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About Michael Brenson
Symposium


MICHAEL BRENSON:
CRITIC-TEACHER-CURATOR

Brenson has played several roles in the art world in the past twenty-five years: author and critic, teacher, curator, editor, and conscience of the art establishment.

AUTHOR Brenson is working on a biography of David Smith, which will be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2008. A collection of his post-New York Times writings, Acts of Engagement: Writings on Art, Criticism and Institutions, 1993­2002, is being published in August 2004 by Rowman & Littlefield. Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress and the Place of the Visual Artist in America was published by The New Press in 2001. With Mary Jane Jacob he edited Conversations at the Castle: Changing Audiences and Contemporary Art (MIT Press 1998). Brenson has written extensively about pressing artistic and cultural issues—including the changing nature of museums, the idea of quality in art, the changing shape and experience of public art, public funding of the arts in America, and the crisis of the National Endowment for the Arts. His writings have appeared in such journals as Artforum, Art in America, Art Journal, American Art, Sculpture, Journal of Art, Art Criticism, and Art & Auction. He has contributed important essays to exhibition catalogues on sculptors Magdalena Abakanowicz, Elizabeth Catlett, Mel Edwards, Alberto Giacometti, Gillian Jagger, Luis Jimenez, Maya Lin, Juan Muñoz, David Smith, Martin Puryear, and Ursula von Rydingsvard.

TEACHER Brenson taught art history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, English at The American School of Paris in St. Cloud, and writing practicums and a seminar on the museum exhibition catalogue at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y, where he was an associate professor in 2000­2001. He has been visiting critic at Yale University and the University of Texas at Austin.

CURATOR Brenson has curated exhibitions of works by Magdalena Abakanowicz (Queens' P.S. 1 Museum), Ryoji Koie (Manhattan's Gallery at Takashimaya), and Jonathan Silver (Manhattan's Sculpture Center).

 

Artist in Residence Home

“I believe that art criticism is failing miserably to meet the challenges of this time, and that art and artists, and indeed the artistic culture of this country, are suffering as a result. American art, artists and art institutions are struggling, and because so few critics have been willing to participate in this struggle and examine their role in its development and outcome, art criticism, as a whole, is in trouble.”