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Please join us on Friday, February 25, 2005 from 6:30-8:30pm at Slought Foundation for a public conversation with Marian Godfrey and Thaddeus Squire, with Paula Marincola and Aaron Levy as respondents. This event is part of the "The Alexandria Project: On the Future of the Organization" series, and is co-produced with Peregrine Arts. Following Marinetti's First Italian Futurist manifesto with which this series began, this event hypothetically takes the incendiary demise of the museum at its premise. Questioning Western impulses to preserve culture that often emanate from the monumental and the museological, this event explores what the field of cultural practice might look like in a hypothetical extreme that presumes an absence of such monumental nodes. Participants to the conversation will speak not as officers of their respective organizations, but as individuals with their own professional opinions about the culture industry. The conversation will begin by addressing questions such as the following:
Are all cultural organizations that aspire to growth (or achieve it) beyond a certain capacity or size forced to insert themselves into a financial-based economy? Is it possible or desirable to envision cultural practice living and growing independent of financial concern or the agendas that unavoidably accompany, to varying degrees, such support? What do philanthropies and grantmaking agencies think of as their
principal assets as they consider these questions? Do these assets include the programs and institutions they support, money, prestige and the valorizing power that accompanies this regard? And how and in what ways do they see these assets leveraged in the service of culture? Similarly, do Foundations consider themselves direct contributors (and thus arbiters) within cultural practice or merely oblique participants (practicing more remove or "objectivity")? In a healthy cultural ecology, there are organizations and cultural practices that are fundamentally provocative or confrontational and by definition do not possess the more decorative attributes that lend them to be inserted in a more substantial money-based cultural economy. How can we support non-decorative practices outside of incubators like the academy?
Marian A. Godfrey is Director of the Civic Life Initiatives of The Pew Charitable Trusts; from 1989 through 2003 she served as the Trusts' Program Director for Culture. Previously, Ms. Godfrey was Manager for the theater collaborative Mabou Mines, for which she also produced a feature film, "Dead End Kids: A Story of Nuclear Power" (1980-86); Instructor in Drama at New York University Tisch School of the Arts (1980-87); Director of Development for Dance Theater Workshop (1983-85); and Managing Director of Ensemble Studio Theater (1977-80). She received her MFA in Theater Administration from the Yale School of Drama in 1975 and BA magna cum laude in English Literature from Radcliffe in 1970. Ms. Godfrey currently serves on the board of the Maine College of Art and chairs the Arts Policy Roundtable of Americans for the Arts; previously she served on the boards of Grantmakers in the Arts (chair, 2000-2002) and Theatre Communications Group.
Thaddeus A. Squire studied at Princeton University, and continued his academic studies as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Leipzig, Germany, and as an orchestral conducting student at Leipzig’s Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy”. As a performer, Mr. Squire has served as Associate Conductor for the West Sachsen Philharmonic and the Schola Cantorum Leipzig, among other conducting engagements. He recently conducted the Relâche Ensemble and was music director of the premiere of Violet Fire (2003), a new multi-media opera by Jon Gibson. As a composer and sound artist, he has created installations for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival (“CAGE12”, 2002) and Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art (“Entr’acte d’ameublement”, 2004). As a curator and producer, Mr. Squire served as Artistic & Executive Director of Relâche, Inc. for four years, during which time he commissioned and developed more than 20 world premiere works by leading contemporary composers from the United States and abroad. Mr. Squire shifted Relâche’s identity toward large interdisciplinary projects including The Bell and the Glass, an installation and sound-art performance piece commissioned from artist Christian Marclay, with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Mr. Squire has served on numerous artistic and funding peer panels and is a 2004/05 Pennsylvania Humanities Council Commonwealth Speaker.
Paula Marincola has been the Director of the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative (PEI) since its inception in 1997; she was also the program designer. PEI is a granting program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and administered by the University of the Arts, Philadelphia that supports visual arts exhibitions and accompanying publications. Since its inception, PEI has awarded 39 exhibition grants to 26 organizations, investing close to $6 million in exhibitions produced in the five-county Philadelphia area for projects of international scope. At PEI, she has produced “Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility,” a major symposium and publication on curatorial practice with an international roster of participating curators and museum directors. She recently moderated a symposium on “Philanthropy and the Art Museum” for the American Federation of Arts’ 2003 Curator’s Forum. She is currently editing a book entitled: “Questions of Practice: What Makes a Great Exhibition?” to be published in winter 2004. Prior to coming to PEI, Marincola was Gallery Director at Beaver College Art Gallery (now Arcadia University) from 1988-1997, where she organized solo exhibitions for artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mary Heilmann, Glenn Ligon and Gary Simmons, Yukinori Yanagi, Richard Prince, Ken Price, Fred Wilson, and Jennifer Bolande, among others, as well as a variety of thematic shows, often with accompanying catalogues. Marincola was the Assistant Director/Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, from 1980-85. She is a free lance art critic and art writer and has published in Artforum, Art News, and Contemporanea magazines, among others.
Aaron Levy is the Executive Director of and a Senior Curator at Slought Foundation. In 2004 he edited, with Eduardo Cadava, Cities Without Citizens, with contributions by Gayatri Spivak, Arakawa+Gins, and Giorgio Agamben (co-published with the Rosenbach Museum and Library, on the occasion of his 2003 exhibition engaging the Early American city in the archive). The Revolt of the Bees, a Winter 2005 exhibition he has organized at the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania, explores the beehive metaphor in their collection as it informs the future of the American organization.
To Cite this Page using MLA Style:
Marian Godfrey, et al. "The Museum in Flames." Slought Foundation Online Content.
[25 February 2005;
Accessed 6 January 2009]. <http://slought.org/content/11263/>.
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This program was made possible in part through the generous sponsorship of Peregrine Arts, which was founded in 2003 as an omni-disciplinary platform dedicated to producing and presenting contemporary multi-disciplinary and multi-media work, as well as consulting and research in arts practice and policy. Current productions include Voice of the Dragon: The Martial Arts Epic (Fred Ho, Ruth Margraff, Tsuyoshi Kaseda), Titanic (Ridge Theater, Bob McGrath, Laurie Olinder, Bill Morrison, Gavin Bryars), and DangerSound (Christian Marclay, Stephen Vitiello, Kathleen Forde). Peregrine’s presenting practice will launch in 2005/06. Consulting clients currently include, Relâche, Inc., MGA Partners LLP, PRISM Quartet, SoundWave Museum and the American Composers Forum, Philadelphia Chapter. Peregrine’s research practice is dedicated to studying micro-policy and micro-theoretical issues and studies in arts practice and policy and through monograph studies, discursive event series and white papers. For 2004/05, Peregrine is co-producing with Philadelphia’s Slought Foundation a symposium series on sustainability and the future of the arts organization entitled “The Alexandria Project: On the Future of the Arts Organization.
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