Mudam Talk | Gardens, flowers, art, creation

With Lisa Oppenheim, Sarah Anne McNear and Luce Lebart

Moderated by Paul Lesch

In the framework of the exhibition: Lisa Oppenheim: Monsieur Steichen

In English

Fee: 10€/person

Free for -21/Students/Kulturpass

Booking required:

mudam.com/rsvp-mudam-talk

From Edward Steichen’s practice to contemporary botanical art.

According to the Huntington Library, ‘Botanical art is a type of art that is both artistic and scientific. It can be made using many different media, and the subject can be any type of plant and any parts of a plant, such as flowers, seed pods, roots, leaves, or stems.’

To understand Edward Steichen’s life and work is to understand his practice as an artist as well as a gardener. His passion for delphiniums and his experimentations regarding gardens, flowers and cultivation, place him as a visionary creator who designed new species as artworks. Considering nature and plants as a central piece of artistic endeavours allows us to recognise Steichen as a pioneer, paving the way for many contemporary cultural practices. Today, as we collectively realise the need for humans to reconnect with their surrounding ecosystems, intersections of artistic creation, ecology and botany are expanding. This conversation gathers prominent voices in contemporary culture who cross the spheres of art and ecology, while we unveil lesser-known aspects of Monsieur Steichen.

Biographies

Since the mid-2000s, American artist Lisa Oppenheim (1975, New York) has been developing a body of work that is rooted in the field of photography while also constantly exploring its margins. She often focuses on the unexplored potential of the medium’s artistic, technical and vernacular histories. Oppenheim’s work draws in-depth enquiry that often takes on a life of its own – leading her down ‘a meandering path’ through which a combination of material and more scholarly research enables her projects to come into being. The artist transforms, or ‘reprocesses,’ as she describes it, images from the recent or more distant past by employing various creative mechanisms, both in the darkroom and through other media such as textile and most recently, sculpture.

Sarah Anne McNear has over thirty years of experience in museums and cultural nonprofits, with a specialisation in photography and community-based art education. She has held positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Allentown Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, where she was the Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Fellow in Photography. Most recently, McNear served as the deputy director of Aperture Foundation and the deputy director of the 92nd Street Y's School of the Arts, as well as the director of its Art Center. Previously, she was director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago. McNear is the author of several books on photography and has served on advisory committees for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Art in Architecture Program for the U.S. General Services Administration and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She is currently a board member of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine, and Aperture Foundation. McNear lives in New York City.

Luce Lebart est historienne de la photographie et commissaire d’exposition, associée à la collection Archive of Modern Conflict. Ses recherches portent sur la photographie d’archive, l’histoire des techniques et les pratiques scientifiques et documentaires de l’image. Membre du Comité scientifique du Fablab « La cellule » sur la biophotographie, elle a publié sur La photographie d'origine végétale dans l'ouvrage Puissance du vegetal et cinema animiste – La vitalité révélée par la technique(Les presses du réel, 2020) et sur la photographie des nuages et des forêts. Parmi ses derniers livres figurent Une histoire mondiale des femmes photographes codirigé avec Marie Robert (Textuel, 2020) et Inventions (1915-1938) (CNRS et RVB Books, 2019).

Paul Lesch est commissaire aux Collections Edward Steichen, au ministère de la Culture. Précédemment directeur du Centre national de l’audiovisuel, il y a travaillé en tant que collaborateur scientifique et a enseigné l’histoire du film et des médias à l’Université du Luxembourg et au Miami University John E. Dolibois European Center. Il a écrit des textes pour les revues Hémecht, Nos Cahiers, Cinéma&Cie., Film History et Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, et a réalisé le film documentaire Call Her Madam (1997).