Spencer Museum hosts virtual event with MacArthur fellows Janine Antoni, John Rich

LAWRENCE — A virtual event hosted by the Spencer Museum of Art at 4 p.m. April 26 will present internationally acclaimed artist Janine Antoni in conversation with other researchers about how to better understand and connect to our bodies through multiple perspectives. A free livestream of this event is available through the Spencer Museum’s website.

The event features MacArthur fellows Antoni, who has explored the body through sculpture, movement and photography for decades; and John Rich, whose work in public health focuses on healing and the Black body. They will be joined in conversation by artists Ingrid Bachmann and Dario Robleto, whose work is featured in the Spencer Museum’s exhibition “Healing, Knowing, Seeing the Body.”

This program is organized by the Spencer Museum’s Integrated Arts Research Initiative (IARI), which facilitates annual inquiries that explore issues across the arts, sciences and humanities. This year’s inquiry — Tending to the Body — uses images, sound, video and text to explore how we care for our bodies through submissions from various artists and scholars on a virtual platform. The livestream event is embedded in the digital space, allowing attendees to reference inquiry contributions before, during and after the conversation.

IARI is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This program is supported in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Image: Dario Robleto, "The Aorta of an Archivist" (video still), 2020-2021, UHD video, 5.1 surround sound installation, 53 minutes, in collaboration with Skye Ashbrook and Bill Haddad, Courtesy of the artist.