Todd Pierce Conference

Artists and Designers
Respond to
AIDS
Duration: 1 hour

From 1981 to 1996, AIDS ravaged the world of artists and designers, particularly in New York and Los Angeles, the two creative capitals of the United States. Belying their reputation as politically naïve and poorly organized, artists and designers worked together to create successful lobbying campaigns to change public health policy. They used technologies that were new at the time and their own sophisticated grasp of visual language to challenge bigotry and apathy. Work by Ross Bleckner, David Wojarnowicz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Gran Fury, Diamanda Galas, General Idea, and others show the potential and the limitations of artistic production about a deadly epidemic. This presentation is in commemoration of World AIDS Day (a bit late, since that’s 1 December) and an opportunity to discuss the eternal struggle in political art between oblique reference and agitprop.

Higher Education in the US
Duration: 1 hour

Are you curious about higher education in the US? A bit confused about how to identify the best masters and Ph.D. programs for you? If so, please come to this talk. The presentation will include how to prepare your applications and draft a personal statement.

The goal of the lecture is to give students, some of whom were born after this work was created, the feel of a particular place and time in the US art world, and show some images they know in a context they might not have seen before. I hope to get lots of questions and ideas from the class.

TODD PIERCE
About

Born in northern California the week the White Album was released, Thomas Pierce usually uses his nickname, Todd. He has always been a bookworm and enjoys the work of WB Sebald, Joan Didion, Chuck Klosterman, and Haruki Murakami. He grew up outside New York City, and has a BA with honors and distinction in English from Stanford University and a master’s degree in history of art from Yale University. He became a diplomat in 1992, and has served as a press or cultural attaché in Athens, Tirana, Accra, Rangoon and Washington. Fluent in French and Greek, he speaks middling Turkish, rudimentary Burmese and Italian, and residual Albanian. He dreams of learning ixaret, the sign language devised by the sultans, but cannot find a living expert. He is a patron of Prospect Burma, a scholarship foundation for Burmese students and a member of Stanford PRIDE.