Talk

Nancy Princenthal / Unspeakable Acts

This talk will be held in the auditorium at KHiO and will also be streamed through Zoom.
Register in advance for this webinar

"When women first spoke up about sexual violence, which was an issue that came late to the agenda of second-wave feminism, artists--from Yoko Ono to Ana Mendieta, Suzanne Lacy and Nancy Spero--were at the forefront of the discsussion. Fifty years later, and despite the revelations of the MeToo movement, sexual assault remains a difficult subject to address, and artists are still crucial to the effort. Coming to grips with how race compounds the challenge is only now underway. The same is true for violence against those in the LGBTQ community."

Nancy Princenthal is a Brooklyn-based writer whose Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames & Hudson, 2015) received the 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. Her most recent book is Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s (Thames & Hudson, 2019). She is also the author of the monograph Hannah Wilke (Prestel, 2020). A former Senior Editor of Art in America, where she remains a Contributing Editor, she has also written for the New York Times and many other publications, including Bomb, Hyperallergic, Apollo and the Brooklyn Rail. Her writing has appeared in monographs and exhibition catalogues for a wide range of artists, including Ann Hamilton, Alfredo Jaar, Gary Simmons, Willie Cole and Lesley Dill. Having taught and lectured widely, she was a longtime faculty member of the MFA Art Writing program at the School of Visual Arts, and was most recently a visiting lecturer at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

This talk is a part of the Academy of Fine Art’s public programme, and the talk will be hosted by professor Melissa Gordon.