Pray, 2012, Kate Clark, antelope hide and horns, foam, clay, pins, thread, and rubber eyes. Collection of Chet Robachinski and Jerry Slipman. © Kate Clark

Artists and Beasts: Why Animals?

GETTY CENTER

Museum Lecture Hall


This is a past event


Animals have been depicted in artworks for tens of thousands of years, dating to the earliest known cave paintings. Over the millennia, art has reflect changes in human-animal relationships. Manuscripts, especially the medieval bestiaries that describe dozens of the world’s creatures, reflect the symbolic meaning attached to animals in the Middle Ages. Many contemporary artists continue to explore our connections to beasts: Kate Clark creates hybrid fusions of humans and animals in her sculptures; Claire Owen explores the emblematic function of beasts in her modern artist-book version of a bestiary; and writer Donika Kelly uses poetry to reflect on encounters between humans and animals. This panel of three artists explores the enduring desire to see the human in the animal world (and vice versa) and how that duality finds its form in the arts of today.

The panel is moderated by Dr. Giovanni Aloi, an expert on the representation of animals in modern and contemporary art. He is a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture and co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press Art after Nature.

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