ArtCenter’s Graduate Art MFA program announces the publication of the first of three volumes of ArtCenter Talks, a collection of transcripts of lectures given by artists, theorists and historians throughout the program’s thirty-year history. For this inaugural volume, Stan Douglas, who joined the Graduate Art faculty in 2009, chose 13 lectures from among hundreds that he deemed best represented the scope and range of the first decade of the program and its guests. In his “Pomophobia,” which introduces the collection, Douglas describes the project:

“The transcripts that follow were presented as lectures or artist’s talks in the Graduate Art Department of ArtCenter College of Design between 1986 and 1995, the first decade of the program’s existence. Almost three hundred of these events were recorded, and presumably even more took place, making the handful collected here only a tiny sample, but they should give a sense of the variety of artistic and theoretical approaches presented to students. Positions were diverse, but there were preoccupations shared by many of the speakers, from the representation of the First Gulf War, to the increasingly cozy relationship between art and commerce, to a general consensus that there was something rotten in the notion of postmodernism: when the word was uttered, it was typically accompanied by a dollop of sarcasm, and more than one person recommended a moratorium on its use.”

To celebrate the book’s publication, Douglas will moderate a roundtable discussion that will include former faculty, alumni and visiting artists (Meg Cranston, Stephen Prina, Diana Thater, T.J. Wilcox) who participated in the “Graduate Seminar” during the decade covered by this first volume.

The Graduate Art Seminar lecture series is a forum for graduate students, members of the ArtCenter community and the general public to enter into dialog with internationally recognized artists, critics, and art historians. The Seminar is a core component of ArtCenter’s Graduate Art program. See artcentermfa.net for more information.