Summer Salons
Curator and Writer
Helen Molesworth
with Fine Art Photographer
Catherine Opie
Friday, June 7, 2024
Saturday, June 8, 2024
Friday, June 7, 2024
6:00 – 7:30 PM ET
A Conversation with Helen Molesworth and Catherine Opie
5:00 PM Reception
Daniel A. Mullin Courtyard
6:00 – 7:30 PM Salon Conversation
Stanley Kunitz Common Room
We kick things off on Friday evening with an un-moderated conversation between our two guests. Friends and collaborators, fine-art photographer Catherine Opie and writer and curator Helen Molesworth have known each other for over twenty years. This evening they’ll each prepare three questions for the other. Since no topic is off limits, who knows what will come up? The night will conclude with a “lesbo slide slam” in which Opie and Molesworth share some of their favorite ideas around both art and pop culture in which they share their sista luvin’ sista influences and humor!
Saturday, June 8, 2024
2:00 – 4:00 PM ET
In-person Workshop with Catherine Opie
Intensive Photography Critique Workshop
Fine art photographer and educator Catherine Opie will conduct an intensive photography critique workshop for a limited number of participants. Participants should come prepared for a 30 min critique of a body of work they bring with them and want to discuss. This workshop will last 4-5 hours. Snacks and beverages will be provided.
Catherine Opie (b. 1961) is one of the most important photographers of her generation. Her subjects have included early seminal portraits of the LGBTQ+ community, the architecture of Los Angeles’ freeway system, mansions in Beverly Hills, Midwestern icehouses, high school football players, California surfers, and abstract landscapes of National Parks, among others. She was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow recipient and the Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography at the American Academy in Rome for 2021. She has exhibited at international venues such as Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Photographer’s Gallery in London, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. Opie lives and works in Los Angeles.
Saturday, June 8, 2024
2:00 – 4:00 PM ET
Virtual Zoom Workshop with Helen Molesworth
The Encounter: Writing About Art with Helen Molesworth
How do we translate the visual into the writerly? While there are myriad frameworks for writing about a work of art, every experience of art begins with an encounter between the viewer and the artwork. Join curator and writer Helen Molesworth for an online workshop that will take the notion of this encounter as the starting point for writing about art—both your own and others. In this workshop–part craft talk and part generative workshop–we’ll examine the triumvirate of the work, the viewer, and the encounter on equal footing. We’ll take a stab at writing about a handful of images in an attempt to find language as specific and as open as we can muster. The aim is for all of us to walk away from this workshop with a stronger sense of what’s possible in writing about art, and to explore how, whenever we write about art, we are also writing about ourselves.
Helen Molesworth is a writer, podcaster, and curator based in Los Angeles and Provincetown.
In 2023 Phaidon published Open Questions, Thirty Years of Writing About Art, an anthology of her essays. Her podcasts include Death of an Artist, a 6-part podcast about the intertwined fates of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta and the inaugural season of Recording Artists with The Getty. She is also the host of DIALOGUES, a podcast that features interviews with artists, writers, fashion designers, and filmmakers hosted by the David Zwirner Gallery. Her major museum exhibitions include: One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art; Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957; Dance/Draw; This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s; Part Object Part Sculpture, and Work Ethic. She has organized one-person exhibitions of Ruth Asawa, Moyra Davey, Noah Davis, Louise Lawler, Steve Locke, Anna Maria Maiolino, Josiah McElheny, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, Amy Sillman, and Luc Tuymans. She is the author of numerous catalog essays and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2021 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2022 she was awarded The Clark Art Writing Prize.
Proceeds from these paid events ensure that the Fine Arts Work Center is able to provide free arts and culture events for the Outer Cape Cod community year round.
