Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production

Hosted by College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts

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.

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