the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar
Video
Amy Sillman
The Diagrammatic or: Painting as Diagram
This lecture took place on December 1st, 2009 at 6:30 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union
Lecture introduction
Amy Sillman is a painter whose work negotiates opposing forces such as materiality vs. analysis, corporeal pleasure vs. destructiveness, color and gesture vs. doubt and anxiety. Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in numerous public collections, including MoMA, The Whitney Museum, and The Hirschhorn Museum. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including an American Academy in Berlin Fellowship in 2009, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001 and a Tiffany Foundation Grant in 1999. Her bibliography includes “Amy Sillman/Gregg Bordowitz,” published in 2007 by A.R.T. Press in NYC, and “Amy Sillman- Work on Paper,” published in 2006 by Gregory R. Miller, NY. Sillman lives in Brooklyn, and teaches at the MFA Program of Bard College in the summers, as well as being on the faculty of the MFA Program at Columbia University.
About Amy Sillman
Amy Sillman is a painter and a draw-er who lives in Brooklyn, NY. Since the mid-90s, her work has been written about and exhibited at museums and galleries in the US and internationally, and she has been the recipient of a long list of awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim, Tiffany, NEA and grant from the Pollock/Krasner Foundation. In Sillman’s painting and her process, she simultaneously engages with the corporeal, the psychological, and the formal, and negotiates between such seemingly disparate conditions as abstraction and figuration, the accidental and the analytical, and states of mind that veer from comedy to anxiety and back again. In 2009, Sillman lived in Berlin with a residency grant from the American Academy in Berlin, and had a solo show there at Carlier-Gebauer Gallery last spring. Her show included paintings, drawings, and also a small edition of a handmade ‘zine with an essay about the diagrammatic. In her lecture Sillman will discuss the trajectory of her recent work, and the idea of the diagram as a useful model for thinking about painting.