Elsewhere: A Conversation with Kim Levin
Kim Levin. Photograph by Seymour Templar.
July 08, 2020
A Virtual Event
Monday, July 13, 12:00pm EST
To register email: aica.office@gmail.com
AICA-USA is pleased to announce a virtual dialogue with Kim Levin, renowned art critic, in conversation with Henry Meyric Hughes, Honorary President of AICA International, and Norman L. Kleeblatt, Co-president of AICA-USA, hosted by AICA International. Discussants will consider Levin’s latest collection of essays Elsewhere: The Tainted Garden and other Essays on Art (Booklocker 2020), as well as her longstanding and illustrious history with AICA. Levin was Treasurer of AICA-USA from 1982-1984, Vice President from 1984-1990, and President from 1990-1992. She became Vice President of AICA International in 1991 and was elected President in 1996 for two terms, ending in 2002. The three panelists will reflect on how Levin’s experience as a leader in the organization shaped her work as an art critic and likewise how her approach to art criticism influenced AICA nationally and globally during her long tenure. Notably, Levin was instrumental in organizing the 1991 AICA International Congress in Los Angeles and the accompanying publication Beyond Walls and Wars: Art, Politics, and Multiculturalism (Midmarch Press, 1992).
Written between 1991 and 2017, the 35 essays in Elsewhere constitute a perceptive commentary on the art and issues of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, examining aspects of the transitional period from the end of postmodernism to now. In these writings, many of which originally appeared in publications outside of the US, Levin discusses such relevant "ancestors"to contemporary art as Robert Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt, Jean Tinguely, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Ana Mendieta, and Mike Kelley. Threaded throughout these essays are the concepts of selective amnesia and creative misunderstanding, as well as changes in the nature of time, space, the future, and the meaning of "elsewhere." From the first essay, "Art That Makes Itself," to the last, "Everywhere and Nowhere: From the Myth of Progress to the Sixth Extinction," the undercurrent is an awareness that we exist in the epoch of the Anthropocene.
Kim Levin is an American art critic and writer. Levin was a regular contributor to The Village Voice from 1982 to 2006. Since 2007 she has been contributing regularly to ArtNews. Levin has also contributed to the publications; Parkett, Artstudio, Sculpture and VOIR, among others. Her essays are also in books and exhibition catalogues. Levin has lectured in the U.S. and internationally at: the Guggenheim Museum, The New School for Social Research, Barnard College, Brown University, the São Paulo Art Biennial, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the California Institute of the Arts, the Cincinnati Center of Contemporary Art, and other institutions. She has been a visiting professor at SVA, at Claremont College graduate school, and at HISK in Antwerp.