Critical Issues in Contemporary Art Practice: Lise Soskolne

Lise Soskolne has been an organizer within W.A.G.E. since its founding in 2008 and its core organizer since 2012. She is an artist who has worked in nonprofit arts presenting and development in New York since 1998 at venues that have included Anthology Film Archives, Artists Space, Diapason Gallery for Sound, Meredith Monk/The House Foundation for the Arts, Participant Inc, and Roulette Intermedium.

This talk will introduce the work of W.A.G.E., tracking its evolution as an organizing body and how it has responded to changing conditions within the art field over the past 9 years. It will also include W.A.G.E.’s thinking around the artist as a hyper-individuated worker – a construction of what the industry demands. W.A.G.E.’s approach to organizing artists in a field that devalues our ‘labor’ while simultaneously overvaluing our ‘work’ has been a long process of emptying out the figure of the artist as an economic subject. This talk will take up W.A.G.E.’s current work to rebuild and redefine this compromised and contradictory figure, and to provide the conditions necessary to mobilizing artists collectively as a labor force.

Critical Issues in Contemporary Art Practice is a free public lecture series. The series is organized by the School of Art + Art History + Design at the University of Washington and is sponsored by The Boeing Company with support from Henry Art Gallery. The lecture series happens over seven Thursday evenings this winter in the Henry’s auditorium. The general public is invited to sit alongside degree-seeking individuals studying fine art to share ideas and raise questions on contemporary art and its place in society and our imaginations. Following the public lectures, UW graduate and undergraduate art students enrolled in ART 361/595 interface with the visiting artists in the classroom and studio.

Lectures begin at 7 pm. Attendees are encouraged to register for individual lectures in order to secure seating.