NOTE: This program will take place at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard.

In conjunction with exhibition The Artist’s Museum at the ICA, exhibition artists Anna Craycroft and Pierre Leguillon will appear in a two-part program at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at 24 Quincy Street in Cambridge.  

4–6 PM: TALK
Anna Craycroft and Ann Reynolds in conversation: “Creative Research” Should be an Oxymoron
Introduction by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator at the ICA

6–8 PM: SCREENING + PERFORMANCE
Pierre Leguillon: The Promise of the Screen
(Seating first come, first served)

Artist Anna Craycroft and art historian Ann Reynolds will be in conversation about Craycroft’s project for The Artist’s Museum at the ICA, The Earth Is a Magnet, which traces relationships between photographer Berenice Abbott and nine contemporary artists, and about Reynolds’s forthcoming book, In Our Time, which addresses the cinematic and social circumstances of various intergenerational creative communities in New York from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Following will be Pierre Leguillon’s performative work The Promise of the Screen (2007–), which doubles as a film screening and a speakeasy, dedicated to the peripheral aspects of cinema. For the CCVA, Leguillon will present The Photography Manual, an anthology of film sequences “to teach, to frame, to trigger, to illuminate, to develop but also, perhaps, to commit suicide with the camera.” The film montage is based on technical and popular books preserved at the Société française de Photographie in Paris, detailing the multiple uses of the medium, from fashion photography to judicial photography, amateur photography, or photojournalism.

PARTICIPANT BIOS

Mining fields like education, cinema, psychology, literature, and art history, Anna Craycroft examines cultural models for fostering individuality. Through drawings, paintings, videos, sculptures, furniture, installations, books, workshops, or curatorial projects she works thematically on a single thesis over a series of exhibitions. Craycroft has had solo shows at the Ben Maltz Gallery at the Otis College of Art and Design; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon; the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas; Tracy Williams Ltd in New York; Le Case del Arte in Milan, Italy; and a two-person exhibition at REDCAT Gallery in Los Angeles, Sandroni Rey in Los Angeles, and the Fundacio Miro in Barcelona. In November 2016, she debuted a major new commission, The Earth Is a Magnet, as part of The Artist’s Museum.

Ann Reynolds is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In her research and teaching, she focuses on 20th and 21st-century art and visual culture in the United States and Europe. Her recent publications include essays on Joan Jonas for the 2015 Venice Biennale; the experience of remoteness in relation to land art (Centre Georges Pompidou Spring 2015); Bob Fleischner, Jack Smith, and Ken Jacobs’ film Blonde Cobra (Criticism Spring 2014); and Charles Simonds’ Urban Dwellings (Dumbarton Oaks, 2011). She is the author of Robert Smithson: Learning From New Jersey and Elsewhere (MIT Press, 2003). She is currently working on a new book entitled In Our Time, as well as co-curating an exhibition focused on the magazine View (1940–47).  

Pierre Leguillon, born in Nogent-sur-Marne, France, in 1969, lives and works in Brussels. His works, performances, and projections have been the subject of many monographic presentations, notably at Raven Row (London, 2011), Mamco (Geneva, Switzerland, 2010), Moderna Museet (Malmö, Sweden, 2010), the Musée du Louvre (Paris, 2009), and Artists Space (New York, 2009). The artist, whose work La grande evasion (The great escape), 2015, is included in The Artist’s Museum, presented two installations at the 2013 Carnegie International, held in Pittsburgh in 2013: A Vivarium for George E. Ohr and Dubuffet Typographer, the latter accompanied by a book published by (SIC) in Brussels. A laureate of the Villa Médicis in 2003, Leguillon teaches at HEAD (Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design) in Geneva.

Film by Pierre Leguillon; Production: Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; Photo Expert: Aurélien Mole; Camera: Julien Crépieux; Editing: Adrien Faucheux; Production assistant: Olivier Strauss. Thanks to Clément Chéroux, Paul-Louis Roubert, and Sam Stourdzé.