Acclaimed American writer, filmmaker and artist Chris Kraus will deliver this year’s Dasha Shenkman Lecture in Contemporary Art at the University of Guelph on March 23.

The free event is open to the public and begins at 6 p.m. at War Memorial Hall.

Described by the New York Times as “one of our smartest and original writers on contemporary art and culture,” Kraus has published various works, including an epistolary novel, I Love Dick, in 1997; the novel Summer of Hate in 2012; and After Kathy Acker, a biography of the American experimental novelist, poet and essayist, in 2017.

The New Yorker described her work as “an uncannily coherent landscape, a kind of hyper-intellectual, hypersexual, digital-era Yoknapatawpha that moves back and forth across the Atlantic, across the Mexican border, across the Soviet bloc.”

Through her earlier involvement with the Semiotext(e) publishing house and its Native Agents series, she advocated for and published first-person women’s fiction by writers including Cookie Mueller and Eileen Myles.

In 2008, she received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art journalism from the College Art Association. The award jury said, “Regardless of genre or medium, Kraus’s works exemplify honesty, wit and plot. Never one to hold her tongue, Kraus helps other women speak with equal force.”

The lecture will be followed by a Q & A moderated by Robert Enright, University research professor in art criticism in U of G’s College of Arts.

The Shenkman lectures are funded through a donation by Dasha Shenkman, a Canadian art collector and philanthropist living in the United Kingdom.

Visitors may view works by students in the master of fine arts program during open studio sessions in Blackwood Hall, the Firehall and Alexander Hall. The studios will be open from 3 to 5:30 p.m. and from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m.

Contact:

Sandra Sabatini
sabatini@uoguelph.ca