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CIVIC RADAR BOOK DISCUSSIONPost an Event »

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

April 19 - April 19, 2017

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701 Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94103
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CIVIC RADAR BOOK DISCUSSION
In this discussion, B. Ruby Rich and Peggy Phelan join moderator Elizabeth Thomas to speak about their contributions to the catalog CIVIC RADAR, the first comprehensive publication summarizing Hershman Leeson's long and varied career. Civic Radar covers the expansive range of works created by the Bay Area-based artist throughout five decades of practice, from early enactments of social performance and experiments with technology to large-scale installations and activist film. As long-time colleagues, Phelan and Rich will consider aspects of Hershman’s pioneering work in new technologies, as it ranges over different formats and disciplines to engage with issues of power, identity, and representation. Exploring the reaches of the artist’s difficult to categorize work, the discussion will explore how Leeson has worked to interrogate media in particular–its capitalistic underpinnings, gender dynamics, and role in social control. B. Ruby Rich is professor of Film, Digital Media, and Social Documentation at UC Santa Cruz; Peggy Phelan is Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English. Both Rich and Phelan have been working in the field of media and performance studies for decades, producing influential scholarship and defining critical aspects of their respective fields, including Rich’s Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (1988) and Phelan’s Unmarked: the politics of performance (1993). Elizabeth Thomas is an independent curator, currently producing Michael Rakowitz’s Radio Silence, a performance and radio program about Iraq and its displacements. Following the discussion, there will be an opportunity to purchase copies of Civic Radar, and have them signed by Lynn Hershman Leeson. Presented in conjunction with Lynn Hershman Leeson: Civic Radar.