Lauren Woods

November 10 — lauren woods is a Dallas-based conceptual artist whose hybrid media projects — film, video and sound installations, public interventions, and site-specific work — engage history as a lens through which to view the sociopolitical nature of the present. Challenging the tradition of documentary/ethnography as objective, woods creates ethno-fictive documents that investigate invisible dynamics in society, remixing memory and imagining other possibilities. She also explores how traditional monument-making can be translated into new contemporary models of commemoration, substituting the traditional marble and granite for new media. In 2013, woods unveiled Drinking Fountain #1, a new media monument to the American Civil Rights Movement, past and present activists/organizers, and the spirit of resistance, installed underneath the remnants of a recently rediscovered Jim Crow “White only” sign in the Dallas County Records Building. Part sculpture, part intervention, the piece is part of the larger public artwork A Dallas Drinking Fountain Project. Having shown internationally throughout her career, woods’s most recent solo exhibition at Zhulong Gallery in Dallas continued her exploration of subject and object through the lens of color with multichannel video and sound interventions that envelope the viewer.

For this Tuesday Evenings presentation, lauren woods shares the work and ideas that have formed her practice.

This popular series of lectures and presentations by artists, architects, historians, and critics is free and open to the public each Tuesday from September 15 through November 10. Visit www.themodern.org/programs/lectures for more information on each talk.

Lectures begin at 7 pm in the Museum’s auditorium. Seating begins at 6:30 pm and is limited to 250; a live broadcast of the presentations is shown in Café Modern for any additional guests. Free admission tickets (limit two) are available at the Modern’s information desk beginning at 5 pm on the day of the lecture. The museum galleries remain open until 7 pm on Tuesday evenings during the series (general admission applies).

Café Modern serves cocktails and appetizers on Tuesday nights until 7 pm during the lecture series.

Image credit: lauren woods, A Portrait of the African Shore (from the AFRICA Archives series), 2010–present (ongoing). Five-channel video monitor installation