The 2024 Walter Harding Lecture will be delivered by Alan Michelson, renowned artist, curator, writer, and Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River. For over three decades, Michelson has been a leading practitioner of a socially engaged, critically aware, site-specific art grounded in local context and informed by the retrieval of repressed histories.
The lecture will take place September 25 at 5:00 p.m. in Doty Recital Hall. It is free and open to the public.
Geneseo's yearly Harding Lecture honors the life and legacy of SUNY Distinguished Professor of English Walter Harding (1917-1996). Harding, one of the twentieth century's foremost scholars of writer, naturalist, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, taught in SUNY Geneseo's English department from 1956 to 1982.
Michelson will explain how Thoreau has influenced some of his works. His lecture will conlude with a live performance by New York City pianist Fred Kameny of the "Thoreau" movement of composer Charles Ives' Concord Sonata, and a recording of a scene from the 1979 Philip Glass opera Satyagraha (loosely based on the life of Gandhi) sung by Michelson's sister Rhonda Liss, who was cast in the opera's original production as a privileged South African matron who rescues Gandhi from a mob. (The title of Glass's opera refers to Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent resistance, which was influenced by Thoreau's famous essay "Resistance to Civil Government," more commonly known under its posthumous title, "Civil Disobedience.")
In recent years, Michelson's work has been exhibited at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, the Tate Modern, MoMA/PS1, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and it is currently on view at the Baltimore Art Museum and the Thomas Cole National Historic Site.
Michelson's diverse practice includes award-winning public art. Mantle, his permanent, site-specific monument honoring Virginia’s Indian nations, was dedicated at the capitol in Richmond in 2018. The Knowledge Keepers, his Huntington Avenue Entrance Commission at MFA Boston, will launch on November 14 of this year.
Michelson was co-founder and co-curator of the groundbreaking Indigenous New York series with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, on whose board he currently serves. His essays have appeared in Aperture, Frieze, and October, and his work has been featured in numerous publications, including the New York Times and Art in America.
To learn more about Michelson and his art, visit his website, https://www.alanmichelson.com/.