On September 5, 2007 the haudenschildGarage held a FUEL4TALK with Lisa Tan who presented work from her May 2007 trip to Buenos Aires for her Garage Project Recoleta.  She was in conversation with Derrick Cartwright (Director, Seattle Museum of Art) and Lauri Firstenberg (Director, LAXART). Following the talk was a Pizza Challenge – challenging directors of museums and alternative spaces to choose the best.

FUEL: Pizza

*In January of 2010 Lisa Tan revisited her project Recoleta and reflected on how three years changed her perspective on the project and the collection of drawings born out of the experience. See ‘Related Content’ below for a link to her text.

About the Participants

Derrick Cartwright

Derrick R. Cartwright, who has headed the San Diego Museum of Art since 2004, was appointed director of the Seattle Art Museum in 2009. Cartwright, a native of San Francisco who was educated at UC Berkeley, UCLA and the University of Michigan (PhD, 1994), is a scholar of North American art and architecture, 19th-century French art and the history of photography. Prior to his time in San Diego, he directed the Musee d’Art Americain in Giverny, France, and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.

Lauri Firstenberg

Lauri Firstenberg is the Founder and Director/Curator of LAXART, Los Angeles, CA and received her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University in 2005. She founded LAXART in 2005 – the leading independent nonprofit exhibition space in Los Angeles. She is currently curating the 2008 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art. Exhibitions Firsenberg has curated at LAXART include Daniel Martinez: How I Fell In Love With My Dirty Bomb, Ruben Ochoa: Extracted, TOROLAB: SOS Emergency Architecture, Lisa Tan: One Night Stand, Michael Queenland: Museum of Romantic Life, Adria Julia: A Means of Passing the Time, amongst others. She co-curated with Anton Vidokle Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life at the Gallery at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/Calarts Theatre), 2006 and Isaac Julien: True North, and Amir Zaki: Spring Through Winter, Mak Center, 2005. Firstenberg was formerly the Assistant Director/Curator of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the Schindler House, Los Angeles and Curator of Artists Space, New York. She has contributed to a host of publications on contemporary art including Art Papers, Frieze, Contemporary, Flash Art, Nka, Art Journal, Parkett, Lab 71 amongst others. She is the founder of L’art a new online publication for contemporary art. She is Adjunct Faculty in the Public Art Program at USC Roski School of Art and at Sciarc, Los Angeles.

Lisa Tan

Lisa Tan (www.lisatan.net) is an artist based in Brooklyn and Stockholm. Her work draws from personal and collective history, particularly in the realms of literature and cinema to deal with longing and loss as constant conditions of being. Many of Tan’s works involve an interest in the conditions of nighttime and solitude as experienced in the context of iconic urbanism. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo CGAC (Santiago de Compostela), Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), El Centro Cultural Montehermoso (Vitoria-Gasteiz), Andreas Grimm (Munich), FDC Satellite (Brussels), Artists Space (New York), Galerie Kamm (Berlin), D’Amelio Terras (New York), Harris Lieberman (New York), and LAXART (Los Angeles). She was the 2009 artist-in-residence at FRAC Bourgogne, (Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain – Région Bourgogne). Her work has been featured and reviewed in publications such as Artforum, artforum.com, Glänta, Blind Spot, FlashArt, and Art Papers. Lisa Tan received her B.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso and her M.F.A. from the University of Southern California (USC).