What's On

The Fragment Transformed

ONLINE ONLY

This is a past event

HOSTED VIA ZOOM
Register in advance for this online event.

This panel will consider the manifold ways that artists have reimagined and repurposed fragments to tell new stories and challenge established traditions. From the junk aesthetic of assemblage in the 1960s to the use of pilgrimage souvenirs in contemporary art pieces, fragments have been reconstituted as expressions of creativity, resistance, and power. These talks will explore how fragments are reified, transformed and reinterpreted to offer critiques of culture, race, and gender.

This panel is moderated by Pietro Rigolo, assistant curator of Modern and Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute.

Natasha Bissonauth is assistant professor at the College of Wooster in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She currently teaches in the art history department at York University in Toronto. Her research examines queer and feminist visual cultures from South Asia and its diaspora. Other research interests include indenture studies and speculative aesthetics.
Talk title: Queer Collage, Queer Memory

Brian Bartell is a faculty member at ArtCenter College of Design where he teaches courses on modernity/modernism, media studies, and race and technology studies in the Humanities & Sciences Department. He is currently writing a book titled On the Eve of the Cyber-Cultural Revolution: Black Power and Racial Capitalism in the 1960s.
Talk title: Noah Purifoy, "Junk," and the Cyber-Cultural Era

Kathryn Barush is associate professor and Thomas E. Bertelsen Jr. Chair of art history and religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA and Santa Clara University (JST-Berkeley campus). Her second book, Imaging Pilgrimage: Art as Embodied Experience (Bloomsbury), was published in August 2021.
Talk title: Assemblage as a pilgrimage portal: the afterlife of the found object

This program is part of The Fragment series, which explores how fragments have long catalyzed the study of visual culture while also continuing to inform contemporary views of society and art.

The conversation will be available on the Getty Research Institute YouTube channel following the event.