Panel discussion held in conjunction with Cary Leibowitz: Museum Show (on view Jan 26–Jun 25, 2017)
The 1995 exhibition In A Different Light at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive was the first to attempt to identify a queer aesthetic. Revisit this exhibition (that included Cary Leibowitz) as panelists examine the exhibition’s impact twenty years later. BAM/PFA Executive Director Larry Rinder, artist Scott Hewicker, and curator Margaret Tedesco discuss; moderated by Stanford University professor Richard Meyer.
Recorded on May 11, 2017.
Lawrence Rinder is director of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). He has held positions at the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he was chief curator of the 2002 Biennial. He was the founding director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, where he also served as dean.
Scott Hewicker is an artist, writer and musician based in San Francisco. He received his MFA from Stanford University and has exhibited his work at [ 2nd floor projects ], Gallery 16, NIAD, Ratio 3, Jack Hanley Gallery, Deitch Projects NY, Galleri Christina Wilson, Copenhagen, ICA Philadelphia and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He co-curated the exhibit Hauntology at the Berkeley Art Museum with Larry Rinder in 2010, and has played in the bands, The Alps, Troll, and Aero-Mic’d. With Cliff Hengst, Hewicker co-edited and illustrated the book, Good Times, Bad Trips published by Gallery 16 editions in 2007. He has been a contributing columnist for Open Space, the SFMOMA blog, and written hundreds of music reviews for Aquarius Records. He currently teaches at California College of the Arts.
Artist and curator Margaret Tedesco works across performance, installation, photography, sculpture, and video. She has presented and collaborated with visual and performance artists, writers, and filmmakers for more than twenty-five years. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally. In 2007 Tedesco established [ 2nd floor projects ] an artist-run exhibition and publishing space in San Francisco. Tedesco grew up in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Richard Meyer, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University, teaches courses in twentieth-century American art, the history of photography, arts censorship and the first amendment, curatorial practice, and gender and sexuality studies. His first book, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, was awarded the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2013, he published What Was Contemporary Art?, a study of the idea of "the contemporary" in early twentieth-century American art, and, with Catherine Lord, Art and Queer Culture, a survey focusing on the dialogue between visual art and non-normative sexualities from 1885 to the present. Meyer served as guest curator of Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered at the Jewish Museum in New York and The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.
Leadership Support for digital media at The Contemporary Jewish Museum is generously provided by the Jim Joseph Foundation.
video by Laurie Lezin-Schmidt. Speaker photos: Larry Rinder photo by Peter Cavagnaro; Scott Hewicker photo by Sydney Cohen; Richard Meyer photo by Cam Sanders.