Practice Makes: Lori Waxman in conversation with Rachel Cohen

Join Lori Waxman and Rachel Cohen for a discussion about practices—art criticism as a practice of writing about art, art history as an attention to artistic practices, art making as a practice of all sorts of things (walking, cooking, painting, thinking, researching, drawing, etc.).

What does it mean to practice these professions? Is it unprofessional? Waxman will talk about her approach to conventional art reviewing through her decade of work as the primary critic for the Chicago Tribune and her attempts to question some of these norms in her ongoing performance project, the 60 wrd/min art critic. Cohen will raise questions that have come up in teaching writing about the arts at the University of Chicago, and through the Speaking of Art working group on campus. The focus of Waxman’s scholarly work, on walking as an art form, will offer a chance to consider how artists themselves engage in alternate practices, and ways that art historians and art writers can meet them somewhere along the road. 

FREE, open to all. 

This event is organized by the Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry at the Smart Museum and co-sponsored by the Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts, Department of Art History, Creative Writing, and the RAVE and Speaking of Art workshops.