Lincoln, Neb.—University of Nebraska–Lincoln Associate Professor of Art History Katie Anania will give an introductory talk and moderate a panel for the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Patricia Orden Memorial Symposium titled “Drawing in the World: Paper’s Material Futures.”
The lecture/panel will be on Tuesday, March 17 from 6-8 p.m. ET in MoMA’s Celeste Bartos Theater (Mezzanine, Theater 3) in New York City. The event is free, but a reservation is required. Visit https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/11277 to register.
“I’m thrilled to be moderating this panel because the previous Patricia Orden Memorial Symposia at MoMA have been so cool,” Anania said. “They’ve put works on paper at the center of contemporary art and culture. Lanka Tattersall (Laurenz Foundation Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints) invited my input during the symposium planning, and the three artists we selected together are going to change people’s ideas of what paper can do as a creative medium.”
Paper is one of the most important and ubiquitous technologies. Indispensable yet disposable, often replicated but never replaced, paper functions as a vital interface for artists—a site to mobilize information, test conceptual approaches, and create hybrid forms.
This symposium will convene a group of leading contemporary artists to discuss the role of paper—in all its forms—in their varied practices. Individual presentations will be followed by a moderated group discussion, led by Anania, centered on the material and conceptual possibilities of paper.
In addition to Anania, the event will include artists Cameron Clayborn, Harmony Hammond and Johanna Unzueta. Clayborn is a U.S. sculptor, performance artist and community organizer who draws on family and community memories in his multimedia works. Hammond is a U.S. artist and curator whose 50-year artistic career includes radical experiments with materials like paper, fabric and latex. Now working in New Mexico, she was a leading figure in the development of the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s. Unzueta is a Chilean artist based in Berlin who makes drawings using hand-stained paper (often stained with herb infusions or foods), wood and thread.
Anania is the author of the book “Out of Paper: Drawing, Environment and the Body in 1960s America” (2024 Yale University Press). The book is a dynamic look at how U.S. artists used paper to radically redefine the relationship between the body and its surroundings, and to propose new conceptions of ecology in the decades following World War II.
The Patricia Orden Memorial Symposium is a biennial public forum for conversations about works on paper. Hosted by MoMA’s Department of Drawings and Prints since 2007, the event honors Patricia Orden, an advocate for contemporary art.
