Our Associate Professor Eva Diaz will give a talk next Tuesday at the Guggenheim related to the Albers in Mexico show: “COPIES HAVE MORE FUN”

In conjunction with the exhibition Josef Albers in Mexico, join Eva Díaz, Associate Professor, History of Art and Design, at Pratt Institute, for a fresh take on Josef Albers’s artistic and teaching practices.

Three quarters of a century after Albers first visited Mexico, artist Jill Magid learned that for many years architect Luis Barragán had displayed two replica Homage to the Square works based on those by his friend Albers in his Mexico City home. Though Barragán hadn’t produced his this way, Magid used the annotations on the back of Albers’s works to paint her own body of copies modeled on the Homages. She went on to show her series, cleverly titled Homage, in Switzerland, building on a controversial body of work about the lack of public access to Barragán’s archives, which are housed in Basel.

This talk will take up how Albers made pedagogical outreach a central part of his work, especially when the stakes of an educational process were understood as a creative enterprise that impelled personal growth and social transformation. He did this by offering perceptual tests through variation, seriality, and systems, as well as by implicitly allowing—in a remarkably nonproprietary way—viewers to enact their own versions of his works, just as Magid did.

The program concludes with an exhibition viewing and reception.

$15, $10 members, free for students with RSVP