Neue Slowenische Kunst (Novi kolektivizem and Laibach), Krst Pod Triglavom (Baptism under Triglav),1986, Cankajarev Dom Cultural and Congress Center, Ljubljana, screenprint on paper, Bates College Museum of Art. Submitted photo
The Bates College Museum of Art will present two programs that correspond to two of exhibitions currently on view, deepening discussions around the artists and works in the collection. The events are free and open to the public.
Director and chief curator Dan Mills will present a lecture about renowned artist Saul Steinberg to accompany the exhibition “Saul Steinberg: Brilliant Witty Inventive Cerebral,” at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 5, in Olin Arts Center Room 104. After the talk, the annual welcome back to campus reception will be held beginning at 5:30 p.m.in the galleries.
Eda Čufer Submitted photo
Visiting artist Eda Čufer will take part in a discussion with Marina Filipovic, visiting lecturer in Russian at Bates, at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 19, in Olin Arts Center Room 104. Their talk will encompass subject matter relating to the “Neue Slowenische Kunst | Monumental Spectacular” exhibition including avant garde arts practices in Yugoslavia in the late twentieth century.
The exhibits are both on view through Oct. 5.
Sept. 5: Dan Mills on Saul Steinberg
Learn more about the fascinating and multi-talented artist Saul Steinberg (b. Romania 1914, d. New York 1999), in this lecture by Dan Mills, Art Director of Museum of Art at Bates College.
Steinberg is known worldwide for his drawings reproduced in The New Yorker magazine. From the 1940s until the late 1990s, he created over 80 covers and 1200 internal drawings for the magazine, many of which have since been repeatedly reprinted. Over the course of his long career, Steinberg also created collages, drawings, murals, paintings, prints, and sculptures. This lecture will discuss Steinberg’s work in various media; his biography, including his difficult childhood and turbulent early adulthood in Romania and Italy before moving to the US; and how he gave graphic definition to post World War II life, often peeling back the veneer of civilization.
Director/artist Dan Mills’s primary curatorial focus is contemporary art. His broad intellectual and aesthetic interests have shaped adventuresome international curatorial programs at several academic museums for 30 years. Mills is known for partnering with scholars and artists on large projects in order to investigate a wide range of topics. At Bates, these have included contemporary Indigenous art (with an Indigenous artist); the anthropocene (with environmental studies); psychological figurative painting and sculpture (studio art); contemporary art by Saudi artists (anthropology); and Vietnamese shaman art (art history).
Exhibitions he has curated or co-curated have traveled to over 50 institutions including Brown University, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Williams College. Mills has been a frequent guest lecturer/panelist at institutions including the Chicago Cultural Center, Wake Forest University, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and guest critic for the Herron School of Art, Stanford University, and Utah Museum of Contemporary Art.
Mills exhibits his work extensively, with recent solo exhibitions at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland; Herron School of Art + Design, Indianapolis; and Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston. His work has been included in international exhibitions at institutions including the Anchorage Museum, Alaska; Long March Space, Factory 798, Beijing; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. He has been Director, Museum of Art, and Lecturer in the Humanities, Bates College since 2010.
Sept. 19: Eda Čufer discussion with Marina Filipovic
Eda Čufer is a dramaturg, curator, writer, and professor of contemporary art history and theory. In 1984, she co-founded the art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Between 2005 and 2020 she lived in the US where she taught art history and theory at Maine College of Art and Design. Her research and writings are concerned with the ideologies of contemporary art, in particular the relationship of political and technological systems to art systems.
Marina Filipovic received her MA in Slavic Languages and Literatures from University of Illinois at Chicago, with a specialization in Russian and Yugoslav literatures; and her PhD in Russian literature and film from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Marina’s teaching ranges from the nineteenth-century to present-day Russia, and across all periods of Soviet culture, including Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cultures. She looks at literatures, film, technology, gender, the avant-garde, socialist realism, and the history of science.
“The Museum is thrilled to have Eda Čufer travel from Slovenia to Bates for a deep engagement with our communities here on the complex topics brought up by the NSK collective,” says Samantha Sigmon, curator of the NSK exhibition. “For Eda to be in conversation with a professor at Bates with many connected ties and interests is such a singular and unique experience not to be missed.”
Neue Slowenische Kunst formed in 1984 out of the industrial band Laibach, The Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre, and the visual art collaborative IRWIN. As a loose organization of like-minded creatives active during the last decade of communist Yugoslavia, they mimicked the language and format of authoritarian regimes and bureaucracy using their repetitive symbols and an eclectic array of iconography, allusions, and references. Neue Slowenische Kunst | Monumental Spectacular is an exhibition of NSK prints from the Museum collection and select multimedia elements primarily from the 1980s that reexamine the complexities around Slovenian, Eastern European, and global history to unearth art’s entanglement with power at a time when Slovenia was held between nationalist, capitalist, and communist ideologies.
The Bates Museum of Art, located at Olin Arts Center at 75 Russell St., Lewiston, is a preeminent cultural center supporting the mission, values, and aspirations of Bates College. As a teaching museum at a liberal arts college, the Museum of Art and its exhibitions, collections, stewardship, and interpretation bring a world of ideas to enhance the vitality of the intellectual and cultural life of Bates, the surrounding communities, and beyond. The museum is always free and open from Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and also until 7:30 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays from September to May. For more information, visit bates.edu/museum.
