005: Dan Graham

11 October 2007

Internationally renowned artist and writer Dan Graham will speak on the history of video art and his own practice on Thursday, 11 October 2007 at 6:30pm at One Longfellow Square, Portland, Maine. Admission is free and open to the public.

Dan Graham has been active since the mid-1960s in a diverse range of arts and humanities: film, video, photography, sculpture, installation, performance, architectural design, art theory and criticism, and rock music criticism. Graham’s pavilion installations interrogate power dynamics of art objects and public architecture, social identity constructions, and mediation of the visual field. A sense of play and cultural-historical consciousness permeates all his practice. Graham made vital contributions to the conceptual and minimal periods of late-20th century art and he continues to participate in the avant-garde.

Graham was awarded the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture 1992 Medal for Mixed Media and the 2001 French Vermeil Medal by the City of Paris. In 2002, his Yin/Yang pavilion was unveiled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In February 2007, Graham presented his important new pavilion Mannerism/Rococo at the Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris. Graham is the subject of a major retrospective at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2009.

The Portland Film + Video Artists Collective and One Longfellow Square are very pleased to facilitate this unique opportunity for Maine to engage one of the foremost practitioners of contemporary arts and humanities.

Dan Graham’s presence is made possible through the generous support of the Maine Humanities Council, Maine Arts Commission, Portland Color, and the MFA Program at Maine College of Art.