The AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School: Holland Cotter: Art Critic, So What?
66 West 12th Street
In awarding New York Times art critic Holland Cotter the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the Pulitzer Committee citation noted his “acute observation, luminous writing [and] dramatic story telling.” In his AICA/USA Distinguished Critic talk the critic known for the range and deep humanity of his concerns will address his roundabout route to art criticism, his response to the predominant modes of art criticism he found in place, the increasing limitations of that model, and how he imagines it could be changed and expanded. This is the fourth AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School, an annual event addressing current issues in the world of art criticism. It is presented by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA: Associations Internationale des Critiques d’Art) in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
AICA was founded in the wake of World War II to protect the openness of global discourse in the arts. There are now chapters in 64 countries currently promoting art criticism and its insights into contemporary culture. AICA/USA, with a nationwide membership, contributes significantly to the current dialogue.
Posted on June 8, 2010
The John McDonald Moore Memorial Lecture: Peter Galison
65 West 11th Street (enter at 66 West 12th Street)
Historian, philosopher and filmmaker Peter L. Galison delivers the fifth John McDonald Moore Memorial Lecture. Galison is Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. His main work explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of twentieth century physics–experimentation, instrumentation, and theory. He is author of several books among them Image & Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (1998) and Einstein’s Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (2003), and the producer of two films, The Ultimate Weapon: The H-Bomb Dilemma (2000) and Secrecy (2008). In 1997, Peter Galison was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow; in 1999, he was a winner of the Max Planck Prize given by the Max Planck Gesellschaft and Humboldt Stiftung. Named after one of the university’s most influential art history teachers, this lecture series honors John McDonald Moore’s contribution to the university’s intellectual life. Moore taught art history and criticism at The New School from 1968 until his death in 1999. His classes were famously popular for bringing the vision of an artist who is also a scholar to his students.
Posted on June 7, 2010
Huma Bhabha
66 West 12th Street
“The idea of monument and death
is the ultimate raw material of art.”
– Huma Bhabha
This spring’s Public Art Fund Talks series features three artists whose works reinvent and extend the language of figurative sculpture for a new era. Neither literal portraits nor traditional monuments, their works push the expressive potential of sculptural forms and materials, marking a renewed interest in the figure in contemporary art. These artists are also featured in the upcoming Public Art Fund exhibition Statuesque, opening June 2, 2010 at City Hall Park. The second speaker in the series is Huma Bhabha. Public Art Fund Talks are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.
Bhabha (b. 1962 in Karachi, Pakistan, lives in Poughkeepsie) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (1985), and her MFA from Columbia University, New York (1989). In 2008, she was awarded the Emerging Artist Award from The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. She has had solo exhibitions at Grimm Fine Art, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2009; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, France, 2009; and Salon 94, New York, NY, 2007. Her work has been presented in group exhibitions including: 2010: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2010; Every Revolution is a Roll of the Dice, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, NY, 2009; and After-Nature, The New Museum, New York, NY, 2008. Bhabha is represented by Salon 94, New York.
Posted on March 11, 2010
Thomas Houseago
66 West 12th Street
“Our generation sees modernist
art through the lens of pop culture,
not the other way around.”
– Thomas Houseago
This spring’s Public Art Fund Talks series features three artists whose works reinvent and extend the language of figurative sculpture for a new era. Neither literal portraits nor traditional monuments, their works push the expressive potential of sculptural forms and materials, marking a renewed interest in the figure in contemporary art. These artists are also featured in the upcoming Public Art Fund exhibition Statuesque, opening June 2, 2010 at City Hall Park. The last speaker in the series is Thomas Houseago. Public Art Fund Talks are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.
Houseago (b. 1972 in Leeds, England, lives in Los Angeles) studied at Jacob Kramer Foundation College, Leeds (1991) and got his BA from St. Martin’s School of Art, London (1994). Solo exhibitions include: Thomas Houseago, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, 2009; Thomas Houseago: Ode, Galleria Zero, Milan, 2009; Herald St, London, 2008. He has also participated in group shows including: 2010: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2010; Beg Borrow and Steal, The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL, 2009; and Construct and Dissolve, Galerie Sabine Knust, Munich, 2009. Houseago is represented by Michael Werner Gallery, New York.
Posted on March 11, 2010
Matthew Monahan
66 West 12th Street
“It’s interesting to see how
inanimate the figure can be, how
figurative art dies, how it scars,
how it shatters into mere things,
how it turns to dust…”
– Matthew Monahan
This spring’s Public Art Fund Talks series features three artists whose works reinvent and extend the language of figurative sculpture for a new era. Neither literal portraits nor traditional monuments, their works push the expressive potential of sculptural forms and materials, marking a renewed interest in the figure in contemporary art. These artists are also featured in the upcoming Public Art Fund exhibition Statuesque, opening June 2, 2010 at City Hall Park. The first speaker of the series is Matthew Monahan. Public Art Fund Talks are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.
Monahan (b. 1972 in Eureka, California, lives in Los Angeles) received his BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art, New York (1994). Solo exhibitions include: Modern Art, London, 2009; Anton Kern Gallery, New York, 2008; Focus: Matthew Monahan, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2007. He has participated in group exhibitions including: Life on Mars: 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, 2008; Unmonumental, New Museum, New York, 2007; Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2006. Monahan is represented by Anton Kern Gallery, New York.
Posted on March 9, 2010
CALL: Roberta Smith / RESPONSE: Laura Auricchio
CALL: Roberta Smith, Criticism: A Life Sentence
On November 5, 2009, Roberta Smith delivered the 2009 AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School. From her vantage as senior art critic of the New York Times, she shared her thoughts on art criticism in general and, in particular, as it relates to her twenty years at the Times. She both embraced and challenged the concept of art journalism for a daily newspaper that caters to a broad general public, and elaborated on the primary importance of the art object, distinct from the cultural, political or economic context in which it might be situated.
RESPONSE: Laura Auricchio, Responsibility
Laura Auricchio is the Assistant Professor of Art History at Parsons The New School for Design. Auricchio has written extensively for both scholarly and general audiences on topics in the disparate fields of eighteenth-century French visual culture and contemporary art. She is the author of several dozen exhibition and book reviews that have appeared in publications ranging from The Art Bulletin to Art Papers to Time Out New York. Her first book, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution, was published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2009. She is currently working on a visually-informed biography of Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution.
During the heated 2008 campaign season, Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin sought to downplay Barack Obama’s experience as a grass-roots organizer by contrasting it with her own past as the chief elected official of Wasilla, Alaska. The mayor of a small town, Palin famously pronounced, “is sort of like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities.”
Listening to Roberta Smith discuss her thirty-seven years as an art critic, more than twenty of which have been spent writing for the New York Times, I found myself returning to an underlying, if unintended, question implied by Palin’s invidious comparison: does every profession come with its own set of responsibilities? If so, what are the responsibilities of an art critic? And does the act of speaking from a platform as powerful the Times add to her load?
By responsibilities, I do not mean tasks, though Smith surely wrestles daily with a to-do list of epic proportions. (As she explains to a questioner, it is only through obsessive list-making that she manages to maintain her bearings on New York’s high-speed carousel of gallery, museum, and alternative exhibitions.) Rather, I mean responsibility in the sense of “moral accountability,” in the words of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?
Smith apparently believes that art critics do indeed carry a certain burden of responsibility. Mid-way through her presentation, she proposes that all of us who are “lucky enough to have a feeling for art” have an obligation “to give back.” “You can’t be proud about where art will take you,” she insists, suggesting an equivalence among the art world’s varied career choices. Whether your professional relationship to art involves making it, curating it, writing about it, or selling it, the fundamental responsibility, Smith believes, remains the same: to “put [the love of art] back into society.”
As a critic, Smith understands herself to be primarily responsible to her “readership.” But who, precisely, is the reader?
At one point, Smith suggests that her readership may be composed of frequent exhibition-goers. Noting that her reviews are “written in the moment,” she observes that they are also “used by people that way, very quickly.” To a certain extent this is true. For a cultured New Yorker or an out-of-town visitor with a bit of spare time, a Times review may offer little more than casual guidance on which shows to catch and which to skip. In this view, criticism is fleeting, with few enduring consequences.
Elsewhere in her talk, however, Smith implies that responsibilities may run deeper. Lamenting that “our visual lives in this country are more or less unexamined,” Smith seems to propose that a critic might serve as a model whose approach to works of art, designed spaces, and other visual features of our environment could be emulated by others. Everyone has a response to the visual, she avers, and everyone has a “critical ability” – the capacity to “analyze and judge.” Yet when faced with Art, which seems always to begin with a capital A, many otherwise confident viewers feel unprepared, intimated, and so fail to engage with their reactions. The world might be a very different place, Smith muses, if this vast but underutilized resource of critical potential could somehow be tapped. She is quite clear on the point that museums have a role to play in fostering visual literacy among the public. Perhaps critics also share some of this burden.
I wonder, though, whether a critic’s constituency might be much smaller than this vision would suggest. As a very part-time writer of exhibition reviews for Time Out New York, I have been known to share Smith’s hopeful attitude towards the power of criticism to open eyes. I’ve aspired to reach out to a broad public, to persuade just one person to give art a chance. But in moments of more sober reflection I have to concede that a reader who finds art uninteresting is not likely to spend any length of time with an exhibition review. Those who turn to the art section are already hooked. In that case, maybe the best I can do is to provide a bit of historical insight or comparative context that will enable readers to see the art in new ways. In other words, maybe the critic’s responsibility is to educate the educated.
Of course, exhibition-goers are not a critic’s only readers. Artists, curators, dealers and collectors also read reviews. In fact, they can be affected quite profoundly, and in lasting ways, by their contents. Is the critic to be held accountable for these effects? Should potential consequences influence a critic’s writing?
Smith responds with a resounding “no.” She is the viewer’s advocate, pure and simple. “I’m not doing it for the artist,” she states. “They can take my response as evidence of how their broadcast is being received,” or they can ignore it. On the subject of commerce, she demurs. “I don’t really know what effect I have on the market because I don’t really pay any attention to it.”
Does anyone? Should anyone? If so, who?
An audience member hints at this line of inquiry by asking how exhibitions are selected and assigned for review at the Times. Evidently, as the critics with greatest longevity, Smith and Holland Cotter wield considerable power in this regard. But Smith hastens to add that they are not omnipotent. Ultimately, the critic reports to her editor, who reports to someone else, and so on up the ladder. At some point, the paper’s bottom line – a matter of particular urgency in these difficult economic times – must come into play. After all, the Times is a commercial enterprise, albeit one that adheres to a code of journalistic ethics. The critic is an employee. She is, in the cold parlance of an increasingly web- and numbers-driven world of journalism, a “content provider.” Neither more nor less.
Still, I think the question is worth pondering. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?
Posted on February 22, 2010
Aleksandra Wagner / Goes West
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
On occasion of the exhibition The Storyteller at Parsons, The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are pleased to present a talk by Aleksandra Wagner. Grounded in her memory of a purchase of A Thousand and One Nights in the Serbian translation by Stanislav Vinaver, Wagner chooses the shortest month of a year, February, to tell stories about the acts of storytelling in education and in psychoanalysis. One story a night, one page each, shared on the night of March 3.
Aleksandra Wagner is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Bachelor’s Program, The New School for General Studies, and a Member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. Wagner is the editor of our recent publication Considering Forgiveness.
Posted on January 27, 2010
Pablo Helguera: What in the World
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
On occasion of the exhibition The Storyteller at Parsons, The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are pleased to present a talk by Pablo Helguera. Providing an “unauthorized biography” of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Helguera digs out little-known stories around the remarkable curators and other colorful figures of its past, while at the same time reflecting on the social role of individuals in museums and the way in which they influence the reading of objects and the larger narratives of collections.
Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance. His work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances, and written fiction.
Posted on January 27, 2010
CALL: Inaugural Lecture, Speculating on Change / RESPONSE: William Morrish
CALL: Inaugural Lecture, Speculating on Change
The inaugural lecture on “Speculating on Change” was delivered by Michael A. Cohen, Director, The Graduate Program of International Affairs at The New School on October 16, 2009. Cohen discussed cities both as sites of the greatest impacts of global change, but also as sites providing solutions to some of the challenges that result from such change. Four specific “paradoxes” – dealing with issues of economy, geography, politics, and sustainability – provided entries to a discussion of cities as both spaces of hope and sites of vulnerability.
RESPONSE: William Morrish
The response is offered by William Morrish, Dean of the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons The New School for Design. Trained as an architect, Morrish comes to Parsons from the University of Virginia School of Architecture, where he taught and led research in the areas of sustainable urban infrastructure, new housing models, and global urbanization and climate change. In that role, he focused on interdisciplinary work addressing what he calls the “second generation of sustainability”: the design of cultural ecologies. He is a nationally recognized urban designer whose practice encompasses inter-disciplinary research on urban housing and infrastructure, collaborative publications on human settlement and community design, and educational programs exploring integrated design, which are applied to a wide range of innovative community-based city projects.
Michael Cohen’s lecture focused on the discrepancy between emerging ideas on sustainable urban development and the realities of implementing them on the ground, in the growing global city. The four points of his lecture identify the reasons that capacity cannot be delivered, namely the lack of adequate research, tools and models. His lecture points to the disturbing fact that most of our urban development skills are based on outdated concepts that identify master plans and large projects as the cure for urban ills. Cohen began to sketch the challenge faced when transferring stimuli for change from to the top to a middle zone, where local economic, social and ecological activities can aggregate into more sustainable urban networks of support. The sobering conclusion of his lecture was that we have little time to change practice and behavior. As the polar ice caps melt, cities are being flooded with new social, cultural and environment realities.
Yet within this maelstrom of global urban change, communities such as Bogotá, Columbia, and Rosaria, Argentina, are overhauling the old the rules of planning, governance and management procedures. Civic leaders and neighborhood activists are learning how to turn the principles of sustainable development into new models of integrated design, inclusive operations, and regenerative practices. These transformations focus on the mid-size scale of the cities and combine it with basic everyday economic and social transactions, for instance by expanding mobility options, connecting micro-business networks, and designing open and transparent civic facilities as cultural centers.
Posted on December 2, 2009
Peter M. Rutkoff, The New School at 90: What Would Dewey Do?
New York City
The New School hosts Peter M. Rutkoff, Professor of American Studies at Kenyon College, to deliver a lecture commemorating the 90th Anniversary of the founding of The New School. Professor Rutkoff wrote New School: A History of The New School for Social Research, the seminal history of The New School and the only publication to deal with the university’s storied history in depth. The co-author of the only published monograph on the history of The New School, Rutkoff considers the heritage of the university on its 90th anniversary. In light of current debates on the challenges posed by urban schooling, pedagogy, and philosophy he will reexamine the influence of The New School in progressive education. Can the teachings of John Dewey (on the 150th anniversary year of his birthday) continue to serve as a guide to the direction of progressive education? He will draw on examples of school and university alliances and the on-going importance of experiential pedagogy in contemporary education. He will, to cite Zorah Neale Hurston, urge American schools to leave the classroom.
Sponsored by The New School and held in conjunction with the week-long exhibition and event series, “By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School.”
Posted on October 7, 2009
Roberta Smith: “Criticism: A Life Sentence”
Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th Street
New York City
Reservations strongly recommended*
The AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School
In an insightful, probing and personal analysis, Roberta Smith delivers this year’s AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School. Under the title “Criticism: A Life Sentence,” Smith presents her view of the craft, process and usage of art criticism, and the rising challenges of crisis-management and relevance-maintenance.
Roberta Smith is the acclaimed senior art critic for the New York Times. She was born in New York City, raised in Lawrence, Kansas, and earned a B.A. from Grinnell College in 1969. An alumna of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art and the Paula Cooper Gallery before becoming a professional art critic in the 1970s, contributing to Artforum and serving as a senior editor for Art in America. In 1981 she became art critic for the Village Voice, before moving to the New York Times in 1986. In 2003, the College Art Association honored Smith with the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism.
This is the third AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School, an annual event addressing current issues in the world of art criticism. It is presented by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA: Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art) in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
AICA was founded in the wake of World War II to protect the openness of global discourse in the arts. There are now chapters in 64 countries currently promoting art criticism and its insights into contemporary culture. AICA/USA, with a nationwide membership, contributes significantly to the current dialogue.
*The New School Box Office is open Monday through Friday, 1 to 7 p.m. Reservations and inquiries can be made by emailing boxoffice@newschool.edu or calling 212.229.5488
Posted on September 20, 2009
By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School
Open daily, 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
66 West 12th Street
New York City
As The New School celebrates its 90th anniversary, this collaboration between Parts & Labor and the Vera List Center features a series of free events hosted in Parts & Labor’s mobile gallery, a truck parked outside Tishman auditorium. Discussions, lectures, and workshops presented inside the truck and in adjacent rooms in The New School’s “signature building” (designed by Joseph Urban in 1930) bring together a cast of contributors, members of the university community, and the public to examine the founding principles of The New School and to address the question of how these principles have fared over time. These participatory events investigate the institutional and pedagogical history of the university as they have grown alongside a community and its urban site. Through a variety of interactive strategies participants initiate reflections on recent calls for change at The New School by projecting them against the backdrop of the university’s unique history of critical engagement with the concepts of newness and change.
Parts & Labor’s stop at The New School is one in a series of encounters unfolding during a traveling exhibition that will subsequently tour the country and explore other site- and community-specific experiences of the transformation of the American landscape. In its New York manifestation, called “By Any Name,” the project takes the concept of a university archive and re-imagines it as a representational installation with the power to evoke–and possibly, to jog–institutional memory, serving as an aesthetic, systemic response to the diverse missions, traditions, and images now associated with The New School.
Composed of recycled texts and computer equipment, materials drawn from The New School library, and a new text penned by members of The New School community, this week-long on-campus environment involves a range of major and lesser-known events, figures, ideas, opinions, and reminiscences which inform the legacy of the university. “By Any Name” invites both The New School community and the general public to consider: How does The New School remember its past, and how can its approach to the past change its approach to the future? “By Any Name” insists that the university’s legacy be subject to further documentation.
These events are presented as part of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2010 program cycle “Speculating on Change.”
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
Unless noted below, all events take place in Parts & Labor Gallery at The New School, parked outside of Tishman Auditorium at 66 West 12th Street, and are free and open to the public.
Consultation/Séance
The Future
Monday, October 19 through Friday, October 23, 2009
Open daily, 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Featuring psychics Sherene Schostak and Kiki T
Sound Installation
WHERE ARE WE GOING? AND WHAT ARE WE DOING?
Monday, October 19 through Saturday, October 24, 2009, Open daily
A project by Vera List Center Fellows Lin + Lam and Robert Sember
Drawing Workshop
Thomas Bosket
Monday, October 19, 2009 – 1:00 to 4:00 p.m.
Discussion Group
Ali Krasners on the history of The New School
Monday, October 19, 2009 – 4:00 to 4:50 p.m.
Discussion Group
Tess Harrison on the history of The New School
Monday, October 19, 2009 – 5:00 to 5:50 p.m.
Lecture
Peter M. Rutkoff
The New School at 90: What Would Dewey Do?
Monday, October 19, 2009 – 6:00 to 8:30 p.m.
Tishman Auditorium, 66 West 12th Street
Reception to follow in Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, 5th Floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street)
Workshop
Andy Bichlbaum’s Class, sans Andy
Tuesday, October 20, 2009 – 3:00 to 5:40 p.m.
Featuring psychic Sherene Schostak
Open Discussion
John Zinsser
The New York Art World and The New School: History and Possibility
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 – 1:00 to 2:45 p.m.
Parsons The New School for Design, Kellen Auditorium
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street
Roundtable
The Librarians’ Circle
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 – 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
The New School, Orozco Room
66 West 12th Street, 7th floor
Class Session
Joseph Heathcott: The City as Archive
Thursday, October 22, 2009 – 12:00 to 1:40 p.m.
Conversation and Art Walk
Art in the Institution/Art as the Institution:
The New School Art Collection and its Institutional Life
Thursday, October 22, 2009 – 4:00 to 5:00 p.m.
Vera List Courtyard, 66 West 12th Street, ground floor
Posted on September 20, 2009
Michael A. Cohen, Speculating on Change: Four Paradoxes of Our Urban Future
65 Fifth Avenue, between 12th and 13th Streets
New York City
Each year, an inaugural lecture launches the Vera List Center’s annual theme, defining the intellectual territory that will be explored in public programs throughout the year. The lecturer introduces the theme in the broadest sense, serving as a guide to the range and richness of the topic at hand, and rooting the concept within The New School’s intellectual tradition.
This year’s programs call for a speculation on notions of “change,” specifically some of the descriptions, procedures and perceptions associated with change that inform collective action, whether political, scientific, or cultural. The inaugural lecture is delivered by Michael A. Cohen, Director, The Graduate Program of International Affairs at The New School.
The current global economic crisis demonstrates the impact on the economic welfare and political stability of both rich and poor countries of accelerating global flows of people, ideas, capital and competition for control over human and natural resources. Cohen discusses cities both as sites of the greatest impacts of global change, but also as sites providing solutions to some of the challenges that result from such change. Four specific paradoxes provide entries to a discussion of cities as both spaces of hope and sites of vulnerability:
- The economic paradox that cities are both the sites of income and opportunity and the sites of growing poverty and inequality,
- The geographic paradox that cities are quintessentially “local” and specific to their geographic context, yet they are the sites of intensified impacts of global processes,
- The political paradox of growing urban populations that will soon represent the majorities of national populations, but do not receive the political attention they deserve and require, and
- The sustainability paradox that cities are sites of pollution that contribute to greenhouse gases, but are also the sites of opportunity for policy reform and sustainable design of the material world.
Michael A. Cohen (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Director of the International Affairs Program. He also works as Advisor to the Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Urban Planning of the University of Buenos Aires. Before coming to the New School in 2001, he was a Visiting Fellow of the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University. From 1972 to 1999, he had a distinguished career at the World Bank. He was responsible for much of the urban policy development of the Bank over that period and, from 1994 to 1998, he served as the Senior Advisor to the Bank’s Vice-President for Environmentally Sustainable Development. He has worked in over fifty countries and was heavily involved in the Bank’s work on infrastructure, environment, and sustainable development. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Panel on Urban Dynamics.
Cohen is the author or editor of several books, including most recently Preparing the Urban Future: Global Pressures and Local Forces (ed. with A. Garland, B. Ruble, and J. Tulchin), The Human Face of the Urban Environment (ed. with I. Serageldin), and Urban Policy and Economic Development: An Agenda for the 1990s. Other recent publications include articles in 25 Years of Urban Development (Amersfoort, The Netherlands, 1998), Cities Fit for People (Kirdar, ed., 1996), The Brookings Review, Journal of the Society for the Study of Traditional Environments, International Social Science Review, Habitat International, and Finance and Development. He is currently completing a study of urban inequality in Buenos Aires. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, The Johns Hopkins University, and the School of Architecture, Design, and Urban Planning of the University of Buenos Aires.
This program has been made possible, in part, by a generous grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
This event is presented as part of the Vera List Center’s program cycle on “Speculating on Change.”
Posted on September 20, 2009
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