Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life

Published on the occasion of Niki de Saint Phalle’s first major US exhibition, the catalogue Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life brings new perspectives to the work of this legendary artist. Join us for a conversation between Ruba Katrib, the exhibition curator and the book’s editor, and catalogue contributors Anne Dressen and Nick Mauss, Alex Kitnick, and Lanka Tattersall, as they discuss Saint Phalle’s attention to interdisciplinarity, architecture, and the politics and erotics of the body.

This talk will be streamed live here on March 11 at 1 p.m. EST. The video will be archived and available to view afterward.

Order Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life from Artbook at MoMA PS1 and support independent bookstores.

Anne Dressen is a Curator at ARC, the contemporary department of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. Her curatorial projects and writings investigate unofficial or peripheral artistic practices in regard to traditional definitions and categories—particularly around sound and video, copy and reproduction, crafts and the decorative arts, feminism and the proto-queer. Her exhibitions include Playback, artists’ music videos (2007), Sturtevant: The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking (2010), Decorum: Carpets and tapestries by artists (2013), The Passion according to Carol Rama, co-organized with MACBA in Barcelona (2015), MEDUSA - Jewelry and Taboos (2017), and TRANS, at the FRAC Aquitaine in Bordeaux. She regularly teaches and contributes to exhibition catalogues, artist books, and art publications. In 2014, she was nominated for the Gerrit Lansing Independent Vision Curatorial Award from Independent Curators International.

Alex Kitnick is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and a frequent contributor to publications including Artforum and October. He edited October 136 on New Brutalism, and a collection of John McHale’s writings, titled The Expendable Reader: Articles on Art, Architecture, Design, and Media, 1951-1979. His book Distant Early Warning: Marshall McLuhan and the Transformation of the Avant-Garde will be published by University of Chicago Press this summer.

Nick Mauss is an artist based in New York. Recent exhibitions include Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc. at Kunsthalle Basel, and Transmissions, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Mauss has published essays on the work of Reza Abdoh, Susan Cianciolo, Lorraine O’Grady, Florine Stettheimer, Madame Grés, and Ian White, among others, and his work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, and M+ Museum Hong Kong.

Lanka Tattersall is a Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art. Previously, she was Associate Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where she organized the exhibitions Cameron Rowland: D37 (2018), Real Worlds: Brassai, Arbus, Goldin (2018), Lauren Halsey: we still here, there (2018), and Hito Steyerl: Factory of the Sun (2016), among other exhibitions. At MOCA, she spearheaded a number of commissions and performances, including works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Rafa Esparza, Juliana Huxtable, and Patrick Staff. From 2010 to 2014, Tattersall was a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, where she was an integral part of the curatorial and editorial teams for the touring retrospective and its accompanying monograph, Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010.