In Conversation: Suzanne Bocanegra & Claire Bishop

Suzanne Bocanegra (Author) is a visual artist who uses theater and theater craft to interrogate the history and practice of visual art, employing large-scale video, performance and installation, as well as collage, sculpture and painting. She is the recipient of the 2020 Robert Rauschenberg Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, among other awards. In 2019, a major show of Bocanegra’s work titled “Poorly Watched Girls” was presented at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Also in 2019, her solo show “Wardrobe Test” was the inaugural exhibition at Artcake, an exhibition space in Brooklyn. Bocanegra’s most recent performance “Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor,” was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has traveled to LAMoCA, ICABoston and the Walker Art Center.

Claire Bishop is an art critic and Presidential Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books includeArtificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012), Radical Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (Walther König, 2013) and a book of conversations with the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (Cisneros, 2020). Her forthcoming book Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today will be published by Verso this year; also due this year is Merce Cunningham’s Events: Key Concepts (Koenig books). She is a Contributing Editor of Artforum, and her essays and books have been translated into twenty languages.