Latest Past Events

Vik Muniz with Sarah Thornton

Ring Auditorium, Hirshhorn Museum 7th Street and Independence Ave SW, Washington

Joined in conversation by author and sociologist Sarah Thornton, Brazilian artist Vik Muniz will dive into his distinguished career for this Meet the Artist program. Best known for creating what he terms “photographic delusions,” Muniz began his career as a sculptor but eventually turned his attention exclusively to photography. Working with a variety of unconventional materials—such as chocolate, diamonds, dust, and sugar—the artist forms three-dimensional narratives before recording the final images with his camera. Foregrounding photography’s ability to capture and create, his work is simultaneously humorous and incisively critical. His practice often focuses on art history and its intersections with […]

George Condo

The Phillips Collection 1600 21st Street NW, Washington

Best known for his existential humor and unhinged pictorial inventions, artist George Condo discusses the 200 drawings, sketches, and “Drawing Paintings” on view in his exhibition The Way I Think, with Klaus Ottmann, Deputy Director for Curatorial and Academic Affairs at The Phillips Collection. A catalogue signing follows. $12 general admission; free for members and students. Includes special exhibition admission. Reservations recommended.

José Casanova — “Early Modern Globalization through a Jesuit Prism”

Room LJ-119, First Floor, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress 101 Independence Avenue SE, Washington

The Jesuits were arguably the first corporate group in history to think and to act globally. In the early modern era Jesuits functioned as pioneer globalizers, making substantial contributions to the growth of connectivity and global consciousness around the world. This lecture will examine the external and internal opportunity structures which made it possible for a Catholic missionary and teaching order such as the Society of Jesus to play such a prominent role as cultural brokers between East and West and North and South in the first phase of globalization. Their global “way of proceeding,” however, became so controversial that […]