Programs

Guest Lecture: Courtney J. Martin
Jan 07, 2010

A recording of this talk is available in our virtual Resource Room.

Thursday, January 7, 6:30 – 7:30 PM

What do you know about Damien Hirst’s shark and Tracey Emin’s bed? What do the initials YBA mean to you? Well, if you are interested in how a group of artists who attended Goldsmiths College took the art world by storm (with the help of one super-collector named Saatchi) come hear art historian Courtney J. Martin discuss these objects and historical events and more!

Courtney J. Martin is an art historian and curator of several exhibitions, including Poison America: Sharon Gilbert’s Bookworks at the Arts of the Book Collection, Yale University, and C-Series: Artists’ Books and Collective Action, in New York at the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Her writing includes, “They Will Come and They Will Go,” Exhuming Gluttony with Wangechi Mutu (forthcoming 2009); “The Twentieth-Century Dandy as Cultural Provocateur: Yinka Shonibare, MBE and the Diary of A Victorian Dandy,” from the edited volume, Black British Aesthetics Today (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007); “Sight Was Regulated, Shapes Were Continually Re-fashioned”: Alia Syed’s Eating Grass at the Biennale of Sydney (2006); and “The Re-selection of Ancestors: Abstraction in the Second Generation,” in Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964–1980, the Studio Museum in Harlem (2006).

In 2007, Martin was a Henry Moore Institute Research Fellow. In 2008-2009 she was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Currently she is a post-doctoral fellow in the History of Art department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation on late twentieth century British art is expected in 2009 from Yale University. Prior to her arrival at Yale, she was the Interim Head Curator at the Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum and worked in the media, arts, and culture unit of the Ford Foundation in New York on an international arts portfolio. She has served as a consultant for Ford in the areas of arts education and cultural re-organization in the Gulf region. She has written for Art Asia Pacific, Art Papers, Contemporary, Flash Art, Frieze, and NKA, and is a regular contributor to Artforum.com.

Free Thursdays are sponsored by Perennial Properties.

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