Artcenter Talks: Graduate Seminar, the First Decade, 1986-1995

This collection of never-before-published talks at one of the leading art schools in the United States, documents an exciting decade in the development of contemporary art and arts education, featuring interviews with renowned artists, curators, and writers. 

Contributions by Beth B, Rosetta Brooks, Luís Castro Leiva, Meg Cranston, Charles Gaines, Jack Goldstein, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Susan Hiller, Roni Horn, Kellie Jones, Mike Kelley, Justen Ladda, Thomas Lawson, Sylvère Lotringer, John Miller, Constance Penley, Brian Routh, Mira Schor, Allan Sekula, Robert Storr, and Lynne Tillman

Introduced in 1986 as an initiative by Richard Hertz (Chair, Academic Studies, 1979–2003), the Graduate Art Department of the ArtCenter College of Design, located in Pasadena, California, celebrates its thirtieth anniversary in 2016. This book documents the first decade of the department’s existence by presenting a selection from over three hundred talks, including a 1990 symposium conducted by renowned curator and art historian Robert Storr, as well as twelve talks from its artists and critics lecture series known as the Graduate Seminar. Discussions between students and faculty members range from what it means to be an artist and the changing role of art in society, to how artists function within an academic setting. 

Alongside the newly transcribed talks, this volume also includes reproductions of slides used by participants at the time. Bringing the presentations to life, these archival images offer a sense of the context and spirit of the original seminars. Together, an introduction by Stan Douglas—ArtCenter Graduate Art faculty member—and a foreword by Diana Thater and Jason E. Smith, Chair and Associate Chair of Graduate Art, present historical context for these illuminating talks.

Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas (b. 1960, Vancouver) has created films, photographs, and installations that reexamine particular locations or past events. His works often take their points of departure in local settings, from which broader issues can be identified. Making frequent use of both analog and digital technologies, Douglas appropriates existing Hollywood genres and borrows from classic literary works to create ready-made contextual frameworks for his complex, reimagined narratives that pertain to specific places or historical events. Since 2009, Douglas has been a core faculty member of the Graduate Art Department of ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Jason E. Smith is currently associate chair of the Graduate Art MFA program at ArtCenter College of Design. His writing and research are largely concerned with contemporary art and aesthetics, philosophy, and political thought. He has published in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Critical Inquiry, Parrhesia, Radical Philosophy, and South Atlantic Quarterly, among other journals and publications.

Diana Thater is a Los Angeles-based artist who has created pioneering film, video, and installation-based works since the early 1990s. Her primary emphasis is on the tension between the natural environment and mediated reality, and by extension, between tamed and wild, and science and magic. Thater earned her MFA from the ArtCenter College of Design. She now serves as chair of ArtCenter’s Graduate Art MFA program.