “a joy to read, studded throughout with brightly living images.” He opens with a short poem called “Commonwealth,” which he dedicates to Rosanna Warren, a University Professor and Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities.

“The very day/the sailboats blossomed the Charles/magnolia blooms unfurled along the avenue,” he reads.

Fallon later speaks of the poem “The Company of Horses,” which he dedicated to Kentucky poet, novelist, and farmer Wendell Berry. He recalls his nervousness in meeting Berry for the first time — “I thought this man was too good for me, too saintly,” he remembers — and it was not until Berry described one of his cows as “a mighty splashy shitter” that Fallon felt at ease. The colorful phrase is reproduced in Fallon’s poem “A Refrain.”

March 30, 2009, 5 p.m.

College of General Studies

Video length is 00:34:49.

About the speaker:

Born in Germany, Peter Fallon grew up on his uncle’s farm in Ireland. He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, and at 18, founded The Gallery Press, which has published more than 400 books of poems and plays by established and emerging Irish authors. In 1990 Fallon edited, with Derek Mahon, the best-selling anthology The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry. His own collections of poems include The Speaking Stones (1978), Winter Work (1983), The News and Weather (1987), Eye to Eye (1992), and The Deerfield Series: Strength of Heart (1997). His most recent collection of poems is The Company of Horses (2007). Fallon received the 1993 O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award from the Irish American Cultural Institute, and he is a former poet in residence at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. As the inaugural Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University, in Pennsylvania, he received an honorary doctorate in 2000. In 2003 he was elected to Aosdána, the association that honors artists who have made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland. He lives with his family in Loughcrew, in County Meath.

The Dutch Courtesan by John Marston

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Passion is scourge, love is humiliation, and friends might as well be enemies in The Dutch Courtesan, a Jacobean stage play written by the John Marston ca. 1604. The play tells the story of Freevill who discards his concubine Francischina and, for a joke, sets his straight-laced friend Malhereux on to her. Malhereux falls for Francischina and promises to carry out her revenge on Freevill by killing him.

The play opens with the aftermath of a robbery -- Cocledemoy has stolen goblets from the Mulligrub household. Freevill, engaged to Beatrice, breaks off his relationship with Francischina, the Dutch Courtesan. Freevill's friend Malheureux, falls in love with Francischina, and she attempts to use him to get revenge on Freevill. While Francischina and Malhereux plot Freevill's death, Cocledemoy continues to plague the Mulligrubs, stealing from them and mocking them without mercy.

Malhereux tells Freevill of Francischina's plans, and the two friends fake Freevill's death. However, Freevill wants to make his friend sweat for even thinking about killing him, and goes into hiding, causing Malheureux to be arrested for murder.

Similarly, Cocledemoy engineers Mulligrub's arrest for robbery, and the final scene opens on two innocent men about to face the gallows.

March 26, 2009 7:00 p.m.

Black Box Theatre

Video Length is 01:51:02.

About the company:
Willing Suspension Productions is a theater company specializing in rare English Renaissance drama comprising graduate students and some undergraduates in the Arts and Sciences English department. It was founded in 1993 at Boston University.

Liam Meyer, Kristin Smith, and Matthew Stokes, Directors

Liam Meyer, and Matthew Stokes, Artistic Directors

Kristin Smith, Technical Director

Holly Schaaf, Producer

Emily Gruber, Set Design

Tatiana Alafouzo-Dambola, Kirk Bezio, Samantha Flick, Emily Gruber, Julia Karsten, Kathryn Kingsley, Lauren Mairella, Liam Meyer, Kristin Smith and Matthew Stokes, Set Construction

Kristin Smith, Lighting Design

Alexander Kemp, Lighting Technician

Alexander Kemp, Liam Meyer, Kristin Smith, and Matthew Stokes, Lighting Crew

Tatiana Alafouza-D'Ambola, Samantha Flick, Julia Karsten, Kathryn Kingsley, Lauren Mairella, Holly Schaaf, and Kristin Smith, Property Crew

Liam Meyer, Holly Schaaf, Kristin Smith, Matthew Stokes, and The Cast, Costume Crew

Tatiana Alafouzo-D'Ambola, Samantha Flick, Julia Karsten, Lauren Mairella, Liam Meyer, and Matthew Stokes, Stage Crew

Holly Schaaf, House and Ticketing Manager

Tatiana Alafouzo-D'Ambola, and Kerri Nelson, Ticketing and House Management

The Players:

Cocledemoy: Dana Sigmund

Malheureux, Lucas Griswold

Freevill, Allistair Johnson

Francischina, Melody Tran

Mulligrub, Jonathan Deschere

Mistress Mulligrub, Emily Gruber

Beatrice, Emily Brownell

Crispinella, Alia Gilbert

Lionell, Benhamin DeTora

Tysefew, Paul Hansen

Mary Faugh, Emma Snider

Sir Hubert, David Edmon

Putifer, Ariel Stich

Holofernes, Fabiana Cabral

Burnish, Katherine Hendley

The Constable, David Edmon

The Watchman, Daniel Salerno

Ursula von Rydingsvard in Conversation with Debra Bricker Balken

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:00:00 EDT

Download available on iTunesU.

In a presentation for the School of Visual Arts’ Contemporary Lecture Series, art historian, theorist, and critic Debra Bricker Balken and sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard — famous for her cedar monuments — discuss the sculptor’s life and career, as well as the effects of subjectivity and psychology on contemporary art.

In introducing von Rydingsvard, Balken describes the role the sculptor’s early life played in her art. Von Rydingsvard’s family fled Poland during World War II and spent a portion of the postwar period in refugee camps before emigrating to the United States. The sculptor’s constructions, Balken notes,are tied to her landscape of memory and her relocations of fleeting, indelible experiences.

Showing slides of her work, von Rydingsvard then comments on her creative process and technical conventions, and often characterizes her pieces as being flirtatious, seductive, sensuous, and provocative. Her immense statues are usually made of wood, but sometimes incorporate various media, including cow stomach.

In the discussion between Balken and von Rydingsvard, the sculptor describes her influences, including minimalist artist Ronald Bladen, though she does not believe that she subscribes to the conventions of any specific artistic movement.

A question-and-answer period follows the lecture.

March 17, 2009, 6 p.m.
College of Fine Arts Concert Hall

Video length is 01:31:00.

About the speaker:
Debra Bricker Balken is an independent curator and writer who has organized numerous exhibitions of American modernism and contemporary art for major museums nationally. Her books include Philip Guston’s Poor Richard and Abstract Expressionism (Movements in Modern Art Series), as well as many exhibition catalogues. She is the recipient of an inaugural Clark Fellowship at the Clark Art Institute, a Senior Fellowship from the Daedalus Foundation, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. She is currently completing a study of the art critic Harold Rosenberg for the University of Chicago Press, made possible through grants from the Getty Research Institute, Creative Capital, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts. She has taught at numerous universities, including Brown University, the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Williams College Graduate Program in Art History.

Ursula von Rydingsvard was born in Deensen, Germany, in 1942. She received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Miami, Coral Gables, in 1965 and her M.F.A. from Columbia University, in 1975. In 1991, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Von Rydingsvard builds towering cedar structures that are shaped by sharp and lyrical cuts and glued together to form sensuous, puzzle-like surfaces. While abstract at its core, von Rydingsvard’s work takes its visual cues from the landscape, the human body, and everyday objects. Von Rydingsvard has received many awards, including a Joan Mitchell Award (1997); an Academy Award, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1994); fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1979, 1986); and exhibition prizes from the International Association of Art Critics (1992, 2000). Major exhibitions include Madison Square Park, New York (2006); the Neuberger Museum, SUNY Purchase, New York (2002); and Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York (1992). Von Rydingsvard lives and works in New York.

Zublinka Among Women: A Reading by Robert Wexelblatt

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:00:00 EST

Robert Wexelblatt, a novelist, poet, and professor of humanities in Boston University’s College of General Studies, reads from his latest book, Zublinka Among Women. He also discusses the experiences that helped him create the fictional Zublinka, a retired philosopher living in exile in the United States and contemplating his own past deceptions. Wexelblatt credits a post-college trip to Prague, where he visited Franz Kafka’s grave, for providing much of the inspiration.

“Those four days in Prague sank deeply into my imagination, and when I came to write the book — although it doesn’t say it’s Prague that Zublinka’s from — those four days were really responsible for his birth.”

Wexelblatt also discusses both his own and his protagonist’s use of pen names, a practice inspired by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Both Wexelblatt and Zublinka publish under pseudonyms, at times sharing the same ones. Wexelblatt says that the process allows him “to write things as someone else that I couldn’t write myself.”

“Do I hear voices? Do I channel people? It’s almost like that sometimes,” he says. “I do have the experience of starting something and not knowing who it’s by.”

February 25, 2009, 7 p.m.
Barnes & Noble at BU

Video length is 00:50:35.

About the speaker:
Robert Wexelblatt is a novelist, poet, and professor of humanities in Boston University’s College of General Studies, where he specializes in 20th-century literature. He is the winner of BU’s highest teaching honor, the Metcalf Cup and Prize for Excellence in Teaching, and the college’s Peyton Richter Award for interdisciplinary teaching. His books include Zublinka Among Women, winner of the 2008 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Fiction; the short story collections The Decline of Our Neighborhood and Life in the Temperate Zone; and a book of essays, Professors at Play. He earned a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English and American literature from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Brandeis University.

Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture: Charles Simic

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:30:00 EST

Download available on iTunesU.

Pulitzer Prize–winner and 2007 U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic reads from his extensive catalog in the semiannual Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture. “The range of Charles Simic’s imagination is evident in his stunning and unusual imagery,” Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said when Simic was apppointed poet laureate. “He handles language with the skill of a master craftsman, yet his poems are easily accessible, often meditative, and surprising. He has given us a rich body of highly organized poetry with shades of darkness and flashes of ironic humor.” The Belgrade-born Simic is joined by Creative Writing Program faculty member Robert Pinsky, a three-time U.S. poet laureate, and recent program graduate Rachel DeWoskin (GRS’00), a memoirist, novelist, and poet.

February 19, 2009, 7:30 p.m.
Photonics Center

Video length is 00:58:58.

About the speakers:
Charles Simic is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems. His other works of poetry include Selected Poems: 1963-2003, winner of the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; Jackstraws, which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times in 1999; and Walking the Black Cat, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for 1996. He was appointed the 15th U.S. poet laureate consultant in poetry in 2007, was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995 and received the 2007 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. Simic is an emeritus professor at the University of New Hampshire.

Robert Pinsky is a professor of English at the College of Arts and Sciences. His works of poetry include Gulf Music; Jersey Rain; The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966–1996, winner of the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone; History of My Heart; An Explanation of America; and Sadness and Happiness. He has also published four books of criticism, two books of translation, a prose book, The Life of David, and a computerized novel, Mindwheel.

Rachel DeWoskin (GRS’00) is a memoirist, novelist, and poet. She is the author of The Caretaker’s Daughter, her first full-length poetry collection. Before coming to BU, she starred as Jiexi, a foreign femme fatale, on the 1995 Chinese TV show Foreign Babes in Beijing; after returning to the United States to study poetry in , she published a memoir of the same title. She has also written a novel called Repeat After Me, which explores a romance between a young ESL teacher and a troubled Chinese radical.

Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:00:00 EST

Download available on iTunesU.

Carol Becker describes her writing as “hovering between theory, memoir, history, and other forms.” The author of five books, the dean of Columbia University’s School of the Arts says she strives to “write clearly so all complexities can be understood.”

As part of the CFA school of visual arts Contemporary Perspectives Lecture Series, Becker reads from her most recent book, Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production. The readings focus primarily on the creative process of artists. “Really good art and design,” says Becker, “should allow us to understand that the imagination, when given space within which to expand, is able to experience its own nature as infinite.”

To succeed in the arts, she continues, the solitary act of allowing ideas to manifest needs to be nurtured and protected. How one creates is a very subtle endeavor, and like thinking itself, is difficult to describe. “But,” she says, “if artists give themselves over entirely to the process of creating, an object, event, or environment will emerge.”

February 10, 2009, 6 p.m.
CFA Concert Hall

Video length is 01:26:13

About the speaker:
The daughter of an auctioneer and a hairdresser, Carol Becker grew up in a three-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. She first realized her love of art as a child, spending hours wandering around the Brooklyn Museum.

Today, Becker is the dean of Columbia University’s School of the Arts. For nearly 30 years, she taught philosophy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she later served as dean of faculty and senior vice president for academic affairs. Becker’s writing reflects her wide range of interests, which include feminist theory, American cultural history, the education of artists, and South African art and politics. She has written The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change; The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility; Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, and Gender; and Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art. Her most recent book is Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production.