Talk

MFA Fine Arts presents a conversation between Lisa Phillips and MFA Fine Arts Chair Mark Tribe.

Lisa Phillips has been the Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum since 1999. During her tenure she has dramatically expanded the museum, its board, staff, attendance and budget, and continues to diversify its leadership and audience. Phillips spearheaded and realized the museum’s first dedicated building (2007) designed by the leading architects SANAA, who subsequently won the Pritzker Prize. In so doing, she established the museum as a top international cultural destination with a critically acclaimed exhibition program rivaling the best in the world. Phillips also co-founded NEW INC (2014), the first museum-led incubator for cultural creatives. She is currently leading a second building expansion by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas.

Previously, Phillips was a curator at the Whitney Museum, where she organized mid-career surveys of Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Terry Winters, as well as thematic exhibitions, including “High Styles: 20th Century American Design” (1985); “Image World: Art and Media Culture” (1989); “Beat Culture and the New America” (1995); and “The American Century” (1999); among many others. She has authored over thirty books, lectured extensively around the world, was on the Fulbright Review Committee, and is a visiting critic at Yale University. She has been named a “Top New Yorker” by New York Magazine, “Top 100 Business Women of the Year” by Crain’s, and “Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company.

Mark Tribe is an artist who believes in the power of aesthetic experience to forge new pathways of understanding. Since 2012, he has made landscape pictures that explore American ideas about nature and land, from Manifest Destiny to contemporary environmentalism. He is also known for his early contributions to the field of new media art, as well as his socially-engaged performances and installations.

Tribe’s paintings, photographs, video recordings and installations have been featured in solo exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Momenta Art in New York; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; the Queen Victoria Museum in Launceston, Australia; and DiverseWorks in Houston. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; the Menil Collection in Houston; Centre Pompidou in Paris; the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; the National Center for Contemporary Arts in Moscow; MUAC in Mexico City; SITE Santa Fe; the San Diego Museum of Art; Museo de Antioquia in Medellín; Blanton Museum of Art in Austin; Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah; Montclair Museum of Art in New Jersey; the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts; the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore; Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York; and Yossi Milo Gallery in New York. He has received grants from Creative Capital, the New York Foundation for the Arts, National Performance Network, ArtsLink, and the Experimental Television Center. He is the author of two books, The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches (Charta, 2010) and New Media Art (Taschen, 2006), and numerous articles. Tribe’s work has been reviewed or discussed in Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, Art Papers, the Boston Globe, the Brooklyn Rail, the Daily Beast, Die Welt, El Pais, Flash Art, Frieze, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Hyperallergic, the Los Angeles Times, Modern Painters, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Village Voice, and many other publications.

Tribe has served as chair of the MFA Fine Arts department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City since 2013. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies at Brown University, Director of Art and Technology at the Columbia University School of the Arts, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Art and Artist in Residence at Williams College. In 1996, he founded Rhizome, a nonprofit arts organization that supports the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.

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. Participation in the Q&A is limited to MFA Fine Arts students attending the lecture in person.

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