Join us for the next CESTA Tuesday lunch seminar, titled "Warhol’s Photography as Data" by Peggy Phelan, Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English at Stanford University. The increasing availability of digital images of art collections raises deep quandaries and fascinating possibilities for the future of art history. During the preparation for the exhibition and book, Contact Warhol: Photography Without End, Professor Phelan and Professor Richard Meyer (Stanford, Art History) began working with digital reproductions of 130000 individual photographic exposures made by Andy Warhol, which are now part of Stanford University’s Cantor Art Center collection.  This talk highlights some of the possibilities and the limitations that emerge when treating visual art as a sequence of numbers. RSVP for lunch or to receive the Zoom link here.

About the Speaker

Peggy Phelan is the Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English. Publishing widely in both book and essay form, Phelan is the author of Unmarked: the politics of performance (Routledge, 1993); Mourning Sex: performing public memories (Routledge, 1997; honorable mention Callaway Prize for dramatic criticism 1997-1999); the survey essay for Art and Feminism, ed. by Helena Reckitt (Phaidon, 2001, winner of “The top 25 best books in art and architecture” award, amazon.com, 2001); the survey essay for Pipilotti Rist (Phaidon, 2001); and the catalog essay for Intus: Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 2004). She edited and contributed to Live Art in Los Angeles, (Routledge, 2012), and contributed catalog essays for Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (Mak Center, 2013), Haunted: Contemporary Photography, Video, and Performance (Guggenheim Museum, 2010); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007); and Andy Warhol: Giant Size (Phaidon, 2008), among others. Phelan is co-editor, with the late Lynda Hart, of Acting Out: Feminist Performances (University of Michigan Press, 1993; cited as “best critical anthology” of 1993 by American Book Review); and co-editor with Jill Lane of The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1997). She contributed an essay to Philip Ursprung’s Herzog and De Meurron: Natural History (CAA, 2005).