In Conversation: Lucy Cotter and Lucy Kim on Artistic Research

Join us for an in-gallery conversation between exhibiting artist Lucy Kim and Lucy Cotter, writer, curator, researcher, and author of Reclaiming Artistic Research. Surrounded by Kim’s large-scale sculptural prints, made from lab-grown melanin, featured in her exhibition Mutant Optics, this discussion explores art practice as a form of research. Together, the speakers will delve into how this approach shapes Kim’s process and work, while envisioning new possibilities for deeper collaborations between the arts and sciences.

The newly released second edition of Cotter’s Reclaiming Artistic Research contains dialogues with 24 artists on the topic of artmaking as a form of research and knowing. Reclaiming the term “artistic research” from its academic associations, these conversations foreground the material, spatial, and embodied ways of knowing specific to contemporary artistic inquiry. Copies will be available for purchase onsite during the program.

Lucy Kim is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She received the 2022 Creative Capital Award for her project printing images with bacteria that has been genetically modified to produce melanin. Kim is also a recipient of the 2023 Brother Thomas Fellowship, 2019 Mass Cultural Council Grant, 2017 ICA Boston James and Audrey Foster Prize, 2014 Artadia Award, MacDowell Fellowship, Hermitage Fellowship, and Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship. From 2018 to 2021, she was an artist-in-residence at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Kim has exhibited her work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; the Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA; Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, New York, NY; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, MA; Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore, Saratoga Springs, NY; Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY; among others. She teaches at Boston University, where she works with her scientist colleagues to further develop her experimental technique printing with melanin.

Lucy Cotter’s multidisciplinary practice engages with art as a site of knowledge and cultural transformation. With academic credentials including a PhD in Cultural Analysis, she has addressed the cultural agency of curating in a decolonizing world and was Curator of the Dutch Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, 2017. She developed one of Europe’s first MAs in artistic research at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. She is widely published in such journals as Flash Art, Third Text, Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic, and Mousse. Her book Reclaiming Artistic Research foregrounds art’s forms of embodied, material, choreographic, and spatial knowledge, and highlights artists’ contributions to the decolonization, Indigenization, and accessibility of knowledge. Irish-born, she is based in Portland, where she is 2024-5 project resident at Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation. She is currently curating a year-long program entitled Artistic Research in a World on Fire, and making new work engaging with embodied language.