Urban Readers Series: Michele H. Bogart - "Sculpture in Gotham" - Daniel Schulman

Saturday, April 21, 2018 - 3:00pm - 4:00pm
The Urban Readers Series presents Michele H. Bogart discussing her book Sculpture in Gotham: Art and Urban Renewal in New York. She will be joined in conversation by Daniel Schulman. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
 
At the Co-op
 
RSVP HERE (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required.)
 
About the book: Public sculpture is a big draw in today’s cities. Nowhere is this more the case than in New York, where urban art has become synonymous with the municipal ‘brand’, highlighting the metropolis as vibrant, creative, tolerant, orderly and, above all, safe. Sculpture in Gotham tells the story of how the City of New York became committed to public art patronage, beginning in the mid-1960s. In that moment of political turbulence, cultural activists and City officials for a time shifted away from traditional monuments, and joined forces to sponsor ambitious sculptural projects as an instrument for urban revitalization.
 
Focusing on specific people, agencies and organizations, and both temporary and permanent projects over the decades since the 1960s, Sculpture in Gotham reveals the changing forms and meanings of municipal public art. It illustrates how all this happened at a time when art theories and styles were changing markedly, and when municipalities were reeling from racial unrest, economic decline and countercultural challenges to culture and the state. Connecting public art activity to agendas of urbanism, Sculpture in Gotham offers new contexts for tracking national cultural trends through the exploration of one specific locality. It also provides a new understanding of civic activism and collaboration as a cultural force in urban America.
 
About the author: Michele H. Bogart has taught art history and American visual culture studies at Stony Brook University since 1982. Bogart is author of Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890-1930 (1989/1997), recipient of the 1991 Charles C. Eldredge Prize; Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (1995); The Politics of Urban Beauty: New York and Its Art Commission (2006), all published by the University of Chicago Press; and now, Sculpture in Gotham: Art and Urban Renewal in New York (2018)(Reaktion Books). She was a talking head in the documentary on movie poster artist Reynold Brown (The Man Who Drew BugEyed Monsters), which aired on PBS television in July 1996; for the 2007 DVD documentary on artist Norman Rockwell, produced by Lucasfilm as part of its 12-volume Young Indiana Jones series; and for a November 2012 segment on public art for Kulturen på News, TV2 News, Denmark. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art at the JFK Institut, Freie Universität von Berlin, and is presently a Senior Fellow at the Rockwell Center for Visual Studies at the Norman Rockwell Museum. From 1999 through 2003 she was Vice President of the Art Commission of the City of New York (since renamed the Public Design Commission [PDC]), the City’s design review agency. She presently serves on the PDC’s Conservation Advisory Group and on the boards of the New York Preservation Archive Project and the Associates of the Art Commission.
 
About the interlocutor: Daniel Schulman is Director of Visual Art at the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events where he is responsible for exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center and directs the city’s Public Art Program. He has over thirty years of curatorial experience at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was assistant and associate curator of modern and contemporary art from 1993 to 2004.
 
A native Chicagoan, Schulman was educated at Columbia University in New York (BA 1982) and NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts (MA 1986; ABD). He has taught undergraduate classes in art history as an adjunct instructor at the Cooper Union in New York, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
 
About the series: In collaboration with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores, UChicago Urban has launched the Urban Readers Series, an author-centered series of readings and conversations at the Seminary Co-op. At Urban Readers, people from all over Chicago can hear from the university's scholars and connect with one another over urban issues, histories and futures. All books in the series are written by UChicago's faculty, alumni, and affiliates.
Event Location: 
The Seminary Co-op Bookstore
5751 S Woodlawn
Chicago, IL 60637
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