Collaboration
Memory and the Work of Art
HOW DO THE ARTS respond to—and mold our experience of—events of global significance and collectivizing impact? How do they shape our collective memory of the past?
On the tenth anniversary of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, these are among the questions being explored in Memory and the Work of Art, a collaborative contemplation spanning some nine months in 2011. Memory and the Work of Art presents a series of exhibitions, concerts, performances, commissions, and lectures that cumulatively seek to help us better understand how the arts mediate our response to the past. Organized jointly by arts and cultural organizations on campus and in the Princeton community and presented with support from the Princeton University Arts Initiative, this expansive project offers a cross-disciplinary investigation that draws from photography, history, and neuroscience; from visual art, music, dance, and the written and spoken word.
Memory and the Work of Art will pose such questions as:
Three complementary Museum exhibitions—Lasting Impressions of the Grand Tour: Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome (March 5–June 12), Cartographies of Time (June 25–September 18), and The Life and Death of Buildings (July 23– November 6)—will explore the themes of time, transformation, and memory, from the perspectives, respectively, of eighteenth-century prints and paintings of Rome, the eternal city; attempts to visually represent time in the form of timelines drawn from rare books, manuscripts, and prints; and photographs from the 1840s to the present evoking the life cycle of buildings and photography’s uniquely appropriate tools for such an investigation.
While the bulk of activity fostered by Memory and the Work of Art will be presented in the fall, two concerts on the theme of memory will be performed in the Museum galleries this winter and spring: the Princeton Singers will present the concert Heaven-Haven on February 19 and 20; and Ars Moriendi and Reliquary: Memorialization in Music, with music composed by Steven Mackey and Barbara White, professors in the University’s Department of Music, will be presented on April 13. Future highlights include a distinguished lecture series in the fall of 2011, bringing together a number of intellectuals whose work engages with memory from multiple vantage points, and which functions as the locus of this collective season of exploration.
Project Partners include
On the tenth anniversary of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, these are among the questions being explored in Memory and the Work of Art, a collaborative contemplation spanning some nine months in 2011. Memory and the Work of Art presents a series of exhibitions, concerts, performances, commissions, and lectures that cumulatively seek to help us better understand how the arts mediate our response to the past. Organized jointly by arts and cultural organizations on campus and in the Princeton community and presented with support from the Princeton University Arts Initiative, this expansive project offers a cross-disciplinary investigation that draws from photography, history, and neuroscience; from visual art, music, dance, and the written and spoken word.
Memory and the Work of Art will pose such questions as:
- How do the arts reify absence and presence?
- If trauma eludes representation, how do we talk about the arts as a witness to trauma?
- In speaking of an ars memorativa, an art of organizing memory, how might we consider a different kind of mnemonic, in which the arts do not so much order memory as create, contemplate, and confound it?
Three complementary Museum exhibitions—Lasting Impressions of the Grand Tour: Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome (March 5–June 12), Cartographies of Time (June 25–September 18), and The Life and Death of Buildings (July 23– November 6)—will explore the themes of time, transformation, and memory, from the perspectives, respectively, of eighteenth-century prints and paintings of Rome, the eternal city; attempts to visually represent time in the form of timelines drawn from rare books, manuscripts, and prints; and photographs from the 1840s to the present evoking the life cycle of buildings and photography’s uniquely appropriate tools for such an investigation.
While the bulk of activity fostered by Memory and the Work of Art will be presented in the fall, two concerts on the theme of memory will be performed in the Museum galleries this winter and spring: the Princeton Singers will present the concert Heaven-Haven on February 19 and 20; and Ars Moriendi and Reliquary: Memorialization in Music, with music composed by Steven Mackey and Barbara White, professors in the University’s Department of Music, will be presented on April 13. Future highlights include a distinguished lecture series in the fall of 2011, bringing together a number of intellectuals whose work engages with memory from multiple vantage points, and which functions as the locus of this collective season of exploration.
Project Partners include
- Arts Council of Princeton
- L’Avant-Scène, Princeton University
- Lewis Center for the Arts
- McCarter Theater
- Music Department, Princeton University
- Princeton Public Library
- Princeton Singers
- Princeton University Art Museum
- Princeton University Concerts
- Princeton University Library
- Theater Department, Princeton University
- Westminster Choir College
