Subject: Lecture

Description: Kristine Stiles, Duke University France Family Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, is one of the leading authorities on the subject of artists’ writings. She has edited a primary resource for artists’ writings, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (University of California Press), which has just been published in an updated, revised, and expanded second edition in 2012. Theories and Documents features over three hundred artists from thirty different countries speaking for themselves on issues related to the production and philosophy of contemporary art. Stiles is also the editor of Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle (Duke University Press), a volume for which she selected, edited, annotated, and introduced the correspondence written and received by Schneemann over a forty year period. The letters provide an epistolary history of Schneemann and other figures central to the international avant-garde of Happenings, Fluxus, performance, and conceptual art, including the composer James Tenney, the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, the artist Dick Higgins, the dancer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, the poet Clayton Eshleman, and the psychiatrist Joseph Berke. Stiles has also conducted interviews with dozens of contemporary artists over the course of her career.