New Canaan Library’s annual Stoddard Art Lecture goes virtual this year, presenting author and professor Joachim Pissarro speaking on the topic of Wild Art: art beyond the expected and revered. The live webinar will take place on Thursday, June 18 at 7 PM EST. Please register online by clicking on the event on the Library’s Events Calendar: newcanaanlibrary.org/calendar. Zoom sign in information will be provided upon registration.
Joachim Pissarro is interested in art worlds, plural. There is the art we learn about, admire and revere through the traditional channels of galleries and museums, critics and art historians. Then there is “wild art,” which Pissarro, himself a distinguished art historian, tells us occupies another world – a world outside of sanctioned “taste” that surprisingly has the same power to inspire and elicit joy.
His first book, Wild Art (Phaidon, 2013), with co-author David Carrier, is a celebration of over 300 offbeat, outrageous artworks—from pimped cars and graffiti to body art, ice sculpture, and flash mobs. Its success led to the more philosophical Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics (Penn State, 2018), in which the duo delves into what drives alternative art, investigates its marginalization, and advocates for a definition of taste in which each expression is acknowledged as being different while deserving equal merit.
Joachim Pissarro is currently the Bershad Professor of Art History and Director of the Hunter College Galleries, Hunter College, CUNY/City University of New York. He was a Curator at MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture. His teaching and writing presently focus on the challenges facing art history due to the unprecedented proliferation of art works, images, and visual data.
The Stoddard Art Lecture series was established in the fall of 2011 to enrich and broaden the community’s understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts in all its forms. The Stoddard Lecture is unique in that it is endowed; once the fund reaches a certain point from contributions the series will operate in perpetuity. It is indeed a lasting gift, honoring lifelong learners, benefiting others and improving the Library.