Distinguished Critic Lecture Series

Launched in 2007 and presented in partnership with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, AICA-USA's Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School is an annual event during which an exemplary writer addresses seminal issues in contemporary art criticism.

Upcoming Lecture

Hilton Als
One Writer’s Beginnings: Thinking in Words and Pictures

Dec 4, 2024
6:30–8:00pm ET
In-person & Livestreamed

Location:

Tishman Auditorium, University Center
The New School
63 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10003

AICA-USA is pleased to announce that award-winning journalist, critic, and curator Hilton Als will deliver 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.

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.

Photo credit: Ali Smith

Past Distinguished Critics

Membership Manager Membership Manager

Lucy Lippard

2013
Changing: On Not Being an Art “Critic”

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