The Sarofim School of Fine Arts’ Art Department is thrilled to present the first exhibition of the Spring season, Listening to the Anthropocene, curated by Douglas Cushing.

Listening to the Anthropocene will coincide and connect with the 2019 Brown Symposium, as described by curator Douglas Cushing: 

This exhibition gives a voice to the world that humanity has shaped and cast as other and external, even while remaining inextricably a part of it. We are in nature and nature is in us; what we do to nature we do to ourselves reflexively. Yet, we seem willfully unaware to such relations. We assume our world mute when we should stop and listen to it speak. Listening to the Anthropocene seeks to give the othered world—object, landscape, and non-human living organism—an equal place in a discourse regarding the manner in which humans live in and with the world, transforming in countless ways. Art, here, acts as mediator, translator and teacher, so that the world beyond us might be heard and fully recognized.

Listening to the Anthropocene includes work by Cynthia Camlin (Mount Vernon, WA), Erik Hagen (Houston, TX), Kelly Jazvac (Montreal, Canada), and Lorella Paleni (Paris, France).

Douglas Cushing is a Ph.D. Candidate in art history at the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation, provisionally titled “Inter-war Romanticism, Revolution, and Modernism on Display in transition,” approaches Eugene Jolas’s little magazine transition (1927-38) as a virtual gallery space and meeting place, as well as a transatlantic vehicle for the transmission, circulation, and transformation of avant-garde ideas. Cushing’s past research includes work on Marcel Duchamp’s relationship with the writings of the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), beginning before the advent of Dada and Surrealism. Cushing was the 2013-14 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Prints and Drawings, and European Paintings at the Blanton Museum of Art, where he subsequently curated Goya: Mad Reason (June 19 to September 25, 2016). Cushing’s most recent major awards include the 2017-18 Houghton Mifflin Fellowship in Publishing History, from the Houghton Library at Harvard University, a University Graduate Continuing Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin  , and the 2018-19 Vivian L. Smith Fellowship at the Menil Collection, in Houston, Texas.  

 Listening to the Anthropocene will be on exhibit at the Sarofim Fine Arts Gallery from February 2- March 3, 2019. The Fine Arts Gallery is open daily from 12:00-5:00 p.m., excluding Mondays and holidays. 

This exhibit’s closing reception will be held on February 27th from 6:00-7:00 p.m., in accordance with the 2019 Brown Symposium.

This exhibit is made possible by the generous philanthropic support of Lynn Parr Mock ’83 and Presley M. Mock ’82.