Lectures

One of the most influential figurative painters of our time, Eric Fischl, kicked off the Otis College of Art and Design Figurative Summer Residency program with a keynote lecture that covered his personal generative process.

What roles does a work of art play in society today? Is the purpose of art to provide pleasure, access the subjectivity of the artist, change society, or to provide a new mode of proposing ideas? Rather than seeing art as a subjective practice—one unassailable by the demands of culture or society—Charles Gaines’s lecture at Otis College of Art and Design for the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art proposed that art needs to be reimagined as a cultural practice in order to be fully relevant for today’s political and social climate.

Does an artist have an obligation to consider the act of “care” when creating? What does care mean, when should it be applied, and to whom should it be applied? Does the process of making art need to be redeemed by art serving a reparative function in society? Those were a sampling of the complex questions posed by award-winning writer Maggie Nelson in her Critic-in-Residence lecture, sponsored by the undergraduate Fine Arts department.