The 2021 Goldfarb Annual Lecture: Marcia Brennan

CURATING PRESENCE IN ACUTE PALLIATIVE CARE:
A MEDITATION ON MULTIPLICITY
Marcia Brennan

The 2021 Goldfarb Annual Lecture

Wednesday, February 3, 2:30-4:30 pm EST
This event will take place on Zoom.
Please RSVP to sensinfo@yorku.ca and a Zoom Link will be sent out prior to the event.

Drawing on her creative clinical experiences in Acute Palliative Care, Professor Brennan will examine the ways in which the curatorial model might be expanded to consider how aesthetics can serve as a form of care for people facing the end of life. Just as the artworks are produced during critical junctures of transition, they often appear as meditations on multiplicity as people imagine various forms of presence. Dr. Brennan’s talk will be followed by a public conversation with Jennifer Fisher and questions from the audience.

Lyn Smallwood, The Black Bird (2020)

Marcia Brennan in the Carolyn and Fred McManis Professor of Humanities at Rice University, where she works in the fields of Art History, Religious Studies and the Medical Humanities. She also serves as a literary Artist in Residence in the Department of Palliative Care and Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Her books include Life at the End of Life: Finding Words Beyond Words (Intellect), Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum (MIT Press), Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School and Post-Painterly Abstraction (MIT Press), and Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (MIT Press).

This event is presented in conjunction with the nascent Art and Wellness initiative in the School of Art, Media, Performance and Design at York University. Dr. Brennan’s work exemplifies the important role that artist and curatorial residencies can bring to practices of caring and curing in hospitals and other health care contexts.

Dr. Brennan’s lecture is organized by the Department of Visual Art and Art History in conjunction with Sensorium: The Center for Digital Art and Technology. We gratefully acknowledge the Goldfarb family for their generous support.