Keynote Speaker - Spencer Finch

Spencer Finch, American artist best known for his ethereal light installations
Monday, June 8 at 1:30pm 

Keynote Summary
This presentation looks at over two decades of work that explores time, light, color, and the nature of sensory perception. Finch’s work integrates science, poetry, art, and philosophy to examine the forces behind what we see and how we represent the world. His practice embraces color in all its paradoxes and ambiguities, and investigates the power of the mind to shape our memories and shared experiences. 

Bio
Spencer Finch is a contemporary American artist whose artistic practice incorporates a wide variety of mediums, including watercolor, photography, glass, electronics, video, and site specific color and light installations. His work has been exhibited internationally since the early 1990’s. 

“Light and its color are ultimately the subjects that fascinate Finch and those that he returns to again and again—along with the perceptual, physiological, psychological, and linguistic workings that influence how we experience them. Like many artists and thinkers who have inspired him and who turn up in his work—scientists, artists, poets, and philosophers, including Monet, Turner, Newton, Dickinson, Goethe, and Wittgenstein—Finch is continuously celebrating, and grappling with, the beauty and enigmas of light and color. His mix of science and poetry is fitting for a subject that is equally tied to science and art.”  — Susan Cross, An Introduction to the Work of the Artist, The Brain Is Wider Than The Sky, pp. 7, 2016

Spencer Finch’s work was exhibited in the 2004 Whitney Biennial Making Worlds and the 2009 Venice Biennale. Public projects include Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on that September Morning, for the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City (2014), Vital Signs for Quadrant 3 in London (2013), a glass facade design for the Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore (2012) and The River that Flows Both Ways as the inaugural exhibition for The High Line in New York City (2009). 

His works are collected in numerous museums including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Glasgow Museum of Art, Glasgow; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Morgan Library and Museum, New York City; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. 

Finch’s monograph The Brain is Wider than the Sky (2016) was edited by Susan Cross with contributions by Mark Godfrey and James Rondeau. A Cloud Index, his large scale project for the new Paddington Station in London, is scheduled to open in 2021.