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The Art of Return: The Sixties & Contemporary Culture

Join us for a night with James Meyer celebrating the release of his new book The Art of Return: The Sixties & Contemporary Culture.

In this innovative work, Meyer turns to art criticism, theory, memoir, and fiction to examine the fascination with the long sixties and contemporary expressions of these cultural memories across the globe. Meyer draws on a diverse range of cultural objects that reimagine this revolutionary era stretching from the 1950s to the 1970s, including reenactments of civil rights, antiwar, and feminist marches, paintings, sculptures, photographs, novels, and films. Many of these works were created by artists and writers born during the long Sixties who were driven to understand a monumental era that they missed. These cases show us that the past becomes significant only in relation to our present, and our remembered history never perfectly replicates time past. This, Meyer argues, is precisely what makes our contemporary attachment to the past so important: it provides us a critical opportunity to examine our own relationship to history, memory, and nostalgia.

James Meyer is the Curator of Modern Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He was previously Winship Distinguished Research Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University and Deputy Director and Chief Curator at Dia Art Foundation. The author of Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties andThe Art of Return: The Sixties and Contemporary Culture, he has organized shows of Kerry James Marshall, Anne Truitt, and Mel Bochner, and the exhibition “Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery 1959-1971” at the National Gallery of Art.











When: Tue., Oct. 1, 2019 at 7:00 pm
Where: 192 Books
192 Tenth Ave.
212-255-4022
Price: Free
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Join us for a night with James Meyer celebrating the release of his new book The Art of Return: The Sixties & Contemporary Culture.

In this innovative work, Meyer turns to art criticism, theory, memoir, and fiction to examine the fascination with the long sixties and contemporary expressions of these cultural memories across the globe. Meyer draws on a diverse range of cultural objects that reimagine this revolutionary era stretching from the 1950s to the 1970s, including reenactments of civil rights, antiwar, and feminist marches, paintings, sculptures, photographs, novels, and films. Many of these works were created by artists and writers born during the long Sixties who were driven to understand a monumental era that they missed. These cases show us that the past becomes significant only in relation to our present, and our remembered history never perfectly replicates time past. This, Meyer argues, is precisely what makes our contemporary attachment to the past so important: it provides us a critical opportunity to examine our own relationship to history, memory, and nostalgia.

James Meyer is the Curator of Modern Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He was previously Winship Distinguished Research Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University and Deputy Director and Chief Curator at Dia Art Foundation. The author of Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties andThe Art of Return: The Sixties and Contemporary Culture, he has organized shows of Kerry James Marshall, Anne Truitt, and Mel Bochner, and the exhibition “Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery 1959-1971” at the National Gallery of Art.

Buy tickets/get more info now