Lucy Lippard lecturing at the Museo Reina Sofía, 2018
Held on 18 Oct 2018
Lucy Lippard (1937) is an American writer, art critic, curator and activist whose reflections have been at the centre of contemporary discussions of feminism, identity, and life’s capacity to transform art. Lippard will be presenting the seventh lecture within the lecture series of Museo Reina Sofía, which on this occasion will be complemented by a workshop led by Lippard herself.
Lippard’s work has been central to a number of contemporary debates including the dematerialization of art in the late 1960s, artistic protests against the Vietnam War in 1970, feminist identity, the aesthetics of social minorities in US, and, more recently, the relationships between art, territory and ecology. However, her trajectory has gradually led her away from art institutions and the art system and into approaching art from life itself.
Since 2010, the academic year of the Study Centre is inaugurated and closed with a lecture. Linda Nochlin, T. J. Clark, Hans Belting, Simón Marchán, Benjamin Buchloh, and Nelly Richard have each explored in their lectures different methodological approaches and tensions affecting art history in recent years. In this seventh lecture the programme has been renamed the Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair by the Museo in homage to the art historian and lecturer Juan Antonio Ramírez (1948–2009), the founder of the MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture, run by the Autonomous and Complutense Universities of Madrid and the Museo Reina Sofía, and a tireless advocate of the ethical and conceptual possibilities of modern and contemporary art.
The Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair, with its annual master lectures, sets out to constitute a space of reflection on art history in terms of its limits and vanishing points, understood as a discourse with specific attributes (iconic-visual, according to Ramírez) and hugely important to contemporary society during times of image overload. Moreover, owing to his publications on the comic, mass culture, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, architecture and cinema, Ramírez will undoubtedly be remembered as a tireless spokesperson against the disappearance of the discipline from the curriculums of secondary education and as an outspoken intellectual who defended copyright. It is this belief in the current need to defend art in its freest and most inventive and original form that has led the Museo to create the Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair, with its first focal point being Lucy Lippard, an intellectual whose work straddles curatorship, critique, academia and institutional experimentation.
As an intellectual introduction and opening statement for the discussion around this new lecture, we quote below the author’s own words:
"Conventional wisdom has it that 'art speaks for itself' so even the goal of saying something beyond the artwork can be contentious. James Baldwin said that 'The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.' That’s an amazing gift…. and responsibility.
I’ve long advocated for art that escapes the artworld and elopes with life –social energies not yet recognized as art. Talking to artist friends (those who led the way out of the art world toward life) I have found that one of the issues that most interests them is how far outside of the art world can artists work and still be satisfied that they’re making art. And still be recognized as artists, not sociologists or 'merely' activists. And still make a living outside of that sandbox we were nurtured in. It’s not easy to totally disavow recognition by the market and the institutions, and if you’ve managed to do it, we probably don’t know what you’re doing. Does it matter? Is it still Art? Who cares?
The dilemma about the artist’s choice between remaining independent and powerless or being co-opted by the powerful mainstream art world is decades long. Perhaps the toughest question we have to ask ourselves is: What do we value most individual success or a collective social victory no matter how apparently small? Over the years a lot of smart things have been said about the possibilities for artists to be in museums and still take on issues, though it may take decades to be accepted...
So, again: What Do We Want to Say? How Do We Want to Say It? Where do we go from here? These questions are directed as much at me as at you. Personally, the temptation to be cynical, nasty, and bridge-burning can be overwhelming, but that puts us in the same bag as the opposition. There’s a line between skepticism and cynicism. Someone said: 'Pessimism is a waste of time'. And optimists are dissed as Utopian and politically reactionary. It’s true that we need to be down to earth. But we also need something to hope for, to long for, to reach for. I hardly ever give a talk without citing Antonio Gramsci: Pessimism of the Intellect Optimism of the Will. I don’t think it’s ever been better said."
Lucy Lippard, Julay 2018
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Education programme developed with the patronage of
Más actividades
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.