VIA YOUTUBE
At a panel discussion in Miami Thursday, Aspen Art Museum director Heidi Zuckerman revealed that in conjunction with the opening of Mickalene Thomas’s exhibition this spring at the museum, she will be inviting people into the museum who specialize in domestic violence, substance abuse, and suicide prevention, with a focus on how these things affect women. The specialists will participate in a lunch and discussion around Thomas’s work, in which women are prominently represented.
“We want to allow the work a broader audience,” Zuckerman said at the panel, which also included Thomas as well as Shirin Neshat, and was hosted by W magazine and Pratt. “We want the museum to be a platform for larger discussions about social justice issues.”
The initiative is one that Zuckerman started during the museum’s current Diana Thater exhibition. For that show, she had a lunch that included representatives of environmental and animal rights organizations. One person there, she told ARTnews, became interested in doing a conservation project involving the Cameroon gorillas that appear in one of Thater’s films.
“I hope the impact will be even larger this time,” Zuckerman said.