Across the opening weekend of The Picasso Century, hear from academics, historians, and specialists alongside NGV curators as they examine the socio-political and cultural frameworks in France and Europe at the time of Picasso and his contemporaries. Discussions cover art, war and politics in Picasso’s era, creative communities as catalysts for change, and themes of gender, feminism and identity.
MONTMARTRE VOICES
The story of The Picasso Century involves the stories of a range of artists in the exhibition, many whose contribution to art history has attained less visibility and critical attention than that of more prominent artists such as Picasso. Beginning in the 1900s and a focus on the culturally and economically diverse Paris district of Montmartre – known at the time as the Butte – this panel examines gender, diversity and identity early in Picasso’s era.
Host
Dr Miranda Wallace, Senior Curator, International Exhibition Projects, National Gallery of Victoria
Speakers
Astrid Lorange is a Senior Lecturer at UNSW Art & Design who lives on unceded Wangal land. Her research focuses on the social movements and cultural practices that emerge as forms of resistance to state-managed violence. Her current project focusses on documentary practices in contemporary poetry and art. She is one-half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate, whose book of essays Homework was published by Discipline in 2021. Her scholarly monograph How Reading is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2014 and her poetry collection Labour and Other Poems was published by Cordite Books in 2020. She co-edits Rosa Press.
Dr Vincent Alessi’s research interests include the life and work of Vincent van Gogh, mid-late 19th-Century European art, 19th-Century popular graphic illustration and Australian contemporary visual art and curatorial practice. He completed his PhD on van Gogh’s collection of black-and-white popular illustrations and is currently undertaking research on the influence of Charles Dickens on van Gogh. Vincent has held numerous positions within cultural institutions including as a Director and Senior Curator. He has curated exhibitions both nationally and internationally on artists as diverse as Mike Brown, Philip Hunter, Brook Andrew, Julie Rrap and Bernard Boles and on topics varying from abstraction in Australian landscape painting to notions of place and identity in contemporary practice. In 2019 Vincent co-founded the non-for-profit contemporary art space Conners Conners in Fitzroy, Melbourne.