Studio Lecture Series with Sam Durant

This is an Archive of a Past Event

1904 to 1979: aesthetics, world war, anti-colonial struggle, psychoanalysis, Surrealism and the Nonaligned Movement

Sam Durant will discuss his current work that links a multitude of forces unleashed during the first half of the 20th century.  His project links the development of psychoanalysts and surrealism to anti-colonial struggle and the ways in which "third world" surrealists opened new paths for a political imaginary in the search of freedom.  Durant's project invokes historian Robin Kelley's work linking surrealism to the struggle for racial justice, and Herbert Marcuse's theory of aesthetics to make connections between surrealism's audacious pursuit of the marvelous and the non-aligned movement.

Sam Durant is a multimedia artist whose works engage a variety of social, political, and cultural issues. Often referencing American history, he explores the varying relationships between culture and politics, engaging subjects as diverse as the civil rights movement, southern rock music, and modernism. His work has been widely exhibited internationally and in the United States.  He has had solo museum exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Dusseldorf, S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand. His work has been included in the Panamá, Sydney, Venice and Whitney Biennales, and his pieces can be found in many public collections including: The Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, Tate Modern in London, Project Row Houses in Houston and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Durant teaches art at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.