The Weitzman Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania and the Institute of Contemporary Art are pleased to present an artist lecture and presentation with Leslie Thornton, whose practice explores experimentation and production across media histories.
This free public lecture is part of a series that gathers distinguished artists, activists, writers, and disruptors whose work engages with the social and cultural themes of our time. This season of lectures presents a selection of artists whose work is connected to or featured in ICA’s current exhibitions.
Registration
Register to attend in-person here. | Attend this lecture via Zoom here.
Captioning will be available for this program via Zoom.
ICA is committed to creating a welcoming environment for all visitors. For more notes on accessibility including accessible parking nearby visit our Accessibility landing page. If you require any accessibility accommodations or have any questions about the program, please contact Brittany Clottey (bclottey@ica.upenn.edu).
About the artist
For more than five decades, Leslie Thornton has probed how we see and make sense of the world. Her newest work, HANDMADE (2023), is a video diptych that juxtaposes natural phenomena with technological discovery, using imagery filmed during artist residencies at several major scientific research centers such as CERN (Geneva) and CalTech (Pasadena).
Thornton emerged as a pivotal figure during the 1970s, encouraging cinema’s shift from the structuralist and cinéma vérité traditions in which she was trained to a practice grounded in linguistics and feminism. With a keen commitment to voice, Thornton has carved out a unique space at the intersection of multiple media histories to ponder the technological landscape of postwar America. From Peggy and Fred in Hell’s consideration of television and artificial intelligence to the emotional evocation of nuclear warfare in Cut from Liquid to Snake, her seminal work illuminates fundamental shifts in how we construct and recognize meaning.
Leslie Thornton’s works have been exhibited worldwide in a range of venues, such as MoMA, New York; MoMA PS1, New York, Whitney Biennial, New York, Documenta, Kassel; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Raven Row, London and CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux. Retrospectives include shows at Anthology Film Archives, New York; Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA. Thornton has been honored with numerous awards, including Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships, the Maya Deren Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Alpert Award in the Arts for Media. Recent artist residencies took place at CERN, Geneva and CalTech, Pasadena.
Leslie Thornton is a professor emerita of Brown University, where she taught film as an art form for over 30 years. She currently lives in the Lower Hudson Valley near New York City.
About the series
The Institute of Contemporary Art and the Weitzman Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to present a series of free public lectures and artist presentations that connect a group of distinguished artists, writers, activists, and disruptors to the Philadelphia public.
In their varied approaches and techniques, these individuals speak to ICA’s ethos of artistic experimentation and practice that engages with the social and cultural themes of our time. As artists, writers, and cultural producers, their artwork and criticism expand across themes of popular culture, queer life, kinship & community, and de/construction through the utilization of sculpture, performance, sound, collage, installation, and more.
In this lecture series, we invite you all to engage in conversation with our participants and become a part of an active dialogue that explores the stake of contemporary art in our society and culture.
Support
Programming at ICA is made possible in part by the Emily and Jerry Spiegel Fund to Support Contemporary Culture and Visual Arts and the Lise Spiegel Wilks and Jeffrey Wilks Family Foundation. Public and Student Engagement at ICA is supported by the Bernstein Public Engagement Fund, Suzanne Weiss Doft & Jacob W. Doft, Stacey & Robert Goergen Jr., Hilarie L. & Mitchell Morgan, the Nash Family Foundation, Joline & David Stemerman, and by Dana McDonald Strong & Mark W. Strong.
The Master of Fine Arts program at Penn is focused on the professional development of visual artists. Through workshops, seminar courses, international residency opportunities and interactions with curators, writers and artists, the program provides an open intellectual framework to foster independent methods of artistic research.