Please join us for a conversation with artist Emily Spivack, who will discuss her current project An archive of everything worn to MoMA from November 1, 2017 to January 28, 2018, a project developed in collaboration with the department of Education as part of Artists Experiment. Thessaly La Force, Features Director, T magazine, joins the conversation.
Tickets for this program will be available beginning November 1. Tickets ($15; $10 members and Corporate members; $5 students, seniors, and staff of other museums) can be purchased online, at the information desk, or at the Education and Research Building reception desk on the day of the program.
Emily Spivack is an artist, writer, and editor whose work draws from contemporary culture, clothing, history, and our relationship to everyday objects. She is the author of Worn in New York (2017), a contemporary cultural history of New York told through clothing, which is a follow-up to her New York Times best seller Worn Stories (2014) and wornstories.com (2010), collections of stories about clothing and memory. In her column for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, The Story of a Thing, Spivack interviews cultural figures about objects in their homes that provide insight into their interests and quirks. Spivack’s off-site installation for the Honolulu Museum of Art, Medium White Tee, was a fulfillment of President Barack Obama’s stated fantasy to run a T-shirt shack that sold only medium-sized white tees as a respite from his nonstop decision-making. She spent seven years finding stories about clothing from eBay posts for her website, Sentimental Value, which she exhibited in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Portland. Spivack created Threaded, the Smithsonian’s only blog about the history of clothing, and she made howtodresslike.com, an online archive of nearly 1,000 step-by-step instructions culled from wikiHow. Spivack has lectured and presented at museums and universities including The Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, New York University, Brown University, Bard College, and the Fashion Institute of Technology. She and her work have been featured in The New York Times, New York magazine, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
Artists Experiment is an initiative in the Department of Education that brings contemporary artists into dialogue with MoMA educators to develop innovative and experimental approaches to public engagement.
The artists who participated in past years of Artists Experiment are:
2017–18
• Michael Rakowitz
• Emily Spivack
2014–16
• Nina Katchadourian
2013–14
• Paul Ramirez Jonas
• Allison Smith
• The Office for Creative Research
2012–13
• Raúl Cárdenas Osuna
• Kenneth Goldsmith
• Xaviera Simmons
• Caroline Woolard