Metropolarity for New Museum Seminars: (Temporary) Collections of Ideas around SPECULATION

Join Metropolarity on a Sunday afternoon at New York’s NEW MUSEUM for their public seminar series, this season themed SPECULATION. Metropolarity will be in dialogue with New School scholars/designers/media theorists Ed Keller and Orit Halpern, addressing speculative realist philosophy and future-oriented speculative thought through fiction and design work. Say what.

This focus on sustained research and ideas in development stimulated the establishment of the Seminar series, in which small groups of multidisciplinary thinkers gather over a three-month period to consider the Education Department’s Seasonal thematic, with pressing conversations related to art and the expanded art context examined in relation to broader issues in society. Entitled New Museum Seminars: (Temporary) Collections of Ideas, the series directly references the Museum’s history of “collecting” ideas, rather than art objects. The goal of the Seminars is to provide a platform for discussing, debating, and enacting ideas as they emerge, in real time, and to develop scholarship or other forms of joint creative production relating to art’s place in culture. The Seminars utilize some recognizable graduate-level and reading-group pedagogical strategies, such as syllabi and weekly closed, peer-led reading sessions, but are distinguished by their context within the contemporary art museum. In addition to the weekly sessions, there is institutional support for some form of group production to grow out of the shared course of study (conferences, performance residencies, online publications, Resource Center exhibitions, etc.). A group of approximately fifteen participants from various backgrounds (including artists, dancers, curators, critics, educators, and scholars, but also those with specialties not directly art-related) constitute each Seminar group, along with R&D Season artists in residence and New Museum Education Department staff members who work on the topic. Unique among museums, the Seminar truly functions as a “think tank” within a programming and exhibitionary institution, fostering new ideas and work between outside and intra-institutional participants (in the past, New Museum curators, editors, researchers, and educators have also applied).