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Josiah McElheny: Keith L. and Katherine S. Sachs Visiting Professor

caption:Josiah McElheny

Internationally acclaimed artist Josiah McElheny has been appointed Keith L. and Katherine S. Sachs Visiting Professor in the department of fine arts at Penn’s School of Design for the 2017-2018 academic year.

Through sculpture, writing, performance, and film, Mr. McElheny investigates the history of twentieth-century modernism in hopes of expanding on the dominant historical narratives of art, aesthetics, design, and architecture, and the criticality of our relationship to them. Recognized for his conceptually rigorous approach, and a physical mastery of materials such as glass, Mr. McElheny explores vastly-ranging topics from astronomical cosmology and the infinite to under-recognized artists or oeuvres, including the visionary abstraction of Hilma af Klint, Blinky Palermo’s wall paintings, and Robert Smithson’s crystalline sculptures.

At PennDesign, Mr. McElheny will be engaged with students pursuing their MFA through studio visits and reviews throughout the year, and teach a course, Imaginary Modernisms. The course will deal with the possibilities available to any artist today to participate in the constant rewriting and redefining of art history, culminating in a spring lecture at Rice University and related publication from the University of Chicago Press. Mr. McElheny will also give a public lecture at the ICA in the spring.

Mr. McElheny is a New York-based sculptor, performance artist, writer and filmmaker best known for his use of glass with other materials. He has exhibited widely including two major survey exhibitions, Towards a Light Club at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2013), and Some Pictures of the Infinite at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, Massachusetts (2012), as well as exhibitions at The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2009), Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2008), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2007), Madison Square Park, New York (2017), and MoMA, New York (2007).

He has written for such publications as ArtforumCabinet, and Bomb Magazine. His book projects include: The Light Club published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010; Interiors, a reader co-edited by Johanna Burton and Lynne Cooke, published by CCS Bard and Sternberg Press in 2012; and Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion: A Paul Scheerbart Reader, co-edited with Christine Burgin and published by Christine Burgin and the University of Chicago, 2014. In 2006 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He was the 2013 Teiger Mentor in the Arts at Cornell, a senior critic in sculpture at  Yale and continues as a mentor at Columbia.

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