Sept. 24: David van der Leer, "Into the Streets" @ SVA D-Crit

Being both inspired and concerned about the current omnipresent urban moment, urban thinker and activator David van der Leer has devoted much of his curatorial practice to projects about and for cities. Combining urban strategies with community engagement tools from the realms of art and performance, Van der Leer has developed a series of tactics intended to engage everyday urban citizens. In this lecture, he’ll show us a selection of past projects conducted as curator of the BMW Guggenheim Lab, and discuss some future initiatives he hopes to bring into being as the newly appointed executive director of Van Alen Institute.

David van der Leer is the executive director of Van Alen Institute in New York City. Previously he was curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s BMW Guggenheim Lab, a mobile urban laboratory that traveled to major cities worldwide including New York, Berlin, and Mumbai. In addition, Van der Leer curated “stillspotting nyc,” a two-year multidisciplinary project that took the museum programming out into the streets of the five boroughs to find special moments of stillness. In 2012, he was co-curator for the American Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale, and for the 2011 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, he curated an exhibition on new towns.

SVA MFA Design Criticism Lecture Series Fall 2013
Tuesdays, 6:30–8:30 p.m.