INCITE•INSIGHT: Lecture with Pablo Helguera

Cornish College of the Arts and Henry Art Gallery have formed a new partnership to present INCITE•INSIGHT, a series of public lectures and performances that promote engagement with contemporary art practice. Invited artists, curators, and thinkers will visit Seattle for short residencies to interact with students through group conversation and studio visits. The series emphasizes and advances the long-standing commitment that Cornish and the Henry share in support of meaningful dialogues around the social and cultural impact of art and the ideas of our time.

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. Helguera’s work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction.

His work as an educator has usually intersected his interest as an artist, making his work often reflects on issues of interpretation, dialogue, and the role of contemporary culture in a global reality. This intersection is best exemplified in his project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest”, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record as well as a pioneering work for the new generation of artworks regarded under the area of socially engaged art.