Publication Highlight: "The Long Front of Culture: The Independent Group and Exhibition Design"

In 1950s London, a cadre of young artists, theorists, and popular culture aficionados known as the Independent Group (IG) came together for a series of pressing meetings. Their humble goal: to reimagine the structure of postwar culture by situating art in the midst of military-industrial technologies and pop pleasures. In The Long Front of Culture, History of Modern & Contemporary Art in Europe & the Americas Professor Kevin Lotery argues that the IG turned to the cross-disciplinary form of exhibition design as the only medium capable of getting the measure of these forces, the only technique that could integrate high and low, aesthetic and scientific, and redesign them in turn. Guests are welcome to join Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director Nancy Netzer in asking questions of the author to learn more.

To register for this talk, visit https://tinyurl.com/y6lht92s.

Kevin Lotery is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art in Europe and the Americas. His research has focused on interactions between art, architecture, and forms of technological and philosophical research. His most recent research examines utopian imaginaries within the work and writing of a number of émigré Jewish artists, writers, and filmmakers in Europe and the Americas after WWII, including Meyer Schapiro, Primo Levi, Siegfried Kracauer, Eva Hesse, Gego, Mira Schendel, Chantal Akerman, and Gregg Bordowitz. This project is, at least in part, a response to the rise of neo-fascisms across the globe and the new configurations of xenophobia, racism, anti-semitism, and anti-LGBTQ violence that buttress them. A recent essay on the work of Robert Morris (October 171, Spring 2020) is an early foray in this direction. Before coming to Boston College, Lotery was a lecturer in the Fine Art Department at the School of Arts and Cultures at Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He was previously a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and lecturer at Columbia University, and his research has been supported by grants from the Hauser & Wirth Institute, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and the Institute for Historical Research, University of London.