Nasher Prize Graduate Symposium: Keynote Speaker announced and submission deadline extended

The Nasher Sculpture Center announces the keynote speaker for the 2018 Nasher Prize Graduate Symposium, Matthew Jesse Jackson, a writer, curator, and critic who teaches modern and contemporary art at the University of Chicago. The annual Nasher Prize Graduate Symposium offers master’s and doctoral students from any academic discipline the opportunity to present scholarly work on a host of questions and topics related to each year’s new Laureate. This year’s focus is the work of 2018 Nasher Prize Laureate Theaster Gates. Jackson, who contributed to the 2012 publication 12 Ballads for Huguenot House about Theaster Gate’s dOCUMENTA (13) work in Kassel, Germany will deliver the keynote address following the presentations of those students selected to present papers at the Graduate Symposium on April 5, 2018 in Dallas, Texas at the Nasher Sculpture Center.

The deadline for submissions for the Nasher Prize Graduate Symposium open call for papers has been extended to January 15, 2018.

About Matthew Jesse Jackson
Jackson is Associate Professor of Art History, Visual Arts, and the College of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Chicago and a current Beinecke Fellow at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He is the author of The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes, winner of the Robert Motherwell Book Award, as well as co-author of Vision and Communism. For the past dozen years he has been involved with Our Literal Speed, a text and art undertaking located in Selma, Alabama. His current writing project is called Vernacular Modernism All Over the Deep South and he is editor and co-translator from the Russian of the forthcoming Ilya Kabakov: On Art. 

Submission requirements
The symposium aims to expand scholarship in the field of contemporary sculpture in its many forms. Submissions should address themes related to the work of the 2018 Nasher Prize Laureate, Theaster Gates. Though best known for his architectural projects, such as Dorchester Projects (ongoing since 2008) and Stony Island Arts Bank (ongoing since 2015), for which the artist has restored abandoned buildings in Chicago and recast them as cultural centers, Gates approaches all aspects of his work from the perspective of an object-maker, with a strong focus on the material aspects of memory, history, and place. Gates has established a new paradigm for sculpture by joining together disparate methods of artistic production—the creation of discrete objects and the re-zoning, rebuilding, and reterritorializing of architectural spaces.

Complete proposals must include the following
–A complete mailing address, e-mail address, phone number, field, and university affiliation of participant.
–Paper title and abstract of no more than 200 words that includes three to five keywords.

Proposals are due on January 15, 2018.
Send submissions and questions to symposium [​at​] nashersculpturecenter.org. More information can be found here.

Successful applicants will be notified on/around January 31, 2018.

With proof of need, eligible candidates may be considered for scholarship funding to offset travel costs.

Sponsors
JPMorgan Chase & Co. is the presenting sponsor of the Nasher Prize. Founding Partners of the Nasher Prize are The Eugene McDermott Foundation and Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger. The Nasher Prize Community Month is made possible by support from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Donna Wilhelm Family Fund. Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) is the public transportation partner for Nasher Prize Month. ​Media sponsors are Belo Media Group, KERA’s Art & Seek, and PaperCity.