P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
Saturday, May 3, 2008 at 3:00PM

SkowheganTALKS, a new lecture series organized by the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, features conversations between some of the most influential visual artists working today.  The first two talks in the series drew a full house at P.S.1.  The series continues on Saturday, May 3, with a conversation between artists Sanford Biggers and Paul Pfeiffer. 

SkowheganTALKS features recent alumni of the residency program of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in conversation with artists who have been faculty members at Skowhegan.  While the association with Skowhegan is the common factor among the artists, the conversations are not intended to focus on the artists’ respective experiences at Skowhegan, but rather will address subjects of broader interest including the participating artists' current and past work and the challenges and opportunities that are characteristic of working as an artist today.  An especially interesting aspect of SkowheganTALKS is that the conversations are also intended explore the mentor-student relationship, a model that is becoming increasingly important for young artists in New York and worldwide.  Because most of the conversations will pair artists who met at Skowhegan when one was a participant and the other was a faculty member, the speakers have direct mentor-student experience with one another upon which they can draw.

Sanford Biggers attended Skowhegan in 1998.  He creates multi-disciplinary artworks that integrate film/video installation, sculpture, music and performance. Influenced by his experiences living throughout the United States, Europe and Japan, and by Buddhism, hip-hop and urban culture, Biggers’ work is known for its combination of meditative rigor and improvisatory edge.  Biggers’ installations, videos, and performances have appeared in venues worldwide including the Tate Modern, London, Whitney Museum, New York, Studio Museum, Harlem, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, as well as institutions in China, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Poland and Russia. He has had solo exhibitions at Grand Arts, Kansas City, Mary Goldman Gallery, Los Angeles, Triple Candie, New York, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Matrix/Univ.of Berkeley Museum, Berkeley, and Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw. He is the recipient of awards and grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, New York Percent for the Arts, Lambent Fellowship in the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation. 

Paul Pfeiffer was a Visiting Artist at Skowhegan in 2005 and is a member of Skowhegan’s Board of Governors.  His videos, photos, and sculptures address the many problematic aspects of present and future worlds dominated by astonishing revolutions in visual representation. His transformation of images and objects from televised sporting events, fashion photography, and Hollywood movies prompts us to reconsider conventional attitudes about issues of the body, race, identity, faith, and architectural space in contemporary society. Pfeiffer uses recent computer technologies to dissect the role that mass media plays in shaping consciousness and contemplates an uneasy dialectic of presence and absence through acts of erasure, camouflage, displacement and reconstruction.  Pfeiffer is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, most notably becoming the inaugural recipient of The Bucksbaum Award given by the Whitney Museum of American Art (2000). In 2003, a traveling retrospective of his work was organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Pfeiffer’s work has also been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Project, Gagosian Gallery (New York), San Francisco Art Institute, the Walker Art Center, SITE Santa Fe, and many other venues in the United States and around the world.  Skowhegan enjoys the benefit of having an exceptionally talented group of alumni and former faculty who maintain a strong connection to the School, and on whom it has drawn for speakers for SkowheganTALKS.  
 
 Recent graduates include some of the most exciting emerging artists working today, and Skowhegan’s faculty has always included a wide range of renowned mid-career artists.    SkowheganTALKS is organized under the auspices of the Skowhegan Alliance, a group of young alumni who organize activities and projects for the benefit of Skowhegan.    Future SkowheganTALKS include:  Ellen Altfest and Robert V. Storr Saturday, May 31 3:00 pm P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center  Skowhegan would like to thank P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center for hosting SkowheganTALKS.  All events are free with admission to P.S.1.   Founded by artists in 1946, Skowhegan is one of the country’s foremost artists’ residency communities, providing visual artists with a collaborative and rigorous creative environment for the development of new work. Since 1946 Skowhegan has brought together almost 4,000 artists—many of whom are among the country’s leading artists—as students and faculty for intensive nine-week summer residencies at the School’s picturesque 300-acre lakeside site in rural Maine.

For more information about Skowhegan, visit www.skowheganart.org. 

For directions and information about P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, visit www.ps1.org.    # # # #  For media information or additional visuals contact:  Kate Haw, Executive Director, Development & Administration Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture 
212.529.0505   khaw@skowheganart.org