Ground Control, Art in a Mediated Landscape: A Conversation with Joseph Smolinski, Keely Orgeman, and Fritz Horstman

Join Artspace New Haven for a conversation with 2021–2022 Happy and Bob Doran Artist in Residence Joseph Smolinski, the Educational Director for Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and artist Fritz Horstman, and the Yale University Art Gallery Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Keely Orgeman. Their conversation will focus on research threads in Smolinski’s practice that run throughout his new works included in the exhibition Footnotes and other embedded stories. including ​​contemporary art and human interventions in the landscape, picturing the landscape through the lens of technology, the material culture of climate change, new monuments of the Anthropocene, and notions of the landscape as a repository of time and change. Additionally, the speakers will consider how the practices of a museum (conservation, acquisition, registration, education, etc.) mimic efforts to mitigate climate change.

This event is part of the programming series for the exhibition Footnotes and other embedded stories, on view April 30–June 25, 2022. As an in-person program, the exhibition opening will be limited to 50 audience members at a time in compliance with COVID-19 venue safety. Artspace New Haven encourages mask-wearing and social distancing. Please register for this program.

Fritz Horstman is the Education Director at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, where he has worked since 2004. He has lectured and given workshops at l’École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Bauhaus Dessau, The Royal Academy of Art in London, Yale University and many other institutions. He has curated exhibitions in Italy, Ireland, Croatia, Norway, and the United States, including the upcoming Anni Albers on Paper at Syracuse University Art Museum, opening August 2022. Also an artist, he has shown his sculptures, installations, and drawings in recent exhibitions across Europe and the US. He received his BA from Kenyon College and his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Keely Orgeman is the Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery. She was previously the Alice and Allan Kaplan Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture. During her tenure at Yale, Orgeman organized the critically acclaimed 2017 exhibition Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light at the Gallery, which traveled to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in Washington, D.C. She recently completed a new installation of the galleries of modern European art and was part of the curatorial team for the exhibitions On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale (2021) and Midcentury Abstraction: A Closer Look (2022). Orgeman earned her doctorate at Boston University, where she curated the exhibition Atomic Afterimage: Cold War Imagery in Contemporary Art for the BU Art Gallery in 2008.

Joseph Smolinski is a multidisciplinary artist and educator that lives and works in New Haven, CT. His practice questions the shifting roles of technology within communication networks, energy and oil companies, and the industrial agricultural infrastructure, which indelibly shape the so-called natural environment. Smolinski received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin (1999) and his MFA from the University of Connecticut, Storrs (2001). Group exhibition venues include Diverse Works, Houston, TX; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; McDonough Museum of Art, Youngstown, OH; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Solo exhibitions include Mixed Greens Gallery, NY; Swarm Gallery, Oakland, CA; Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; and Artspace, New Haven, CT. His work has been discussed in Art in America, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and Art Papers. He is a recipient of the Connecticut Commission of the Arts 2012 Artist Fellowship, the 2014 Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the College of the Environment at Wesleyan University, and a 2012 Artist Resource Trust Grant from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation. He has been an artist in residence at Wassaic Projects and is currently a 2021–2022 artist in residence at Yale University Art Gallery and Artspace, New Haven through the Happy and Bob Doran Connecticut program.