A(R)TALK 04 – Monumental Cares and Concerns
Image Credits: Manchester University Press. Cover image: Emilio Rojas, He Who Writes History Has No Memory (2017-18)
November 2 | 7 pm
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Join us for a panel discussion with Austrian art historian and professor at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Dr. Mechtild Widrich, and Dr. Martino Stierli, Chief Curator for Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art New York. The topic of the discussion reflects Widrich’s publication “Monumental Cares” Manchester University Press, 2023, which analyzes global monument debates, site-specificity, and art activism in the context of contemporary issues such as war, migration, and the climate crisis.
About the Panelists
Dr. Mechtild Widrich is Professor in the Art History, Theory and Criticism Department at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She researches art in public space, in particular monuments and monument activism, performative and participatory practices, and the theory of the public sphere. Widrich is the author of Performative Monuments. The Rematerialisation of Public Art (Manchester UP, 2014) and Monumental Cares. Sites of History and Contemporary Art (Manchester UP, 2023), which rethinks monument debates, site specificity, and art activism in light of challenges that strike us as monumental or overwhelming, such as war, migration, and the climate crisis, as well as numerous edited books and scholarly articles. Widrich received her MA degree in art history from the University of Vienna and her PhD from the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She previously held positions at ETH Zurich and the Universities of Vienna, Zurich and Basel, most recently as guest professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2022), and in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago (2023). Image Credits: Mechtild Widrich
Dr. Martino Stierli is Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art New York. Stierli is the author of Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity and the Representation of Space (2018) and Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film (2013). He has organized the international traveling exhibition Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and The Architecture of Hedonism: Three Villas in the Island of Capri, which was included in the 14th Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2014. At MoMA, he has curated the exhibitions Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 (with Vladimir Kulić, 2018), Renew, Reuse, Recycle: Recent Architecture from China (with Evangelos Kotsioris, 2021), and The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985 (with Anoma Pieris and Sean Anderson, 2022). Previous to joining MoMA, Stierli was the Swiss National Science Foundation Professor at the University of Zurich’s Institute of Art History. He has taught at Princeton and Columbia University, the universities of Zurich and Basel, EPF Lausanne, and ETH Zurich, from where he holds a PhD. Image Credits: 2021 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by Peter Ross