Talk

The built environment has long been a source of inspiration to contemporary artists. From Gordon Matta-Clark’s abandoned building “cuts” to Doris Salcedo’s site-specific interventions and Dan Graham’s Pavilions, artists have utilized architecture as a means to engage the public. This fall, Public Art Fund presents a series of talks by a new generation of artists whose work engages the built environment as both a point of departure and source of inspiration. Drawing on elements of architectural and design history—including Modernism, Brutalism, and even DIY construction—these artists address the psychological, social, and cultural significance of the urban landscape.

Carol Bove’s room-sized installations and intricate assemblages suggest an anachronistic archaeology of objects that register at both metaphoric and psychic levels. Incorporating artifacts, images, and objects, her sculptural compositions subtly evoke a wide range of cultural references that often circle around the atmosphere of the 1960s and 70s. Using such diverse materials as books, prisms, driftwood, peacock feathers, metal, concrete, foam, and loans from other artists, and more recently bronze, and petrified wood, Bove’s close relationship between the built environment and working process is evident in both her materials and forms. In recent years the industrial landscape of her studio location in Red Hook, Brooklyn, has been an inspired source for found materials and forms in her work. Likewise, she has drawn on architectural frameworks such as Brutalism, corporate lobbies, and more specifically the work of Phillip Johnson, and the architectural museum designs of Italian architect Carlo Scarpa. For her Public Art Fund Talk, Bove discusses these influences and their specific relationships to her new body of work for public space.

Born in 1971, Carol Bove lives and works in New York. Bove was raised in Berkeley, California, and studied at New York University. Her work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions, including the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Tate St. Ives, Cornwall, England; Horticultural Society of New York; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; Kunsthalle Zürich; Institute of Contemporary Art Boston; and the Kunstverein Hamburg. Her work has been prominently featured in major group exhibitions, most recently in 2011 with her installation The Foamy Saliva of a Horse at the Arsenale as part of the 54th Venice Biennale. Other group exhibitions include The Age of Aquarius, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Biennial 2008, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, New Museum, New York; and Greater New York 2005, P.S.1, New York. New public art works by Bove were included as part of this years dOCUMENTA 13.

Public Art Fund Talks at The New School are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.