Lavine Lecture: Julia Weist

Julia Weist’s artistic practice is defined by a participatory aesthetic in which her artworks are shaped by the systems they foreground as subjects. 

Across various mediums, with a recent focus on photography, Weist is known for her deeply collaborative approach that emphasizes discovery as a defining factor in shaping material choices, formal qualities and display strategies.

Weist goes to remarkable lengths to gain access and build relationships, and the results of these efforts are often surprising. Weist embedded for a year within New York City government and developed an artistic and bureaucratic process to ensure that her artworks would be classified as government records. Rubrics, one of the works in this series, was acquired by the List Center Collection. In 2022, the artist positioned her practice as the investigative experience required to earn a private investigator license and was approved; she now has access to information that’s collected and sold to law enforcement, including a database of timestamped images of vehicles on the road.

This event will highlight the connections between these bodies of work and will cover how they’re currently evolving and guiding her practice. The lecture will be followed by a food and wine reception.

6:30 PM - Program start time
7:30 PM - Wine Reception

Speaker Bio

Julia Weist (b. 1984) is a visual artist based in New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Jewish Museum among other collections. She has recently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Queens Museum and The Shed and internationally at the Hong-Gah Museum, Taiwan; nGbK, Berlin; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam and the Gwangju Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include Private Eye at Moskowitz Bayse and Governing Body at Rachel Uffner Gallery. Her latest public artwork, Campaign, debuted in Times Square in 2022.

About the Lavine Lecture Series

The Leroy and Dorothy Lavine Lecture Series was established to honor the Lavines, two prominent Boston art patrons and longtime supporters of the MIT List Visual Arts Center. The Leroy and Dorothy Lavine Lectures bring to the Boston community distinguished art world figures for talks on modern and contemporary art.