Mel Bochner in Conversation with Alexis Lowry and James Meyer

Event Details
Saturday, February 8, 2020, 11:30 am

Dia Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York

Mel Bochner was born in Pittsburgh in 1940. Bochner received his BFA (1962) and honorary Doctor of Fine Arts (2005) from the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, where he studied under Douglas Wilson and Wilfred Readio. After completing his BFA, Bochner studied philosophy at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, before moving to New York City in 1964. Bochner’s work has been included in numerous group shows internationally, with notable solo exhibitions at Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery (1985), Sonnabend Gallery, New York (2000), and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2012). Major retrospectives of his work have been held at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut (1995), and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2011). He also participated in the Whitney Biennial (2004) and Documenta (1972), among other international surveys. His work is collected by major institutions including Tate Modern, London, and Museum of Modern Art, New York. He lives and works in New York.

Alexis Lowry is a curator at Dia Art Foundation, New York, where she is responsible for exhibitions, collection presentations, and public programs pertaining to Dia’s holdings of Minimal, Postminimal, and Conceptual art across the museum’s various sites. She recently organized the first North American retrospective of Charlotte Posenenske’s work for Dia Beacon, in Beacon, New York, as well as installations by Mel Bochner, Mary Corse, Barry Le Va, Lee Ufan, Robert Morris, Michelle Stuart, and Anne Truitt. At Dia Chelsea she has overseen commissions by Rita McBride and Kishio Suga. Prior to joining Dia, she was curator of the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Providence. Lowry has recently contributed to publications for the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, Orlando; Drawing Center, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; in addition to books produced by Dia. She obtained her PhD from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2019.

James Meyer is curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and curatorial and academic advisor at Dia Art Foundation in New York City. He was previously the Winship Distinguished Research Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta and deputy director and chief curator at Dia. The author of several essays on Mel Bochner’s work, Meyer organized the exhibition In the Tower: Mel Bochner at the National Gallery of Art in 2011–12. His research has been awarded a number of prestigious grants and honors, among them a Sterling Clark Fellowship; a Smithsonian Senior Fellowship; the Daphne Mayo Visiting Professorship at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia; and a Getty Research Support Grant. Meyer’s books include Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (2001), Minimalism (2000), and edited volumes of the writings of Carl Andre and Gregg Bordowitz. His most recent publications are Dwan Gallery: Los Angeles to New York, 1959–1971 (2016) and The Art of Return: The Sixties and Contemporary Culture (2019).