AICA-USA Lecture

Award-winning journalist, critic, and curator Hilton Als delivers the 18th annual AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture, presented in partnership with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. This lecture is about Als’ early relationship not only to writing, but to visual culture. He also discusses his career as a New Yorker Staff Writer for over twenty years.

The lecture is preceded with a welcome address by Renée T. White, Provost, Executive Vice President, and Professor of Sociology, The New School. Following the lecture, Als is joined in conversation and a moderated Q&A by Kenneth E. Silver, Silver Professor of Art History Emeritus, New York University.

Als has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1994. Prior to the New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism (2017), Yale’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize (2016), the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism (2002-03), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2000). His first book, The Women, was published in 1996. His next book, White Girls, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award in 2014. His most recent book, My Pinup, a meditation on love and of loss, of Prince and of desire, was published in November 2022. He is currently a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and has also taught at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, Princeton University, Wesleyan University, and the Yale School of Drama.

Previous lecturers in the AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture Series are Valerie Cassel Oliver, Siddhartha Mitter, Legacy Russell, Carolina A. Miranda, Courtney J. Martin, Aruna D’Souza, Paul Chaat Smith, Negar Azimi, Naomi Beckwith, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Lucy Lippard, Michelle Kuo, Peter Schjeldahl, Holland Cotter, Roberta Smith, Linda Nochlin, and Michael Brenson.