Josh Azzarella
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Josh Azzarella, Untitled #176 (Albedo 0.343), installation view, 2015-16. Scale model (1:4:9) of the monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Josh Azzarella | Wallace Herndon Smith Distinguished Faculty Visiting Lecture
Josh Azzarella will deliver the 2024 Wallace Herndon Smith Distinguished Faculty Visiting Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series at WashU.
Azzarella’s multidisciplinary practice, which includes videos, objects, and photographs, explores the power of authorship in shaping collective memory. The works address broader postmodern debates on the nature of reality. His research-based practice continually adopts new media methods such as artificial intelligence, while reexamining and adapting historical methods of reproduction, employing such diverse technologies as electromagnetic levitation and custom lathe-cut records.
About Josh Azzarella
Scholarly discourse acknowledges Azzarella’s work for challenging the evidentiary capacity of the image. His work has been written about in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and publications such as Visual Ethics (Routledge, 2018). Critic Shana Nys Dambrot asserts “[the] work is about the very nature of memory, attention, and experience themselves.”
His work is included in the permanent collections of SFMoMA, MFA Houston, and LACMA, among others. Recently, he has collaborated with Teddy Abrams and the Louisville Orchestra and had solo exhibitions at Indiana University and City Gallery Wellington in New Zealand.
More Upcoming Lectures
Apr 15 at 5:30pm • Museum Lobby
Being and Becoming in Contemporary Chinese Art
This talk by Peggy Wang, associate professor of art history and Asian studies at Bowdoin College, addresses the conflicting pressures that artists in China confronted during the 1990s and early 2000s, including rapid urbanization and cultural globalization. Even as they navigated political constraints and deficits in resources, contemporary artists enacted productive strategies for making and exhibiting their art. This lecture foregrounds artists’ assertions of being and becoming, both as critical tactics for configuring identity and generative topics unto themselves. Wang will particularly examine how artists studied the vibrant dynamics of change through temporal, historical, and material dimensions in their art.
This lecture is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China, on view at the Kemper Art Museum from February 27 to July 27, 2026.
Part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series