"Attention Becomes a Kind of Politics": Sarah Hamill on Sculpture and Interpretation

In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

04/11/23 • 33 min

In this week episode Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Sarah Hamill, a scholar of modern and contemporary art and professor at Sarah Lawrence College, about the role of description in art history, and how description is always a form of interpretation. Sarah describes how the embodied experience of sculpture captured her imagination and how she came to understand the role of photography in mediating our encounters with art objects. She also discusses her current research into feminist politics, media, and sculpture in the 1970s, focused on the artist Mary Miss, and reflects on how art historical practices like slow looking may help us grapple with urgent issues like the climate crisis.

04/11/23 • 33 min

In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing - "Attention Becomes a Kind of Politics": Sarah Hamill on Sculpture and Interpretation

Transcript

Caro Fowler

Welcome to In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing. I am Caro Fowler, your host and Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. In this series of conversations, I talk with art historians and artists about what it means to write history and make art, and the ways in which making informs how we create not only our world, but also ourselves.

Caitlin Woolsey

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