Tune in to Skirball Tapes – NYU Skirball’s interview series, with luminaries and game-changers, artists and organizers, writers and climate change scientists, hosted by the notable Catharine R. Stimpson.
A NOTE FROM CATHARINE STIMPSON
The Skirball Tapes is a unique interview series. Watch it, and you will meet the most creative people among us. What do they share? Radical imaginations, courage, and the capacity for truth-telling – a necessity in good times, an urgent necessity in corrupt and mendacious ones.
Try watching a bird take flight. Note how it speeds up, soars, and swoops above the landscape. It might be a foot or yards above the earth, but it moves. It may fly alone, or with a mate, or with a flock. In time, it will alight on a branch or, if a seabird, on the water. It will perch. But it will take flight – again and again – if it can.
Every generation produces some people of radical imagination. They perform equivalent movements of thought and vision. They take flight in studios or studies, workshops or stages, streets or galleries. When they settle, they have left indelible acts of art: a dance, a composition, a poem, or a creation that defies boundaries and labels.
The Skirball Tapes reveal diverse people of radical imagination who shaping indelible acts that will provoke, inspire, and change us. They reflect on their flights of thought and vision. What were they thinking? What were their visions? What was their struggle to ascend? How did they leave an earth that could mire them?
I am privileged to be the host of the Skirball Tapes, and want to share, with our audience, my wonder at courageous creativity and defiance of the gravity of the ordinary.