Image: Nancy Fried, “Torso with Hands on Hips”, 1994 © courtesy of the artist.
Welcome to a sculpture talk focusing on disabilities and disability aesthetics within contemporary art with Dr Ann M. Fox and Jessica Cooley.
Saturday March 5th
2-3:30pm
Göteborgs Konsthall
In their lecture at Göteborgs Konsthall, Dr. Ann M. Fox and Jessica Cooley will begin by discussing the exhibition “Re/Formations: Disability, Women, and Sculpture” that they co-curated at the Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College, North Carolina expanding into a discussion concerning crip theory, disability aesthetics, and the presence of disability in modern and contemporary art (including the art of HIV/AIDS). “Re/Formations” is the first exhibition to address the intersection between disability identity and female identity. Five female artists, four of whom are disabled, exhibited sculpture that examined disability not as mental or physical insufficiency limited to a small minority, but as a widespread and diffuse cultural identity, like race or sexual orientation. It is not art as therapy or rehabilitation. It is art emerging from within disability culture that is at once activist and aesthetically innovative.
Dr. Ann M. Fox is a Professor of English at Davidson College where she specializes in 20th- and 21st-century dramatic literature and disability studies. In 2009, Fox co-curated two disability-related exhibitions with Jessica Cooley: Re/Formations: Disability, Women, and Sculpture, and STARING. Fox co-curated the exhibition “Re/Presenting HIV/AIDS” in the fall of 2014.
Jessica Cooley is a scholar-curator working at the intersections of curatorial and museum studies, studies of contemporary art and material culture, queer theory, and disability studies. Currently, Jessica is a Ph.D. candidate in the art history department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she is working on her dissertation titled “Crip Materiality: The Conservation of Art in the United States, Disability, and the Art of Failure.” Before Madison, Jessica completed her Master’s degree in art history at Temple University and from 2006 to 2010 she served as the Assistant Curator for Davidson College’s Van Every/Smith Galleries where she curated a number of exhibitions related to disability studies, archive theory, and the history of photography.
The presentation at Göteborgs Konsthall is the fourth in the sculpture lecture series organized by artist Josefina Posch and curator Sofia Landström – sculptureHUB. Produced by Snowball Cultural Productions supported by Göteborgs Stad Kultur, Stiftelsen Längmanska Kulturfonden, SWEA- North Carolina and Galleri Box.
