The Visual Arts Center hosts a symposium that brings together scholars and critics, as well as The University of Texas at Austin faculty and students, to discuss a variety of themes connected to the multi-venue exhibition Strange Pilgrims. Esteemed speakers include Andrea Lissoni, senior curator of International Art (Film) at Tate Modern; Valerie Smith, freelance curator and writer; Ann Reynolds, associate professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History and the Center for Women’s & Gender Studies in the College of Liberal Arts; Michael Smith, professor of Studio Art in Transmedia in the Department of Art and Art History; Rachel Stuckey, MFA candidate in Studio Art; and Department of Art and Art History PhD candidates in Art History Dorota Biczel, Kate Green and Robin Williams.

The symposium will be organized around the exhibition’s three thematic sections—Environment & Place, Performance & Process, and Technology & Information—and utilize the 250-page, full-color catalogue forStrange Pilgrims distributed by the University of Texas Press as a launching point for discussion. This academic gathering provides a forum for viewers of the exhibition and scholars in the field to unpack and develop new ideas around the exhibiting and historicizing of time-based media and ephemeral art and to discuss the redefinition of “experiential art” as work that is immersive, participatory, performative or kinetic.

Strange Pilgrims Symposium is organized by the Visual Arts Center and Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin and presented in partnership with The Contemporary Austin.