- Category
- Free Fridays
Drop-in Exhibition Tour with Ila Sheren
In this guided tour of Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea, art historian Ila Sheren will discuss connections between water and humans, including how rivers operate as both political and ecological borders.
Tours begin at the welcome desk in Sculpture Hall and are available on a first-come, first-served basis.
About the tour
In the words of scholar Mark Cheetham, water has its own “emotional life” that is intimately related to human needs yet often evades our understanding. Visitors will learn about Kiefer’s physical and conceptual representation of boundary waters in relation to other contemporary artists and will discuss their own relationship to the Mississippi and Missouri watersheds and to waterways around the globe.
About the speaker
Ila Sheren is an associate professor in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. She holds courtesy appointments in American culture studies, Latin American studies, performing arts, and the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity. Her research focuses on questions of borders and ecology, and she is currently finishing a manuscript titled Whose Crisis? Visual Narratives in the US-Mexico Borderlands. She is the author of two books: Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera since 1984 (2015) and Border Ecology: Art and Environmental Crisis at the Margins (2023). Her work has been published in journals including Afterimage, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, The Journal of Borderlands Studies, Geohumanities, and ASAP Journal. She is cofounder of the interdisciplinary digital project Moving Stories, which collects and analyzes narratives of international migration to the United States.
Generous support provided by Art Bridges Foundation’s Access for All program.
