Lunch on Fridays: Michelle Grabner and Jennifer Kabat

Spend a lunch hour learning about the latest in art and design during these Friday lectures. Each lecture features a variety of artists and designers from around the world, including CIA faculty and visiting artists. This event is free and open to the public. Pizza and beverages will be provided on a first-come, first-served basis.

In connection with the Great Lakes Research exhibition currently on view in the Cleveland Institute of Art’s Reinberger Gallery, join us for a dynamic conversation between artistic director of FRONT International, Michelle Grabner, and writer and critic Jennifer Kabat. In an article for Frieze, Kabat asks, “As more artists and writers move outside the ‘centre,’ how can that open up art and increase its relevance as artists confront new communities and contexts?” This question and others regarding contemporary discourses that shape the distinctions between the localism, regionality, and globalism will be discussed.

Jennifer Kabat

Awarded a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism, Jennifer Kabat teaches at the New School and NYU. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, BOMB, Frieze, McSweeney’s, The New York Review of Books, The Believer andThe White Review. Her essay “Rain Like Cotton” is in Best American Essays 2018, and she’s working on a book GHOSTLANDS, about grief and modernism. She lives in rural upstate New York, and her proudest achievement is joining her local fire department.

Michelle Grabner

Michelle Grabner is an artist, a writer, and a curator based in Wisconsin. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught for 20 years. In addition, Grabner has held teaching appointments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cranbrook Academy of Art; Yale Norfolk; Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts–Bard College; Yale University School of Art; and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. Grabner co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial and curated the 2016 Portland Biennial. Her reviews are regularly published in X-tra and Artforum. In 2010, Mary Jane Jacob and Grabner co-edited THE STUDIO READER, published by the University of Chicago Press. Grabner is represented by James Cohan Gallery in NYC; Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Gallery 16, San Francisco; Rocket Gallery, London; and Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie, Basel. With her husband and Brad Killam, they founded The Suburban in 1999 in Oak Park, Illinois, hosting a range of international contemporary art. After 16 years in the Chicago vicinity, The Suburban began programming exhibitions in two storefronts located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 2009 Grabner and Killam opened The Poor Farm in rural Wisconsin. The Poor Farm is dedicated to annual historical and contemporary exhibitions, lectures, performances, publications, screenings and alternative free pedagogical programs.