Spring 2009 Speaker

Composition in Red and Green (2000) - Installation by Spencer Finch

Spencer Finch, Artist

"Beauty and the Scientific Method"

Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 7pm
Textor 102

Free and Open to the Public

In a wide-ranging talk that incorporates examples drawn from 19th-century science and technology such as the telegraph, artists such as Claude Monet and Georges Seurat, and his own contemporary artwork, Spencer Finch will explore how science and art are intertwined and can inform each other. Science and scientists have been inspirations for Finch’s own practice as an artist, and he will examine the way that the scientific method and strategies of art-making are analogous. He will also discuss how artists can use science to pursue their own very unscientific agendas. His presentation will include a dramatic re-creation of Galileo’s refutation of Aristotle’s theory of falling bodies — using grapefruit.

A Day of Science and Art

During Mr. Finch's visit to campus, visitors will be able to view several installations of his artwork, along with student artwork prepared especially for this event. See Spring 2009 Art Installations for complete information.
 

Biographical Information

Spencer Finch was born in 1962 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at Rhode Island School of Design (MFA in Sculpture), Hamilton College (BA in Comparative Literature) in New York, and Doshisha University in Kyoto, and has exhibited extensively internationally. Finch had a major solo exhibition What Time Is It On The Sun? at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts in 2007 which was accompanied by a monograph with essays by Susan Cross and Daniel Birnbaum. His large solo exhibition ‘As if the Sea Should Part and Show a Further Sea’ is currently on view at Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane Australia. His public art project with Creative Time ‘The River that Flows Both Ways’ for the High Line in New York City will be on view in the Spring of 2009. Finch's work is held in important museum collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; MASS MoCA, Massachusetts and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Finch was featured on the cover of the journal Art in America in 2008.

Gallery of Spencer Finch art work
Spencer Finch personal website