Art Talk: Michael Brenson on David Smith

Name: Art Talk: Michael Brenson on David Smith
Start: 2025-02-22T13:30:00-06:00
Location: Nasher Sculpture Center

Schedule

Sat, 22 Feb, 2025 at 01:30 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

Nasher Sculpture Center | Dallas, TX

David Smith and the Language of Memory: The time of sculpture and the time of writing
David Smith (1906-1965) welded together images that are impossible to forget. He thought deeply about sculpture and memory, imagining sculpture as its own material field in which, as much as in painting, people could always discover more. The power of his images may announce itself immediately but the potentialities of his sculptures reveal themselves slowly and they keep revealing themselves over time. Smith biographer and sculpture critic Michael Brenson reflects on the forms and place of memory in Smith’s sculptural language and on the impact of this language on the understanding -- and on the writing -- of his grand and elusive work.
Registration is FREE for Nasher Members and students; $10 for non-members (includes museum admission). In-person and open to the public. Advance registration required (limited seating available).
Michael Brenson’s David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor is the first biography of this epochal figure. It follows Smith from his upbringing in the Midwest, to his heady early years in Manhattan, to his decision to establish a permanent studio in Bolton Landing in upstate New York, where he would create many of his most significant works—among them the Cubis, Tanktotems, and Zigs. It explores his at times tempestuous personal life, marked by marriages, divorces, and fallings-out as well as by deep friendships with fellow artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell. His wife Jean Freas described him as “salty and bombastic, jumbo and featherlight, thin-skinned and Mack Truck. And many more things.” This enormous, contradictory vitality was true of his work as well. He was a bricoleur, a master welder, a painter, a photographer, and a writer, and he entranced critics and attracted admirers wherever he showed his work. With this book, Brenson has contextualized Smith for a new generation and confirmed his singular place in the history of American art.
About Michael Brenson
Michael Brenson is an art critic, art historian and teacher. He received a BA in English from Rutgers University and an MA in Creative Writing and Ph.D in Art history from Johns Hopkins University, writing his doctoral thesis on “The Early Work of Alberto Giacometti: 1925-1935.” In 1975 he moved to Paris and began writing art criticism, first for Art in America and eventually for The New York Times. In 1982 The Times brought him back to New York City, his home town, as its art reporter. In 1991, after eight years as a Times art critic, writing into one tumultuous controversy after another, including the battles over Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc and the National Endowment for the Arts, he left The Times, eager for a different writing rhythm and more varied opportunities. He curated exhibitions (for P.S. 1 and the Sculpture Center) and taught (Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, where for almost twenty years he was a member of its sculpture faculty). He consulted for Harry N. Abrams and The Rockefeller Foundation and organized and moderated conferences at New York’s Jewish Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art. Always he wrote, on museums and arts policy and on modern and contemporary art -- primarily sculpture. He is a Getty Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Clark Fellow and the recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. He is the author of Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in America, Acts of Engagement: Writing on Art, Criticism and Institutions: 1993-2002 and David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor. He is the Artistic Director of the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation.