Tuesday Evenings at the Modern opens this season with insights into the art and issues of Urban Theater: New York Art in the 1980s. Dr. Mark Thistlethwaite, Kay and Velma Kimbell Chair of Art History at TCU, directs a panel discussion with the Modern’s Chief Curator Michael Auping, organizer of the exhibition Urban Theater, along with Curator Andrea Karnes and Assistant Curator Alison Hearst, who also contributed essays to the catalogue.

Kenny Scharf, an artist featured in Urban Theater: New York Art in the 1980s, rose to prominence in the 1980s East Village art scene and was one of the first artists to inject elements of street culture into the mainstream of contemporary art.

Kenneth Goldsmith is, among many distinctions, the 2013 inaugural Poet Laureate of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and founding editor of online archive UbuWeb. With eleven books of poetry to his name, Goldsmith’s writing has been called “some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry” by Publishers Weekly. He was invited to read at President Obama’s “A Celebration of American Poetry” at the White House, where he also held a poetry workshop with First Lady Michelle Obama.

Jules de Balincourt, the artist featured in the Modern’s exhibition FOCUS: Jules de Balincourt, works from the position of an outsider on paintings of American politics and marginalized communities, both utopian and dystopian, in compositions that explore the shifting relationship between representation and abstraction.

Jenny Jaskey is director and curator of the Artist’s Institute at Hunter College; co-editor of Realism Materialism Art, an upcoming publication on the “speculative turn” in philosophy and aesthetics; and contributor to various publications including the Brooklyn Rail. Of particular interest for this presentation is Jaskey’s curatorial innovations and experiences in her position at the Artist’s Institute, a research institution and experimental curatorial platform for contemporary art in New York City.

Jenny Holzer is internationally recognized for her daring approach to Public Art and her dramatic site-specific installations in galleries and museums. Since the mid-1970s, Holzer has used language as her primary means of expression, delivering various statements and stories through a wide range of media. Beginning with inexpensively printed posters, Holzer's art has steadily evolved in sophistication, expanding into a lexicon that includes advertising billboards, radio, television, clothing, and the medium she is most associated with-the electronic sign.

Special Presentation

Lecture: Mexican Contemporary Art and the Art Historical Canon
Thursday, September 12, 6 to 7 pm, with book signing to follow

James Cutler, FAIA, founding partner of Cutler Anderson Architects, is known for his environmental and emotional sensitivity to place, institution, program, climate, and cultural circumstance. For this Tuesday Evenings at the Modern, Cutler presents “Searching For True," stating, “We [Cutler Anderson Architects] have chosen, as best we can, to respect and reveal the nature of all of the elements that influence, or are employed, in the making of architecture.

Howard Rachofsky is an internationally renowned collector of contemporary art living in Dallas. He began collecting in the mid-1970s, and over the past three decades has amassed a world-class collection of paintings, sculpture, video, and installation art by many of the era's greatest artists, including Robert Irwin, Donald Judd, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, and Mark Rothko, among many others.