Leslie Thornton

The Weitzman Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania and the Institute of Contemporary Art are pleased to present an artist lecture and artist presentation with Leslie Thornton. 

This free public lecture is part of a series that gathers distinguished artists, activists, writers, and disruptors whose work engages with the social and cultural themes of our time.

About the Series

The Institute of Contemporary Art and the Weitzman Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to present a series of free public lectures and artist presentations that connect a group of distinguished artists, writers, activists, and disruptors to the Philadelphia public.

In their varied approaches and techniques, these individuals speak to ICA’s ethos of artistic experimentation and practice that engages with the social and cultural themes of our time. As artists, writers, and cultural producers, their artwork and criticism expand across themes of popular culture, queer life, kinship & community, and de/construction through the utilization of sculpture, performance, sound, collage, installation, and more.

In this lecture series, we invite you all to engage in conversation with our participants and become a part of an active dialogue that explores the stake of contemporary art in our society and culture.

For more than five decades, Leslie Thornton has probed how we see and make sense of the world. Her newest work, HANDMADE (2023), is a video diptych that juxtaposes natural phenomena with technological discovery, using imagery filmed during artist residencies at several major scientific research centers such as CERN (Geneva) and CalTech (Pasadena). 

Thornton emerged as a pivotal figure during the 1970s, encouraging cinema’s shift from the structuralist and cinéma vérité traditions in which she was trained to a practice grounded in linguistics and feminism. With a keen commitment to voice, Thornton has carved out a unique space at the intersection of multiple media histories to ponder the technological landscape of postwar America. From Peggy and Fred in Hell’s consideration of television and artificial intelligence to the emotional evocation of nuclear warfare in Cut from Liquid to Snake, her seminal work illuminates fundamental shifts in how we construct and recognize meaning.

Leslie Thornton’s works have been exhibited worldwide in a range of venues, such as MoMA, New York; MoMA PS1, New York, Whitney Biennial, New York, Documenta, Kassel; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Raven Row, London and CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux. Retrospectives include shows at Anthology Film Archives, New York; Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA. Thornton has been honored with numerous awards, including Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships, the Maya Deren Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Alpert Award in the Arts for Media. Recent artist residencies took place at CERN, Geneva and CalTech, Pasadena.

Leslie Thornton is a professor emerita of Brown University, where she taught film as an art form for over 30 years. She currently lives in the Lower Hudson Valley near New York City. 

Read more about Leslie Thornton's recent work.

See Leslie Thornton's projects online.

Registration
Register to attend in-person here. | Attend this lecture via Zoom here.

Captioning will be available for this program via Zoom. If you require any other accessibility accommodations such as audio description or ASL interpretation, or have any questions about the program, please contact Brittany Clottey at bclottey@ica.upenn.edu.