Laura Raicovich and Michael Hall on Culture Strike
The Art Students League New York, NY 2022
The Art Students League is proud to present a book talk with writer and curator Laura Raicovich, followed by a conversation with Raicovich and The League’s Artistic Executive Director, Michael Hall. The evening will focus on Laura’s incendiary 2021 publication, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, which investigates how cultural institutions have come under fire in recent years as concerned members of the arts community have mobilized in critique of sources of museum funding. Protests have affected and targeted institutions all over the world from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim, and the Akron Art Museum. Laura will read excerpts from Culture Strike in the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery of The League, where copies will also be available to purchase. Raicovich and Hall will then engage in a conversation about the book’s themes both as they relate to The League and to the broader art world beyond our walls. This live talk will be Laura’s first in-person event in New York City since the book’s release in the summer of 2021.
Artist Talk: Adrian Paci with Laura Raicovich
Green Wood Cemetery Brooklyn, NY 2022
Laura Raicovich will introduce artist Adrian Paci as he discusses his new film U’ncuontru (2021), currently on view in Green-Wood’s Historic Chapel.
After Shocks: Art, Disruption, and Provocation
Sydney Contemporary and ArtSpace Sydney, Australia 2021
This panel featured artists, curators and writers whose practices and research intersect with themes of censorship, disruption and protest. The discussion will focus on leading institutional structural change and embedding new perspectives in the arts sector. At a time of profound social, cultural, and political transformation After Shocks considers how contemporary art and cultural spaces are being shaped by decolonial practices, greater equity and direct action.
Dorothea Tanning: Transformations | A conversation with Victoria Carruthers and Laura Raicovich
Wendi Norris Gallery San Francisco, CA 2021
A curatorial conversation Victoria Carruthers and Laura Raicovich, in celebration of Gallery Wendi Norris' forthcoming presentation of Dorothea Tanning at the ADAA Art Show 2021.
Art Institutions in the Age of Existential Risk
ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany 2021
We live in critical times. Whether pandemics, environmental and climate crises, social inequalities, or conflict- and disaster-induced displacement: humanity is heading towards an uncertain future in which it is exposed to existential risks. What essential role could art and culture play in discussing, reshaping and overcoming such crises? The art scene in transition functions as a mirror of social changes such as coming to terms with colonization, sexism, racism, xenophobia, the discrimination of minorities and other socially relevant issues.
The conference »Art Institutions in the Age of Existential Risks – What to do?« brings together experts from the arts, academia and society to outline the diversity of demands and perspectives arising from global risks for cultural institutions. Where exactly do cultural institutions stand in these new global challenges? Does culture need a renaissance? And conversely, what happens when such crises threaten the very existence of cultural institutions?
Cinesymposia 1
Anthology Film Archive New York, NY 2021
Organized by artist and filmmaker, cherry brice, jr., Cynesymposia is a mini-symposium organized around a specific theme. Each Salon features three short films and three rounds of arena discussion. Each Salon invites you to come prepared with thoughts, manifestoes, and democratic screeds. Each Salon invites you to engage in ideas and exchange in communion. Cinesymposia 1 includes:
Artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia
Writer and curator Laura Raicovich
Commissioner of New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs, Gonzalo Casals
Public programmer and writer Kazembe Balagun
Urban policy/planning professor emeritus Tom Angotti
Pass the Mic! Create. Curate. Care.
Wheaton College Norton, Massachusetts 2021
Artists, designers, curators, scholars, and art facilitators recognize that cultural initiatives need to respond with agility and alacrity to the realities of inequity, in all of its forms. How those responses are enacted is a more complex set of questions. This online conference focuses on the political potentials of care and compassion as practiced in the arts. Participants will reflect on the differences between hearing and actively listening, and between speaking with and speaking to, in a variety of art-centered exchanges.
Culture Strike: Laura Raicovich in conversation with Mari Spirito
Protocinema Istanbul, Turkey 2021
On the occasion of Protocinema’s 10. Year milestone exhibition, Once Upon A Time Inconceivable, Raicovich will launch her new publication Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest (Verso, 2021). This book delves into the growing tension between public expectations and the mandate, role, and structural conditions of Art Museums in the United States and further afield. It discusses well-known case studies such as the resignation of Warren Kanders from the board of the Whitney Museum on account of investments in the munitions industry and tear-gas, as well as protest efforts to address labour politics at museums in the US and internationally.
Books: Laura Raicovich on Culture Strike
Kunstinstituut Melly Rotterdam, The Netherlands 2021
In this special BOOKS edition, Raicovich will launch her new publication Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest (Verso, 2021). This book delves into the growing tension between public expectations and the mandate, role and structural conditions of Art Museums in the United States and further afield. It discusses well known case studies such as the resignation of Warren Kanders from the board of the Whitney Museum on account of investments in the munitions industry and tear-gas, as well as protest efforts to address labour politics at museums in the US and internationally.
Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest
Laura Raicovich and Jeff Chang
Virtual Book Talk, ICA Los Angeles, CA 2021
Join us for book talk around Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, written by Laura Raicovich, curator, activist, and former director of the Queens Museum. The author will be joined by the historian, writer, and cultural critic Jeff Chang to explore the issues and controversies around art museums today and to discuss how activism shapes existing and future cultural organizations.
Congress on Art & Life
BPL Presents (virtual): A culminating event for the Art & Society Census Brooklyn, NY 2021
For the past year, BPL and partners have engaged in radical listening from people across the country about what changes we want to see in the arts, in culture and our daily lives, while the pandemic upended all of these. Through a survey of over 1500 people and a series of focused working groups, we’ve heard and taken stock of what important changes on the part of institutions, cultural producers, and participants need to happen and what fresh imaginings can help us seize this moment.
Topics on the agenda: inverting expertise and finding new languages, financial transparency and better funding models, the importance of local organizing & institutions for our survival, what we wish to see--a series of demands.
We call together the public to hear about our learnings and voice your own.
Project Organizers: Laura Raicovich, Jakab Lászlo Orsós and Cora Fisher
Facilitators: Fadwa Abbas, Kazembe Balagun, Suhaly Bautista-Carolina, Jennifer Keeney Sendrow & Hrag Vartanian.
Participants: Open to all.
*A document will be shared with all who sign up in advance of the event, which has been compiled from the project and outlines the observations offered and changes demanded by participants.
Laura Raicovich in conversation with Seph Rodney
Philadelphia Free Library (virtual): Culture Strike launch event Philadelphia, PA 2021
Former interim director of New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Laura Raicovich is a fierce advocate for museums to be hubs of activism and protest that foster a more engaged and informed public. The former director of the Queens Museum, her 2018 resignation from that institution became one of the latest instances of politicized resignations amongst museum administrators across the U.S. A recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship, Raicovich lectures internationally, has created and implemented new museum preservation strategies, and is the author of the books At the Lightning Field and A Diary of Mysterious Difficulties. In Culture Strike, she offers context for historical and contemporary museum controversies, argues that ideological neutrality in museums is a myth, and outlines a plan for improving these institutions to better serve the public. She talks with Seph Rodney, PhD, opinions editor and managing editor of the Sunday Edition for Hyperallergic, author of The Personalization of the Museum Visit, and winner of the 2020 Rabkin Arts Journalism Prize.
Laura Raicovich in conversation with Malkia Devich-Cyril
City Lights (virtual): Culture Strike launch event San Francisco, CA 2021
A leading activist museum director talks with activist and writer, Devich-Cyril about why museums are at the center of a political storm and how they can be reimagined.
BPL Presents: Culture Strike, Art and Museums in an Age of Protest
BPL Presents (virtual): Culture Strike launch event New York, NY 2021
Leading activist museum director Laura Raicovich explains in her new book why museums are at the center of a political storm and how they can be reimagined. For this evening of conversation, she is joined by writer and art historian Aruna D'Souza, as they discuss the structural issues faced by cultural organizations and museums that have increasingly come under fire in our age of protest, and how to address them.
Protests against museum funding (like the Metropolitan Museum accepting Sackler family money) and boards (such as the Whitney appointing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders)—to say nothing of demonstrations over exhibitions and artworks—have roiled cultural institutions across the world, from the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to the Akron Art Museum. Meanwhile never have there been more calls for museums to work for social change. Raicovich shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding capitalist values. And she suggests how museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.
After their conversation, leading curators and writers Ken Chen, Dr. Kelli Morgan and Helen Molesworth respond in turn.
Neutrality and Institutions
BAK, Instituting Otherwise Symposium, Trainings for the Not-Yet Utrecht, The Netherlands 2019
In an effort to undo the biases embedded in museums and cultural institutions that prevent radical inclusion and participation, the myth of neutrality must be confronted. This talk addresses the ways in which cultural institutions are never politically or ideologically neutral, and calls for a space of collective imagination, centered on art and creativity. Further it identifies where and how neutrality operates, implicitly and explicitly. Where do such notions of the neutral come from and how do they manifest in cultural space? Why are they so powerful? What are the processes that can lead to their undoing.
Manifestations of Neutrality
Artspace Sydney, Australia 2019
In this free public program, Independent curator and writer Laura Raicovich will consider where ideas of the neutral come from and how they are manifested within museums and cultural institutions, both implicitly and explicitly. She will specifically address the ways in which neutrality is a fiction, and how it can be used to veil exclusion and bias. Raicovich suggests that in order to make cultural institutions more accessible, diverse, and inclusive it is imperative to confront this myth of neutrality to collectively imagine such spaces in the future.
Subversion to Red
North Macedonian Pavilion by Artist Nada Prlja, Venice Biennale Venice, Italy 2019
As part of artist Nada Prlja commission for the North Macedonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, she has organized an experimental live art event Red Discussion 2, featuring contemporary thinkers and curators engaged in transformative practices, including Charles Esche, Maurizio Lazzarato, Vlad Morariu, Chantal Mouffe, Laura Raicovich and Artan Sadiku. They will jointly seek to find exit strategies from the current conditions of social pre-cariousness, exploitation and violations, by defining alternative conditions to the “interesting times” in which we live.
Give and Take: Examining the Intersection of Arts, Ethics and Philanthropy
Brown Arts Initiative, Brown University Providence, RI 2019
How do artists and cultural organizations approach the funding of creative work that is often supported by donated money from various sources? This panel examines the history and structure of US philanthropy, how this manifests in contemporary society and the ethical considerations of contributed income. Guests include philanthropy scholar Lucy Bernholz, PhD; nonprofit arts executive Jamie Bennett; artist Cannupa Hanska Luger; philanthropy and fundraising expert Amir Pasic, PhD; and curator, author and former museum director Laura Raicovich.
The Myth of Neutrality and Cultural Institutions
Museums Association Conference Belfast, Northern Ireland 2018
Raicovich kicked off the Museum's Association's annual conference in Belfast in November 2018 with a keynote presentation on the myth of neutrality in museums and cultural institutions. She outlined why it is so important to identify this myth and how it contributes to exclusionary practices, as well as some thoughts on how museums can serve as a commons for civic engagement. The oldest Museums Association in the world and founded in 1889, this entirely membership funded, independent organization organizes their annual conference for its membership, with over 1,000 in attendance. This year's conference theme was "Dissent."
Art World Talk: Society, Politics, and the Art System
ArtBasel Basel, Switzerland 2018
Raicovich joined a panel including artists Lauren Bon/Metabolic Studio and Ahmet Öğüt to discuss the complexities of art and politics in the current climate. Moderated by Stephanie Baily.
Museums in a Time of Crisis
Princeton Environmental Institute, Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 2018
A panel of artists, scientists, and curators including artist and activist Beka Economopoulos, Princeton Art Museum’s Karl Kuserow, founding director and curator of the Museum of Impact Monica Montgomery, gathered to discuss climate realities, artistic production, and ways to urgently address these topics within cultural organizations and museums. Moderated by Ashley Dawson.
Towards Sanctuary Summit
Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New School
New York, NY 2018
Artist Jeanne van Heeswjik, NYC Cultural Affairs Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl, and Raicovich held a robust discussion of current thinking in the arts around notions of sanctuary. Moderated by Alexandra Délano Alonso, Associate Professor and Chair of Global Studies at The New School, and Carin Kuoni, Director/Chief Curator, Vera List Center for Arts and Politics at The New School.
The Armory Live Panel: Collapsing Structures
The Armory Show
New York, NY 2018
El Museo del Barrio Director Patrick Charpenell moderated presentations and a discussion between Raicovich, Swiss Institute director Simon Castets, curator Michy Marxuach, and artist Carlos Motta on the paradoxes inherent in presenting art that addresses political and social content.
The Power of Art: Museums, Culture, Democracy
Annual Director’s Dialogue, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, NY 2017
Annually, the director of the Guggenheim invites another museum director to deliver a presentation and participate in a discussion with artists and curators. Raicovich discussed the intersections of museums, power, culture, and democracy, followed by a conversation on the contemporary political and social conditions of making and presenting art with artist Marilyn Minter, and Nancy Spector, Artistic Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Moderated by the Guggenheim’s Director, Richard Armstrong.