On April 1, the School of Art announced the return of the Photography Department’s virtual pop up lecture series—a reprise of last year’s Q&A-style events initiated by Director of Graduate Studies in Photography, Gregory Crewdson, in response to the shift to online learning during the 2020 pandemic.

In these online 30-minute events, Crewdson asks each guest a list of simple questions about artistic practice, and the anticipation of an end to the pandemic crisis. American film director David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en, Gone Girl) kicked off the 2021 series with the first event on April 5, with subsequent events welcoming A$AP Rocky, Barry Jenkins, James Laxton, Julianne Moore, Adrianne Lenker, Jeff Wall, and Jeremy O. Harris.

The events in the 2021 reprise were officially open to all, with new events announced on the School’s public, Yale, and Facebook calendars, with Zoom links made available through our Instagram. While the recordings of all of these online events cannot be made publicly available, select clips and full segments are published on the School of Art’s Youtube channel as well as archived below.

The final talk in Season 2 of the series was hosted on Monday, May 10, 2021 with Takashi Murakami.

David Fincher is an American film director and producer. His work has received countless awards internationally, including 40 Academy Award nominations, three for Best Director. His most recent, Mank, leads this year’s Oscars nominations with 10 total. Fincher began his career directing music videos, including Madonna’s Express Yourself (1989) and Vogue (1990), winning the MTV Video Music Award for Best Direction for both, and going on to make dozens of iconic videos spanning decades. His feature films, however, place him among the most acclaimed directors in the modern American film canon, including Zodiac (2007), The Social Network (2010), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Fight Club (1999), Panic Room (2002), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) and Gone Girl (2014). Fincher has also served as the executive producer on television shows such as House of Cards (2013-2018) and Mindhunter (2017-2019).

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One of hip-hop’s true mavericks, Harlem born MC A$AP Rocky, born Rakim Mayers, has taken the music and fashion worlds by storm since his emergence in 2011. In 2018, with two critically acclaimed, #1 debuts on the Billboard 200 for freshman & sophomore albums, LONG.LIVE.A$AP and AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP, Rocky released his highly-anticipated third studio album, TESTING, which has garnered over 1 Billion streams worldwide, landing at #1 on the iTunes charts in 16 countries upon release. In August of 2019, Rocky dropped new single “Babushka Boi” accompanied by a viral Dick Tracy-inspired video, which went on to receive a 2020 MTV Video Music Award nomination for “Best Art Direction.”

Rocky continues to collaborate with many notable artists and creatives across various genres, including G-Eazy’s 5x RIAA Platinum “No Limit” with Cardi B, Mura Masa’s “Love$ick”, Tyler, The Creator’s “Who Dat Boy”, and songs with Lana Del Rey, The Weeknd, Selena Gomez, Young Thug, Skepta, Juicy J, Rod Stewart, Alicia Keys and more. Rocky made his acting debut in director Rick Famuyiwa’s coming-of-age film DOPE in 2015, which debuted at Sundance Film Festival to much fanfare.

The past four years have also seen Rocky’s creative agency AWGE in the spotlight, launching partnerships with Selfridges, JW Anderson, Under Armour, MTV and most recently a collaboration with Kayne West. In addition, AWGE has launched the careers of notable artists such as Playboi Carti, Smooky MarGielaa, slowthai and more.

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Academy Award winner Barry Jenkins’ feature film debut, Medicine for Melancholy, was hailed as one of the best films of 2009 by The New York Times and received several Independent Spirit and Gotham Award nominations. In 2017, along with playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, Jenkins received an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his second feature the Academy Award and Golden Globe winning Best Picture Moonlight. As well as earning eight Academy Award nominations, ten Broadcast Critics Choice Awards nominations, six Golden Globe nominations and four BAFTA nominations, Moonlight won Best Picture and Director at the Gotham Awards and Best International Film by the British Independent Film Awards. In addition to NYFCC and NBR awarding Jenkins Best Director and LAFCA naming him Best Director and the film Best Picture, Jenkins received a DGA Best Director nomination and won the WGA Award for Best Original Screenplay. His third feature, the adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk went on to receive three Academy Award nominations and won Best Picture at the Independent Spirit Awards. Jenkins also received the Independent Spirit Award for Best Director. Jenkins’ next feature film projects include a follow up to The Lion King for Walt Disney Studios as well as a biopic of famed choreographer, Alvin Ailey, for Searchlight Pictures. His next project for television is an adaptation of National Book Award winner Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad for Amazon.

Director of photography James Laxton is best known for his work on Moonlight, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography and won the award for Best Picture. Laxton also received a prestigious American Society of Cinematographers Award nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography in Theatrical Releases; the Independent Spirit Award; the Los Angeles Critics Association Award; the National Society of Film Critics Award; and the New York Film Critics Award—all for best cinematography. In 2018 Laxton teamed up with Jenkins again for If Beale Street Could Talk. Most recently, Laxton completed production on The Underground Railroad, also directed by Jenkins, being produced for Amazon Studios and set to be released in 2021.

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Julianne Moore is an Academy Award and Emmy winning actor, and the first American woman to be awarded top acting prizes at the Cannes, Berlin, and Venice film festivals. Julianne also is a New York Times bestselling author, for her children’s book series Freckleface Strawberry. She is on the Advisory Council of The Children’s Health Fund, a supporter of the Tuberous Sclerosis Alliance, and in 2015, became founding chair of the Everytown for Gun Safety Creative Council, a creative community established to help amplify the movement to end gun violence in America. Julianne has most recently starred in Gloria Bell (2019), After The Wedding (2019) and The Glorias (2020). Future projects include the Apple+ series Lisey’s Story (2021), Spirit Untamed (2021), Women In The Window (2021), Dear Evan Hanson (2021) and When You Finish Saving the World.

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Adrianne Lenker has been writing songs since she was 10 years old. Her back story has been well documented in various interviews and profiles for Big Thief over the last five years. Despite, or more likely because of, the constant touring and studio work, the last few years have been some of the most prolific for Lenker as a writer. Songs pop out at soundcheck. They pop out on late night drives between cities. They pop out in green rooms, hotel stairwells, gardens, and kitchens around the world. In the hands of Lenker, songwriting is not an old dead craft. It is alive. It is vital. Following a busy 2019 which saw Big Thief release two critically acclaimed albums, Lenker released her latest solo albums, songs and instrumentals, on October 23, 2020.

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Jeff Wall was born in in Vancouver, Canada, where he lives and works. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Broad, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; and Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada. Exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007, traveled to Art Institute of Chicago, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); In light, black, colour, white, and dark, PinchukArtCentre, Kiev (2012); Jeff Wall Photographs, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth (2012, traveled to National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, through 2013); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2013); Tableaux, Pictures, Photographs 996–203, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2014, traveled to Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark, through 2015); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2014); Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris (2015); Appearance, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany (2018); and Mudam Luxembourg (2018).

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Jeremy O. Harris is the playwright and creator of the most Tony nominated Broadway play ever, Slave Play (Golden Theatre - Broadway, New York Theatre Workshop, NYT Critics Pick, Winner of the 2018 Kennedy Center Rosa Parks Playwriting Award, the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, and The Lotos Foundation Prize in the Arts and Sciences). Jeremy co-wrote A24’s upcoming film Zola with director Janicza Bravo which premiered at Sundance in 2020. He is currently adapting the sci-fi epic The New World by Ales Kot for Warner Bros. Pictures. In television, Harris is in an overall deal with HBO and is a co-producer on their hit series Euphoria. He was named “The Queer Black Savior the Theatre World Needs” by Out Magazine, is the HRC’s 2020 honoree, was included on both THR’s 50 Most Powerful LGBTQ Players in Hollywood and TIME Magazine’s 2019 100 NEXT lists, is the 11th recipient of the Vineyard Theatre’s Paula Vogel Playwrighting Award, a 2016 MacDowell Colony Fellow, an Orchard Project Greenhouse artist, a resident playwright with Colt Coeur, and is under commission from Lincoln Center Theater and Playwrights Horizons. Jeremy is a graduate of the Yale MFA Playwriting Program and currently resides in NYC.

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Ed Ruscha (b. 1937, Omaha, Nebraska, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. At the start of his artistic career, Ruscha called himself an “abstract artist … who deals with subject matter.” Abandoning academic connotations that came to be associated with Abstract Expressionism, he looked instead to tropes of advertising and brought words—as form, symbol, and material—to the forefront of painting. Working in diverse media with humor and wit, he oscillates between sign and substance, locating the sublime in landscapes both natural and artificial.

Ruscha’s paintings of the 1960s explore the noise and the fluidity of language. With works such as OOF (1962–63)—which presents the exclamation in yellow block letters on a blue ground—it is nearly impossible to look at the painting without verbalizing the visual. Since his first exhibition with Gagosian in 1993, Ruscha has had twenty-one solo exhibitions with the gallery, including Custom-Built Intrigue: Drawings 1974–84 (2017), comprising a decade of reverse-stencil drawings of phrases rendered in pastel, dry pigment, and various edible substances, from spinach to carrot juice. The first retrospective of Ruscha’s drawings was held in 2004 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ruscha continues to influence contemporary artists worldwide, his formal experimentations and clever use of the American vernacular evolving in form and meaning as technology and internet platforms alter the essence of human communication. Ruscha represented the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005) with Course of Empire, an installation of ten paintings. Inspired by nineteenth century American artist Thomas Cole’s famous painting cycle of the same name, the work alludes to the pitfalls surrounding modernist visions of progress. In 2018 Ruscha’s Course of Empire was presented concurrently with Cole’s at the National Gallery in London.

Ruscha’s most recent shows include Ed Ruscha: OKLA, an ongoing exhibition at the Oklahoma Contemporary that explores the artist’s childhood upbringing in Oklahoma, and Paintings at Gagosian New York.

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Considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, Carrie Mae Weems is a photographer, filmmaker, installation artist and writer. Her work explores themes of family relationships, cultural identities, political systems and power. Weems is the recipient of many awards—both internationally and within the United States. In 2013, she received the MacArthur Genius grant and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Her other awards include: BET Honors Visual Artist Award, the Lucie Award for Fine Art Photography, and the ICP Spotlight Award, among others. Her work is represented in both private and public collections around the globe, and she is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York.

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Takashi Murakami seamlessly blends commercial imagery, anime, manga, and traditional Japanese styles and subjects, revealing the themes and questions that connect past and present, East and West, technology and fantasy. His paintings, sculptures, and films are populated by repeated motifs and evolving characters of his own creation. Together with dystopian themes and contemporary references, he revitalizes narratives of transcendence in continuation of the nonconformist legacy of a group of eighteenth-century Japanese artists known as the Edo eccentrics.

Since the early 1990s Murakami has invented characters that combine aspects of popular cartoons from Japan, Europe, and the US—from his first Mr. DOB, who sometimes serves as a stand-in for the artist himself, to various anime characters and smiling flowers, bears, and lions. These figures act as icons and symbols—hosts for more complex themes of violence, technology, and fantasy.

Murakami earned a BA, MFA, and PhD from Tokyo University of the Arts, where he studied nihonga (traditional Japanese painting). In 1996 he established the Hiropon Factory, a studio/workshop that in subsequent years grew into an art production and artist management company, now known as Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd.

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Credits:

Season 2 of the series was co-produced by Lindsey Mancini, Yale School of Art, and Juliane Hiam, Crewdson Studio.

The series graphic identity was created by Kyla Arsadjaja, Graphic Design MFA ‘20, and YouTube videos and clips were cut and edited by Lindsey Mancini, with Instagram clips for the series cut by Emily Barresi, Photography MFA ‘22.