Jenni Sorkin will be coming to speak at the Seminar in New York & American Material Culture on Wednesday, March 28, 2012. Her talk is entitled “Ancient Modernisms.”

Jenni Sorkin is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History and Critical Theory at the University of Houston. She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University, an M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 2010 to 2011, Sorkin was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute. In 2010, she co-organized Blind Spots/Puntos Ciegos: Feminisms, Cinema, and Performance for the Eighth International Symposium of Contemporary Art Theory in Mexico City. Her curatorial projects also include High Performance: The First Five Years, 1978-1982 (LACE, Los Angeles, 2003) and Judy Chicago: Minimalism, 1965-1973 (LewAllen Gallery, Santa Fe, 2004). Sorkin’s writing has appeared in several journals, including New Art Examiner, Art Journal, Art Monthly, NU: The Nordic Art Review, Frieze, The Journal of Modern Craft, Modern Painters, and Third Text. She has also written numerous in-depth catalog essays on feminist art. Her current project, an in-progress book manuscript entitled Live Form: Craft as Participation, examines the confluence of gender, artistic labor, and the history of post-war ceramics from 1945 to 1975.

In her talk, Sorkin will discuss weaving and its unstable disciplinary status in the university. A primary focus of the talk will be the relationships between several prominent figures in the field of weaving, including textile artist and printmaker Anni Albers, fiber artist Sheila Hicks, pre-Columbian textile specialist Junius Bouton Bird at the American Museum of Natural History, and pre-Columbian art historian George Kubler at Yale University.

Light refreshments will be served at 5:45 pm. The presentation will begin at 6:00 pm.

RSVP is required. Please click on the registration link at the bottom of this page or contact [email protected].

PLEASE NOTE that our Lecture Hall can only accommodate a limited number of people, so please come early if you would like to have a seat in the main room. We also have overflow seating available; all registrants who arrive late will be seated in the overflow area.