Thursday, February 4, 2021; 5pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org
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Luis Camnitzer challenges convention and confronts institutional power, economic injustice, and political repression. A prolific artist, theorist and educator, and a prominent force in Latin American Conceptualism, his work springs from a relentless curiosity and a belief that art is a platform for acquiring new knowledge. In light of the potential closure of the 150-year-old San Francisco Art Institute, Camnitzer and The Lab’s director Dena Beard discuss his radical engagement with art education and its institutions, from his student days in Uruguay and move to New York in 1964 to his current work and writings.

As an art student in Uruguay in 1960, Camnitzer was part of a collective of artists, students, and educators who reformed the School of Fine Arts in Montevideo. Today, he is still an ethical anarchist preoccupied with the role of education in redistributing power in society. “If we keep digging,” he writes, “it becomes clear that these ideas existed way before us, will persist long after we are gone, and will do so regardless of who speaks or writes of them... The important question is whether they will ever be absorbed.”

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Image: “The Museum is a School; the artists learns to communicate; the public learns to make connections.”, 2011. © by Luis Camnitzer.