Redwood Library Blog

In Library of Amorphous Matter, Curator, Leora Malt-Leca described how Jocelyne Prince considers the material properties of glass, an amorphous or noncrystalline solid that is the central protagonist of a fantastical library of cracks, drips and scars. Slide Library (2002-present), exhibited in the Redwood’s Rovensky Delivery Room on custom “atheneum-like” bookcases. She examined the features of hundreds of […]

This exhibition tour and lecture addressed Barclay’s three bodies of artwork being shown at the Redwood in the context of the Ford Foundation funded initiative, Material Politics. How do Barclay’s Oil House (2019); his glass house Untitled (2018), and his quartet of monumental photographs use materials to enact a politics of the everyday? Generously sponsored […]

In a curator talk, Leora Maltz Leca discussed the Tayou’s site-specific memorial for the Redwood, contextualizing his monument to global slavery in light of the larger memorial turn in contemporary art. What does this installation propose? How does it picture history? And what does it ask of us?

Why have some of the most interesting contemporary artists working today abandoned the traditional materials of art to work with rubber, sugar, gold and oil, chalk, soap and shoelaces? Leora Maltz-Leca, Redwood’s Curator of Contemporary Projects explored how contemporary artists like Kader Attia and Pascale Marthine Tayou, Kara Walker and Berni Searle activate the social […]

The Redwood’s Contemporary Curator, Leora Maltz-Leca, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at RISD, presented an in-depth analysis into the history of global contemporary art. When does contemporary art begin? What is its relationship to modern art? And to the post-modern? And the anti-modern…? How do we chart a history of the art of […]

Leora Maltz-Leca is Professor of Contemporary Art, and Head of Theory and History of Art and Design at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI. She is the author of William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor and Other Doubtful Enterprises (Univ. of California, 2018) and has written for Artforum, Frieze, African Arts, Art South Africa, ArteEast as well as Art Bulletin, where […]