Deviant Scale: Jenni Sorkin

Intense and immersive, the immediacy of cloth is its evocation of the body. Conveying abstraction, embodiment, and corporeality in the shadow of American-based Culture Wars, and the global AIDS epidemic, 1990s-era sculptural textile practices offered dynamic structures in which cloth was manipulated, folded, stacked, clustered, layered, and sewn, through repetitive accretions, to approximate sizes, shapes, and contours of the body. In an era that fostered social and political inequities, textiles were repeatedly employed as allegories of repair, mending, and healing. In her lecture Jenni Sorkin will address the complexities and biases aimed at 1990s textile-based installation in relation to the female-identified body, ideologies of abjection, and technologies of sculpture as depicted in the exhibition “Future Bodies from a Recent Past—Sculpture, Technology, and the Body since the 1950s.”

Jenni Sorkin is Professor of History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, CA. She writes on the intersections between gender, material culture, and Contemporary art, working primarily on women artists and underrepresented media. Her books include: “Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community” (2016), “Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women Artists, 1947–2016” (2016), and “Art in California” (2021), as well as numerous essays in journals and exhibition catalogs. She received her PhD in the history of art from Yale University and is a member of the editorial board of the “Journal of Modern Craft.” From 2021–2022, she was Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

The lecture is part of the academic workshop "Sculptured Surfaces, Bodily Interfaces. The Long 1980s" in cooperation with Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. Please find the detailed program here.