This Is Not Your Mama’s MoMA: The Illusions of Modern Art

Join us for a conversation with Jorge Daniel Veneciano, El Museo’s Executive Director and exhibition curator, along with New York Times Art Critic Ken Johnson as they explore psychedelic and occult consciousness within modern art.

Born in Villa María, Argentina, Jorge Daniel Veneciano is executive director of El Museo del Barrio, New York and former director of the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska and of the Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers University, Newark. Veneciano served as curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem and with the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. He holds a PhD from Columbia University in the Department of English and Comparative Literature; an MFA in Art/Critical Studies emphasis from CalArts; a BA in Philosophy and Political Theory, with a minor in Intellectual History, from UCLA. Veneciano is a scholar of modern and contemporary art and has taught at Columbia and RISD. His books include The Geometric Unconscious: A Century of Abstraction and Fabulous Harlequin: Orlan and the Patchwork Self. He is also the founding editor of artland magazine, a statewide arts advocacy magazine for Nebraska, and curator of The Naked Museum, on Philip Johnson’s Sheldon Museum, and Its Surreal Thing: The Temptation of Objects, on surrealist sculpture.

Ken Johnson grew up in Maine and graduated from Brown University in 1976 with a B.A. in art. He earned a masters degree in studio art with a concentration in painting at the State University of New York at Albany in 1977.  For the next five years he worked as a technician in the painting department of an art conservation laboratory operated by the New York State Department of Historic Sites in Waterford, NY. In 1983, he started  writing art reviews for the Albany Times Union newspaper and for other local publications in the Albany region where he  lived from 1977 to 2001 (in Troy from the early 80s on). In 1987 he began writing articles on contemporary artists for the now defunct Arts Magazine, and a year later he moved on to Art in America for which he wrote reviews and articles regularly for the next nine years. In 1997 he began writing reviews for The New York Times, and continued to do so until Sept. 2006, when he took a job as the chief art critic for the Boston Globe. After a year in Boston, he returned to New York and to writing art criticism for the Times. He began producing an online comic called Ball and Cone (ballandcone.tumblr.com) in 2013. He has lived in Flushing, Queens since 2001. In 2011, his book “Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art” was published by Prestel Books.











When: Wed., May. 18, 2016 at 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Where: El Museo del Barrio
1230 Fifth Ave.
212-831-7272
Price: Free
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Join us for a conversation with Jorge Daniel Veneciano, El Museo’s Executive Director and exhibition curator, along with New York Times Art Critic Ken Johnson as they explore psychedelic and occult consciousness within modern art.

Born in Villa María, Argentina, Jorge Daniel Veneciano is executive director of El Museo del Barrio, New York and former director of the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska and of the Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers University, Newark. Veneciano served as curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem and with the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. He holds a PhD from Columbia University in the Department of English and Comparative Literature; an MFA in Art/Critical Studies emphasis from CalArts; a BA in Philosophy and Political Theory, with a minor in Intellectual History, from UCLA. Veneciano is a scholar of modern and contemporary art and has taught at Columbia and RISD. His books include The Geometric Unconscious: A Century of Abstraction and Fabulous Harlequin: Orlan and the Patchwork Self. He is also the founding editor of artland magazine, a statewide arts advocacy magazine for Nebraska, and curator of The Naked Museum, on Philip Johnson’s Sheldon Museum, and Its Surreal Thing: The Temptation of Objects, on surrealist sculpture.

Ken Johnson grew up in Maine and graduated from Brown University in 1976 with a B.A. in art. He earned a masters degree in studio art with a concentration in painting at the State University of New York at Albany in 1977.  For the next five years he worked as a technician in the painting department of an art conservation laboratory operated by the New York State Department of Historic Sites in Waterford, NY. In 1983, he started  writing art reviews for the Albany Times Union newspaper and for other local publications in the Albany region where he  lived from 1977 to 2001 (in Troy from the early 80s on). In 1987 he began writing articles on contemporary artists for the now defunct Arts Magazine, and a year later he moved on to Art in America for which he wrote reviews and articles regularly for the next nine years. In 1997 he began writing reviews for The New York Times, and continued to do so until Sept. 2006, when he took a job as the chief art critic for the Boston Globe. After a year in Boston, he returned to New York and to writing art criticism for the Times. He began producing an online comic called Ball and Cone (ballandcone.tumblr.com) in 2013. He has lived in Flushing, Queens since 2001. In 2011, his book “Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art” was published by Prestel Books.

Buy tickets/get more info now