The Annual Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art

The Plonsker Family Lecture Series in Contemporary Art, established in 1994 by Madeleine Plonsker, Harvey Plonsker ’61, and their son, Ted Plonsker ’86, examines current issues in contemporary art. This year, we will host a lecture by Florian Idenburg, co-founder of SO-IL, the architecture firm selected to design and build WCMA’s new home in Williamstown.

Artist Arthur Jafa discusses his dynamic practice comprising films, artifacts and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of Black being.

Chemehuevi artist Cara Romero speaks about her photographic practice and recent projects engaging with contemporary issues of Native representation and identity. Romero's photograph "Coyote Tales, No. 1" is in the museum's collection and is currently on view in the exhibition "Sweaty Concepts."

Artist, geographer, author, MacArthur award-winning Trevor Paglen addresses a body of work that tackles surveillance, data collection, and artificial intelligence.

Kenturah Davis is the featured speaker in this fall's Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art.

An afternoon of music and conversation on cultural and artistic production in and out of Cuba. Featuring multimedia artist Nestor Siré, musicians Neil Leonard and Miguel Nuñez.

Clifford Owens is an artist, writer, and curator. Influenced by performance art practices of the 1960s, he is known for live and photographic works that center on the body. His work often asks audiences to manipulate, move, dress, touch or otherwise engage directly with his body, resulting in spontaneous actions. Owens’s work Anthology (Benjamin Patterson), 2011 will be included in Active Ingredients: Prompts, Props, Performance. For the Plonsker program, his performance-based, “audience-sensitive” lecture will be radically different from the standard artist slide talk.

Sharon Hayes’s work in performance, video, and installation draws from historical examples of activism and protest to interrogate the present political climate. She tackles issues such as gay rights, gender construction, and militarism, often performing archival documentation in new or unexpected settings. Hayes is an associate professor of fine art at the University of Pennsylvania.

Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates interventions into public life that re-imagine individual, group, and institutional behavior. His projects include starting a radio station in an abandoned neighborhood that only plays the sound of an extinct bird, operating a resturaunt that produces a live video talk show with its customers, and co-directing another that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. He is currently developing a collaborative sitcom that will be shot simultaneously in Los Angeles and Tehran. He has exhibited nationally and internationally as well as in backyards, living rooms, and street corners. Jon is an associate professor in the School of Art and head of Contextual Practice at Carnegie Mellon University.