Northwestern University conceptual artist Michael Rakowitz knows how to grab the public’s attention with creations like “Enemy Kitchen”—an Army-green ice cream truck, staffed by Iraqi war veterans serving up recipes from the Rakowitz’s family Jewish-Iraqi heritage—and other thought-provoking installations.
Rakowitz, a professor in Northwestern University’s Department of Art Theory and Practice, will explain how he develops an idea into a work of art—including the latest, on the killing of Tamir Rice, which drew him to Cleveland and his talk at Case Western Reserve University.
Rakowitz will give the 2015 biennial Beamer-Schneider Lecture in Ethics and Civics, “There is a crack in everything: that’s how the light gets through.” The free and public event begins at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, April 7, in 309 Clark Hall.
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, the Beamer-Schneider Professor in Ethics, invited Rakowitz for the biennial lecture. Rakowitz’s work has been exhibited in such places as Chicago, Palestine, Iraq and museums like the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Gallery and Museum of Modern Art.
The lecture is meant to push the boundaries of typical ethics as practiced and studied in higher education by hearing from internationally recognized thinkers and practitioners, Bendik-Keymer said.
Among Rakowitz’s notable projects are:
- paraSITE: Inflatable customized homeless shelters constructed from garbage bags and waterproof tape—all built on a $5 budget.
- Plans for recreation of the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein, which will be made of birdseed, meant for eating by birds.
- Return: Davisons & Co. is a New York City import business, first started by Rakowitz’s grandfather, who was exiled from Iraq in 1946 and immigrated to the United States. The import business closed in the 1960s but was revived by his grandson in 2004.
- Spoils of 2011: Rakowitz and Creative Time collaborated on a series of culinary art performances at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Autumn. Each featured an Iraqi entrée of venison and date syrup served on looted china plates once owned by Hussein. Marshals later confiscated the stolen merchandise bought on eBay.
Chicago Tribune’s Christopher Borrelli has described Rakowitz as one of the most influential conceptual artists of the moment, a “deeply politically minded soul whose work, posed between agitprop and performance, has accomplished the remarkable: He has figured out a way to make conceptual art less…Conceptual. And more accessible.”
For information, contact Bendik-Keymer at jdb179@case.edu or visit philosophy.case.edu/beamer-schneider-professorship/beamer-schneider-lecture.