Denver, CO – January 12, 2023 – The Clyfford Still Museum (CSM) will host the free panel discussion Critique as Radical Love from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. on January 26 at the Sharp Auditorium at the Denver Art Museum. Moderated by CSM Director Joyce Tsai, Ph.D., panelists include Lisa Yun Lee, Ph.D., Sierra Van Ryck deGroot, and Seph Rodney, Ph.D.
The panel will explore the concept of community, Clyfford Still’s viewpoints on museum practice, and current issues in the field.
“CSM’s current exhibition, You Select considers the intersections between Still’s networks and the Museum’s communities,” said Nicole Cromartie, CSM director of learning and engagement. “While Still was often perceived as difficult, holdings in CSM’s archives demonstrate that he felt strongly about art institutions being better for both artists and patrons. The purpose of critique is to improve. Still wanted museums to improve, and many people today are focused on this work.”
Registration is required to attend in person. The event will also stream live on CSM’s YouTube channel. Registration is not required to stream the program on YouTube.
About the Panelists and Moderator
Lisa Yun Lee, Ph.D., is the executive director of the National Public Housing Museum, a cultural activist, and an associate professor at UIC. She teaches with the Prison Neighborhood Art Project and is a Chicago Torture Justice Memorials member. Lee served as Co-Chair of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Arts & Culture Transition Team and on the Mayor’s Committee for Monuments, Memorials, and Historical Reckoning. She is working with public housing residents to open a museum in the last remaining building of the historic Jane Addams Homes, with the mission to preserve, interpret and propel housing as a human right. NPHM includes the world’s largest collection of oral histories of people who grew up in public housing, restored apartments from different generations of diverse public housing families, spaces to bridge the arts and innovative public policy, an Entrepreneurship Hub with a museum store that is a cooperative owned with public housing residents, and contemporary art spaces. Lee is a board member of the Field Foundation, 3Arts, and the Illinois State Museum.
Sierra Van Ryck deGroot is the deputy director of Museum Hue. A proud alumna of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Program at Seton Hall University and Bank Street College of Education, Van Ryck deGroot has her BA in Art, Design and Interactive Media; Fine Arts; and Art History and MS Ed in Museum Education. A child of Guyanese immigrants, Van Ryck deGroot was born and raised in New Jersey. She is also half of the former Sierras co-presidential leadership team of the National Emerging Museum Professionals Network and a current board member for the New Jersey Association of Museums. Van Ryck deGroot also advocates for change in the GLAM sector, especially in museums, around salary transparency, actionable equity in hiring practices, the abolition of unpaid internships, and the practice of rest for all museum workers. Visit sierravrd.com.
Seph Rodney, Ph.D., was born in Jamaica and came of age in the Bronx, New York. He has an English degree from Long Island University, Brooklyn; a studio art MFA from the University of California, Irvine; and a doctorate in museum studies from Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a former senior critic and opinions editor for Hyperallergic and now regularly contributes to The New York Times. Rodney has written for CNN, NBC, American Craft Magazine, and penned catalog essays for Crystal Bridges Museum, the Mississippi Museum of Art, Teresita Fernandez, Meleko Mokgosi, and Sarah Oppenheimer. He can be heard weekly on the podcast “The American Age.” His book, The Personalization of the Museum Visit, was published by Routledge in May 2019. In 2020, he won the Rabkin Arts Journalism Prize. Visit sephrodney.com.
Joyce Tsai, Ph.D., is the director of the Clyfford Still Museum and is an internationally acclaimed curator, scholar, and teacher. She arrived at CSM from the University of Iowa, where she served as Chief Curator of the Stanley Museum of Art and Associate Professor of Practice in the School of Art and Art History. Tsai is trained as an intellectual historian and art historian — Princeton, AB, History, cum laude; Johns Hopkins University, MA German, Ph.D. Art History and Humanities. She has published extensively in technical art history with conservators and conservation scientists at the National Gallery of Art, Harvard Art Museums, Guggenheim, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
About the Clyfford Still Museum
Designed by Allied Works Architecture to display the revolutionary art of one of the 20th century’s greatest artists, the Clyfford Still Museum opened in November 2011 in Denver’s Golden Triangle Creative District. Considered one of the most important and mysterious painters of the 20th century, Clyfford Still (1904-1980) was among the first generation of abstract expressionist artists who developed a new and powerful approach to painting in the years during and immediately after World War II. The Museum’s collection represents more than 93% of the artist’s lifetime output. As the steward of Still’s art and legacy, the Museum’s mission is to preserve, exhibit, study, and foster engagement with its unique collections; generate outstanding exhibitions, scholarly research, educational and other cross-disciplinary programs that broaden the definition of a “single-artist” museum; and be a gathering place for the exploration of innovation and individual artistic endeavor. Connect with the Clyfford Still Museum on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or at clyffordstillmuseum.org.
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