Center for Experimental Lectures

Rhode Island School of Design Department of Sculpture, The RISD Museum, and RISD’s Center for Arts & Language collaborate with The Center for Experimental Lectures (CEL) to present three new lecture-performances by Carissa Rodriguez, Naama Tsabar, and Pablo Helguera, whose presentation emerges from his RISD Museum exhibition, Inventarios / Inventories, part of the exhibition Raid the Icebox Now.
Pablo Helguera’s lecture-performance “Free of All Ties,” will be delivered in a peripatetic format from his own neighborhood and in his home in Brooklyn. Pablo Helguera brings together the story of the objects in an immigrant family's apartment, posing questions around the things that bind us as a community in this global moment of isolation and anxiety. This piece emerges from Helguera’s RISD Museum exhibition, Inventarios / Inventories, part of the exhibition Raid the Icebox Now.
These three pieces are site-specific to the internet, using a variety of online presentation platforms and presented remotely. This series of lecture-performances has been developed throughout the spring with RISD students in the course "Talking Is Dancing: Lecture-Performance As Form," written and taught by CEL founder Gordon Hall who is a 2019-2020 RISD Provost Fellow in Sculpture Department.
Pablo Helguera:  Thursday, May 7, 5 pmFree.                                                                 Naama Tsabar:  Tuesday, May 12, 5 pmCarissa Rodriguez:  Tuesday, May 19, 5 pmAll times Eastern Standard Time.
Pablo Helguera (b. 1971, Mexico City) is a visual artist living in New York City. His work involves performance, drawing, installation, theater, and other literary strategies. He is often considered a pioneering figure in the field of socially engaged art. His work has been featured at many international biennials including Manifesta, Havana and Liverpool Biennial, and Performa. He has received the Guggenheim and Creative Capital Fellowships as well as the first International Award of Participatory Art in Bologna, Italy.  Recent projects include a two-person exhibition with artist Suzanne Lacy at the UC Santa Barbara Museum and the 8th Floor in NYC and a mid-career survey of his work at the Jumex Museum in Mexico City. He is the author of many books including Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011) and The Parable Conference (2014).
The Center for Experimental Lectures was started in 2011 by Gordon Hall, and since then has commissioned 40 new lecture performances at a variety of venues including Recess, MoMA PS1, The Shandaken Project, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Artists Space, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art presenting Seminars with Artists in conjunction with the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Starting in 2016, Joseph Lubitz joined Gordon Hall as an organizing collaborator at the CEL. An archive including transcripts and video documentation of past events can be found at experimentallectures.org