Founder of Performa NYC to lecture at Middlebury

For immediate release: 12/19/13
For further information contact: Emmie Donadio, Chief Curator, at donadio@middlebury.edu or (802) 443-2240

Middlebury, VT—RoseLee Goldberg, author, scholar, curator, and founder of the Performance biennial in New York, will speak at Middlebury College on Thursday, February 27 at 4:30 pm in the Concert Hall of the Mahaney Center for the Arts. Her lecture will provide rich context and in depth analysis for Performance Now, an exhibition which she organized and is on view through Sunday, April 20 at the Middlebury College Museum of Art.

Goldberg, who has been called “the P.T. Barnum of performance art,” wrote the first scholarly history of the subject, Performance Art: from Futurism to the Present, in 1979. The book, now in its third edition, has been widely translated and is used by many as a core text in the study of modern and contemporary performance art. Former Director of the Royal College of Art Gallery in London and Curator at The Kitchen in New York, she is also the author of Performance: Live Art Since 1960 (1998) and Laurie Anderson (2000), and is a frequent contributor to Artforum and other publications. Recent awards and grants include two awards from the International Association of Art Critics (2011), the Agnes Gund Curatorial Award from Independent Curators International (2010), Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Warhol Foundation (2008), and Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Government (2006). In 2004, she founded Performa, a non-profit arts organization committed to the research, development, and presentation of performance by visual artists from around the world, and launched New York’s first performance biennial, Performa 05 (2005), followed by Performa 07 (2007), and Performa 09 (2009), Performa 11 (2011), and Performa 13 (2013). Since 1987, Goldberg has taught at New York University.

Ms. Goldberg was born in South Africa, where she studied dance and political science. She went on to write her dissertation about Oskar Schlemmer, the German artist who worked in a variety of mediums and influenced the Bauhaus school’s idea of interdisciplinary practice.

Ms. Goldberg’s talk is sponsored by the Middlebury College Museum of Art, the Department of History of Art and Architecture, the Department of Theatre and Dance, and the Director of the Arts. The Mahaney Center for the Arts is located on Route 30 on the southern edge of campus. Both the Center and the Museum are physically accessible. The lecture is free and open to the public.