Talk

MFA Fine Arts presents a lecture by Eva Díaz entitled “Beyond Vision: Art and the Atmosphere of the Senses” on atmosphere, olfaction, and breathe in contemporary art. 

Eva Díaz is Professor of Contemporary Art History at Pratt. She received her MA and PhD from Princeton University, and her BA from University of California, Berkeley. Her teaching and scholarship are informed by historical and contemporary interdisciplinary collaborations between artists and other cultural producers. Her first book, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College, was released in 2015 by the University of Chicago Press.

Díaz's new book After Spaceship Earth, analyzing the influence of R. Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art, will be published by Yale University Press in winter 2024. The book is supported by grants from the Warhol Foundation / Creative Capital, the Graham Foundation, a Barr-Ferree Grant, and the Pratt Faculty Development Fund. Recent sections of this project, featured in New Left Review, Aperture, e-flux journal, and Texte zur Kunst, take up artists’ challenges to a privatized and highly-surveilled future in outer space, analyzing how the space “race” and colonization can be reformulated as powerful means to readdress economic, gender, and racial inequality, as well as ecological injustices. 

She recently edited the book Dorothea Rockburne, published by Dia Art Foundation and Yale University Press in 2024, contributing an essay on topology and techniques of folding in art. Díaz writes for magazines and journals such as The Art Bulletin, Artforum, Art Journal, Art in America, Cabinet, Frieze, Grey Room, Harvard Design Magazine, and October. Prior to arriving at Pratt, she taught at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Sarah Lawrence College, and Parsons; she also worked as the curator at Art in General. Since joining the Pratt faculty she has developed and taught courses such as Art Since the Sixties; Contemporary Art, 1990-Present, The Current Season; Art Criticism; Critical Models in Art and Theory; Posthumanism; Art and Non-Visual Senses, Institutional Critique; Exhibiting Race, 1945-Present; and Black Mountain College and Beyond, among others. She is currently at work on a book that explores non-visual experiences in art, such as olfaction, topological procedures, and haptics, by examining the overvaluation of certain experiences in culture (vision and cognition, distance and analysis, for example) and the devaluation of others (smell and sensuality, proximity and the body). In support of this new research, Díaz was awarded a grant from the Huntington Library, and she was in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles as a Getty Scholar in 2023-2024.

Talks is a series of lectures by artists, writers and critics presented by MFA Fine Arts. Talks are held on Tuesdays at 3:00pm at 133 West 21st Street in Room 101C and on Zoom. Participation in the Q&A is limited to MFA Fine Arts students attending the lecture in person.

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