Paul Mellon Distinguished
Fellow Lecture: Catherine Liu
Type
Lecture
Series
Barbara Lee Lecture Series
Location
Old Dominion Fresco Barn
Skowhegan Campus
39 Art School Rd
Madison, ME 04950
Date
8 PM
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Next up in our 2025 Barbara Lee Lecture Series, please join Paul Mellon Distinguished Fellow Catherine Liu for her talk: “Trauma Culture Liberalism, the Transitional Object and the Crisis of Contemporary Art.”
Catherine writes, “Playing with and testing the materials of shared reality is critical to art making. Artists in the era of liberal trauma culture have come of age when vulnerability has been reified as a source of political legitimization and inspiration: bad for politics and bad for art, this approach infantilizes everyone involved in the making and understanding of art itself. This paper explores through the lens of D. W. Winnicott the importance of play and the transitional object in the experience of art making and world breaking.”
About the speaker:
Catherine Liu is the author of Virtue Hoarders: the Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. Her forthcoming book Traumatized is due out with Verso in 2026. She writes about culture, critical theory, financialization and higher education. Her substack deals with culture, politics and family. Her next project is on political message art as the highest form of kitsch. She is Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine.
About The Barbara Lee Lecture Series
The Barbara Lee Lecture Series is an annual series that features faculty artists during our summer program. During this series, we open our campus to the public, welcoming our friends and neighbors into the conversations that take place at the School. After the summer program, the lectures become part of the Lecture Archive, a growing collection of recordings that can be accessed online or on request.
