SITE Santa Fe presents a new 5-day immersion contemporary art course:
Biennials, Triennials, and more!
Tuesday, July 17 – Saturday, July 21, 2018
​
Since the mid-1990s, SITE Santa Fe has been at the forefront of the global international biennial scene. In fact, did you know that when SITE founded its Biennial in 1995, ours was the only international contemporary art biennial in the United States?! This short course, for art enthusiasts at all levels, looks back at the history of this global contemporary art phenomenon, takes stock of the current biennial scene, and looks to the future of this influential and highly visible exhibition model.

What exactly is an art biennial? What are the origins of this tradition? How has this genre of contemporary art exhibition evolved? And, given that there are dozens of these each year across the globe, what distinguishes each of them? This five-part course tackles these questions, and many others, beginning with the Venice Biennale (est. 1895) and the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (est. 1896) and leading up to the present day. Surveying biennials, triennials, quadrennials, and more, the course considers not only the types of art and culture presented at these events but also the ways in which such events reflect important historical, political, social, and technological shifts.

The course will look back at the influence of world’s fairs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on these events and then travel through time, up until the present, to the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceana. In addition to early precursors like those in Venice and Pittsburgh, exhibitions to be studied, include those held in São Paolo, New York (Whitney Biennial), documenta in Kassel, Medellín, Gwangju, Poligráfica in San Juan, Philagrafika, Johannesburg Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Manifesta (itinerant throughout Europe), and, SITE Santa Fe.

DAY 1
Tuesday, July 17
3:00-5:00pm
Course Overview
Introduction to early international contemporary art biennials
Instructors: Irene Hofmann and Jennie Hirsh

​DAY 2
Wednesday, July 18
3:00-5:00pm
​The Venice Biennale in depth
Instructor: Jennie Hirsh

​DAY 3
Thursday, July 19
3:00-5:00pm
​documenta in depth
Instructor: Candice Hopkins
​​
DAY 4
Friday, July 20
2:00- 4:30pm
The global proliferation of the Biennial
Pedagogy and the Biennial
Instructors: Jennie Hirsh and Joanne Lefrak

​DAY 5
Saturday, July 21​
11am-12:30pm  Biennials in the Americas
Lunch as a group (included in the course fee)
1:30-3:00pm  SITElines 2014 – 2018
Instructors: Candice Hopkins, Irene Hofmann, and Jennie​ Hirsh
Note: Saturday is a longer summary day, and is the only day offered as a stand alone single session for those who wish to only attend 1 segment of this course.

COURSE FEE:
Full five-day course -$500 General/$450 Members / $250 Students (with current ID and registration by June 15)
Day 5 only – $150 General/$125 Members/ $75 Students (with current ID and registration by June 15)

-Course Readings: A coursepack of readings is provided with registration.
-Course Instructors: Jennie Hirsh, Candice Hopkins, Irene Hofmann, and Joanne Lefrak
-To inquire and/or register for the Biennial course, please contact Josie Butler, at butler@sitesantafe.org.

Jennie Hirsh (PhD, Bryn Mawr College) is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton and Columbia Universities, and is the recipient of fellowships from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the U.S. Fulbright commission, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Wolfsonian FIU. Hirsh has authored essays on artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Giorgio Morandi, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Yinka Shonibare, and Regina Silveira. She is co-editor of Contemporary Art and Classical Myth (Ashgate 2011), and she is currently completing Reflections of the Self: On Giorgio de Chirico, Self-portraiture, and the Classical Tradition. She is co-curating with Sid Sachs, Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde, 1956-1976, opening in March 2019. Since 2009, she has directed MICA’s Summer Travel Intensive program in Venice, Italy focused on international biennials.

Irene Hofmann is Phillips Director and Chief Curator at SITE Santa Fe. Since arriving at SITE in 2010, she has co-curated numerous exhibitions and projects, including More Real: Art in the Age of Truthiness s(2012), SITElines: Unsettled Landscapes (2014), and SITElines: Much Wider than a Line (2016). Prior to arriving at SITE in 2010, she served as Executive Director and Curator of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore for nearly five years. She has also held positions at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California; Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

Candice Hopkins, a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation in Yukon, Canada, is an independent curator and writer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is a curator for documenta 14. Her writing has been published widely by MIT Press, BlackDog Publishing, and the National Museum of the American Indian, among others. Her recent essays and presentations include “Outlawed Social Life” for the documenta 14, edited issue of South as a State of Mind and Sounding the Margins: A Choir of Minor Voices at Small Projects, Tromsø, Norway. In 2014 she co-curated the SITElines.2014 biennial exhibition, Unsettled Landscapes with Lucía Sanromán, Irene Hofmann and Janet Dees and returned in 2016 as Managing Curator of SITElines.2016. She has held curatorial positions at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, National Gallery of Canada, Western Front Society, and Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre. In 2015, she received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art.

Joanne Lefrak is the Director of Education and Curator of Public Practice at SITE Santa Fe. Lefrak has developed and leads many innovative programs at SITE that engage high school, college, and graduate students. She curates all public programs and performance art for the institution and works with artists on commissions enacted within the community of Santa Fe. She is Director of SITE Center, the education component of the SITElines Biennial exhibitions. She organizes a small biennial conference for Directors of Education across the nation called the Advance which is recognized as best practice for small conferences in museum education. Lefrak volunteers as the Chair for the City of Santa Fe Children and Youth Commission and received the City of Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2014. She is also a practicing visual artist. She received a BS in Studio Art with a minor in Art History from Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY and an MFA from Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ.