Art in the Age of Resortization

Join us for a panel discussion that will take its point of departure from CIA faculty member Christian Wulffen’s current exhibition, Mouse Museum Reframed: 20 Years and More, and Isabelle Graw’s recent essay in Texte zur Kunst, “Welcome to the Resort.”

This insightful discussion will be held from 6 to 7:30pm Friday, November 18 in the Ann + Norman Roulet Student + Alumni Gallery, where Mouse Museum Reframed is on view through November 21. Seating for this event is limited. Please reserve your spot via Eventbrite.

Art historian, theorist and journal publisher Graw offers the timely provocation that contemporary art is up against a big money circuit of commodification through the trade of super galleries and their extended marketplace online. Graw frames the situation as “a new value regime” and finds an analogy in resorts for the wealthy—hence, “resortization.” Key questions center on the loss of critical evaluation and the cultural and social efficacy of art as it continues to decline through the processes of financialization and resortization. The panel will respond to Graw’s several theses while addressing issues of exhibition and installation elicited by Wulffen’s Mouse Museum Reframed.

About the Moderator

Gary Sampson (MA, PhD University of California, Santa Barbara) teaches art and design history and theory at the Cleveland Institute of Art. His areas of scholarship are in history of photography, urban design and representation, and visual culture. His publications include Imag(in)ing Race and Place in Colonialist Photography, with Eleanor Hight; Photographs at St. Lawrence University, with Catherine Tedford; and “Landscape and Fluid Imaging of the Emerging City” in Emerging Landscapes: Between Landscape and Representation. Sampson’s current book-length project comprises a series of essays on modes of photographic representation and the politics of urban regeneration. He also engages in practice-based research in photography.

About the Panelists

Christian Wulffen was born in 1954 in Bochum, Germany, where he received his training, culminating with a MFA from the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste (State Academy of Fine Arts) in Stuttgart. He is currently professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He previously taught at the Staatlichen Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart and Freie Hochschule (Independent Art Academy), Metzingen, among other institutions, in Germany. He has lectured in both Germany and the United States. His work has been supported by artistic residencies from the Kunststiftung (Art Foundation) Baden-Württemberg and Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.

The artist is currently represented by Michael Sturm Gallery (Stuttgart, Germany) and Reinhold Maas Gallery (Reutlingen, Germany) and collaborates with Niklas van Bartha London. He has a long distinguished repertoire of exhibitions, through both group shows and one-person exhibitions. He has developed installation exhibitions for the McDonough Museum of Art: How to Improve your English (2007); Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland: It is, It is not (2009); Dallas Contemporary: Bridges and Other Constructions (2010–2011); and William Busta Gallery, Cleveland: NSEW (2012).

His work has been extensively collected by the Stiftung für Konkrete Kunst, (Reutlingen, Germany) which has featured his work in a series of exhibitions and also houses his archive. Wulffen has curated with his Portability and Network, Spaces (2011) Cleveland, which brought together the work of 21 European artists who pursue the fluid boundaries between visual art, architecture and design as well as the relationship of the art to the larger society. In 2017, the collection of the Stiftung für Konkrete Kunst, (Foundation for Concrete Art) transferred to the Municipal Museum of Art Reutlingen, including a selection of works from C. Wulffen.

Laura Hengehold is Professor of Philosophy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Her research explores the relationship between imagination, political power and embodiment, and draws on 20th century French philosophy, particularly existentialism and the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, as well as feminist philosophies and theories of sexuality. She has published books on Foucault and Kant, Simone de Beauvoir and Deleuze, and edited and translated works by Francophone African political thinkers including Jean Bidima, Seloua Luste Boulbina and Dénètem Touam Bona. Her latest solo book project explores political responses to the fantasy of anonymity.

Joan Waltemath is an artist whose work investigates the temporal and spatial registers of painting and drawing set in relation to architectonic elements. Informed by the cross-disciplinary exchange that began in 1970s downtown New York, her practice continues to respond dialogically to other media and disciplines.

Waltemath’s work emerges as a response to materials, visions, architectures and historical contexts. Her series of eight large-scale paintings, The Treaty of 1868: an epic (2009-2018) takes as its subject her relationship to the genocide unleashed upon the Plains Indian tribes in the aftermath of the Fort Laramie treaty between the United States and the Dakota, Lakota and Arapaho tribes. In 2011, Waltemath sought out Lakota medicine man, Dave Swallow, and asked for his help in coming to terms with her legacy as a descendent of peoples who settled on the land designated by the 1868 treaty. Working on grounds of multiple sewn canvas panels, Waltemath’s paintings reflect the fractured and multi-perspectival nature of the history being told as she processes her ongoing relation with Swallow’s and his tiyospaye (“family of families”).

Her solo exhibitions include One does not negate the other, Peter Hionas Gallery, New York (2015); Torso/Roots, Galerie von Bartha, Basel, Switzerland (2007); The invisible web of Iktomie iyokipi, Newspace, Los Angeles (2002); and Joan Waltemath, The Drawing Center, New York (1998). Her work was also presented in the group exhibition Géricault to Rockburne: Selections from the Michael and Juliet Rubenstein Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2020).

Waltemath is the recipient of the Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2018); a Creative Capital Award for Treaty of 1868 (2012); and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2008). She participated in residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, Nebraska (2017); Art Farm, Marquette, Nebraska (2014-2016, 2011, 2009); the Jentel Foundation, Banner, Wyoming (2008, 2005); and The Edward F. Albee Foundation, Montauk, New York (2006, 2003).

She is the director of the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, a member of the editorial collective for PUBLIC Journal, and editor-at-large of The Brooklyn Rail. She holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Hunter College in New York City.

Image: An installation view of Christian Wulffen’s “Mouse Museum Reframed: 20 Years and More” in the Ann and Norman Roulet Student + Alumni Gallery.