This art historian and critic is speaking at UTSC the Monday after Reading Week. Will

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LECTURE SERIES ON VISUAL CULTURE, SPONSORED BY THE HUMANITIES CENTRE, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

John K. Grande

Monday February 26, 2-4pm, Arts and Admin. building, AA204

Art historian and critic John K. Grande's reviews and feature articles have been published extensively in Artforum, Vice Versa, Sculpture, Art Papers, British Journal of Photography, Espace Sculpture, Public Art Review, Vie des Arts, Art On Paper, Circa & Canadian Forum.

He is also the author of Balance: Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists (State University of New York Press, 2004), Art and Nature (Black Rose Books, 2004), Intertwining: Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists (Black Rose Books, 1998) and Jouer avec le feu: Armand Vaillancourt: Sculpteur engagé (Lanctot, 2001). Grande is the 1994 winner of Espace-sculpture’s Prix

Quotes from Grande:

"Cultural identity is as necessary to humanity as the sun is to nature, for it guides us to identify who we are, where we have come from and where we are going. The impulse to create reflects an implicit desire to improve the world around us. Art can no longer be purely object based. The limits imposed on us by nature are guiding us to establish a new global ethic that involves the mutual respect between living things. Art draws upon that flow of energies that is part of the process of life, the procreative core of our need to transform, enrich express,"
------from "The Spiritual in Art linking Nature to it All" by John K. Grande/1997

From the Introduction: TRUE TO NATURE by John K. Grande

...."These dialogues will provide the reader with a variety of artists'own views on the process of their artmaking and viewpoints on the place of nature in art. With a better understanding of how the art-nature phenomenon is occurring simultaneoulsy in many places, among a great variety of artists, in many countries, and how this synchronicity is no accident, readers will be provided with a broader worldview. It evidences the urgent need for contemporary art to embrace the nature phenomenon as an ongoing part of the dialogue on humanity's place in nature."

Praise from Fellow Artists:

“John Grande encourages us to rethink what it means to be an artist in a time of global ecocrisis.”
Suzi Gablik, author of The Reenchantment of Art

“A call to reawaken creativity in this time of alienation by demonstrating in lively ways that
culture is part of nature.” Antony Gormley

Grande’s latest book, Dialogues in Diversity: Art from Marginal to Mainstream, is inspired by a series of dialogues with artists. It paints a wide spectrum ranging from discussions with well-known international artists, including Antony Gormley in the UK and Alan Sonfist in the USA, to indigenous artists and those from marginalized cultures. In each case the artist has something important to say to us. Dialogues in Diversity will make readers aware of the way in which the centres of the art world feed on the margins. It shows how artists from countries as diverse as Senegal, Chile, Mexico, and Norway are offering unique perspectives to the mainstream art market of today’s Paris, London or New York.

John K. Grande currently lives and works in Montréal, Canada.