Talk

Kicking off the spring 2011 Public Art Fund Talks series New York Stories, noted curators Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp discuss their exhibition Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present, which was on view at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid from June through September 2010. The exhibition surveyed the uses artists have made of New York City’s run-down lofts, abandoned piers, vacant lots, and deserted streets during its period of intensive de-industrializaton in the 1970s and continuing to the present. As a centerpiece of their show, Cooke and Crimp reassembled Projects: Pier 18, conceived by Willoughby Sharp in 1971 and comprising twenty-seven artists’ projects made on a dilapidated Hudson River pier; the projects were photographed by Shunk-Kender and initially shown at the Museum of Modern Art. In addition to Projects: Pier 18, Mixed Use, Manhattan featured more than 250 works by forty artists, including Danny Lyon, Joan Jonas, Peter Hujar, Thomas Struth, Zoe Leonard, David Wojarowicz, Barbara Probst, Steve McQueen, and Emily Roysdon.

Lynne Cooke is Chief Curator and Deputy Director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. She was co-curator of the 1991 Carnegie International, Artistic Director of the 1996 Sydney Biennale, and the curator at large for Dia Art Foundation from 1991 to 2009. Among her numerous publications are recent essays on the works of Francis Alÿs, Richard Serra, Agnes Martin, Josiah McElheny, Zoe Leonard, Juan Muñoz and Thomas Schütte.

Douglas Crimp is Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester and the author of Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (MIT Press, 2002) and On the Museum’s Ruins (MIT Press, 1993). Crimp curated the 1977 Pictures exhibition at Artists Space, New York, and was an editor of October magazine from 1977 to 1990, where he edited the 1987 special issue AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism. He is currently completing a book about Andy Warhol’s films and working on a memoir of New York in the 1970s.