A Conversation with Fernanda Fragateiro

Artist Fernanda Fragateiro will talk with James Voorhies, the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, about the role of research in her practice and her contributions to the recent Carpenter Center exhibition The Way We Live Now: Modernist Ideologies at Work.

Fragateiro’s sculptures and installations depart from existing or recognizable design, architecture, publications, and artifacts to rethink prevalent narratives about modernism. Her rigorous practice involves archaeology into modernism’s social, political, and aesthetic history through ongoing research of archival matter, materials, and objects. In doing so, she uses our familiarity with the modernist aesthetic to undermine accepted knowledge of its key figures and historical moment through interventions that alter the appearance of things. Her richly complex works often stop and redirect our attention toward the broader cultural conditions responsible for the modernist ethos and the effect it continues to wage on our present moment.

Cosponsored by the Harvard Art Museums and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University.

This event will take place in Menschel Hall, Lower Level.

Free admission. Please enter the museums via the entrance on Broadway.

Complimentary parking available in the Broadway Garage, 7 Felton Street, in Cambridge.

This lecture is part of the series What Is to Be Undone? Modernism in the 21st Century, by Ahmet Öğüt, Fernanda Fragateiro, Raqs Media Collective, and Renée Green, which will feature workshops and lectures throughout the month of April at the Harvard Art Museums. During each “intervention,” one artist or collective will interrogate specific cultural objects, both within the Harvard Art Museums collections and beyond, as sites of exchange, contestation, restitution, and critique. The series is bookended by two related exhibitions, The Way We Live Now: Modernist Ideologies at Work (Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, February 5–April 5, 2015) and Jesse Aron Green: Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik (Harvard Art Museums, May 23–August 9, 2015). The series considers how artists today use a variety of research methodologies to reimagine the lasting and conflicted legacies of modernism in the contemporary moment.

Support for this program is provided by the Widgeon Charitable Trust and the Richard L. Menschel Endowment Fund. Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.