The Leroy and Dorothy Lavine Lecture: Light Trap for Dan Flavin a Talk by Jeffrey Weiss

This talk will represent Dan Flavin’s landmark Green Gallery exhibition in 1964 as a dividing point in the development of his work. Focusing on the precise nature of the fluorescent lamp (both the object and the light) as Flavin’s sole medium, it will bracket Flavin in the context of the rise of so-called minimal art, seeking instead to position his early work within a more complex historical narrative centered on the re-emergence of Marcel Duchamp as an art world figure in New York circa 1960.

Jeffrey Weiss is an independent scholar in New York, having returned to academic and curatorial practice after a brief tenure as Director of the Dia Art Foundation.  Previously, between 2000 and 2007, he was Curator and Head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  Weiss holds a Ph.D from the Institute of Fine Arts in New York.  His book, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, was published by Yale University Press in 1994. The curator of exhibitions on Mark Rothko, Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns, he edited and contributed to catalogues for those projects. He was also the editor for Dan Flavin: New Light, an anthology of essays published by Yale.  Widely published in various periodicals on modern and post-war art, Weiss is an ongoing contributor to the magazine Artforum. He is also an adjunct faculty member at the Institute of Fine Arts.

The Leroy and Dorothy Lavine Lecture Series was established to honor the Lavines, two prominent Boston art patrons and long time 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.