When Fountainheads Collide: Lawrence Weschler on Robert Irwin and David Hockney December 9, 2009

The BFA Illustration program at Parsons presents When Fountainheads Collide, a discussion about Robert Irwin and David Hockney with writer Lawrence Weschler. The event celebrates the publication of Weschler’s braided biographical volumes, "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Things One Sees: Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin" and "True to LIfe: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney." When Fountainheads Collide will be held at 7pm in the Kellen Auditorium, 66 Fifth Avenue, and is free and open to the public.

Weschler, a longtime New Yorker contributor, will describe his experiences working with these two giants of contemporary art, who have incredibly different views, and have never actually spoken with each other. Weschler is director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University and the artistic director for the Chicago Humanities Festival. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for over twenty years. Weschler is a two-time winner of the George Polk Awards, first in 1988 for Cultural Reporting and again in 1992 for Magazine Reporting. He was also a recipient of Lannan Literary Award (1998). Beginning in 1999, his Convergences essays appeared regularly in McSweeney's Quarterly; a collection of these essays, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, was published in 2006 and received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. His book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder was a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Parsons’ BFA Illustration Program engages students as visual artists who are poised to become influential, pictorial communicators. Through studio and digital course work, the program builds proficiency in drawing and media-based skills, creativity in concepts and problem solving, awareness of art and design and current social and cultural concerns, and fluency in technological tools and software. Moving Pictures is one of many events organized by the Illustration program to foster a critical dialogue on the field of illustration. Each fall, the program organizes a symposium that brings together leading artists, designers, and writers to discuss the past and future of the craft, and its place in academic and pop culture. For more information on illustration at Parsons, please visit http://parsonsillustration.wordpress.com.

Official Website: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=196208268894&ref=mf