IMAGE: Elisabeth Millqvist (Photograph by Reney Warrington); Helen Pheby.

Visiting Lecture: Art Outside

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What opportunities does curating outdoors offer? How do you build a distinct exhibition program for a sculpture park?

Join Elisabeth Millqvist, Co-Director and Artistic Leader of Wanås Konst, Sweden; and Helen Pheby, Senior Curator of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, U.K., for a conversation about how they conceive projects, engage artists, and impact audiences for two different international sites.

Moderated by Andrea Mellard, Director of Public Programs and Community Engagement.

About the Lecturers

In 2011, Elisabeth Millqvist succeeded Founding Director Marika Wachtmeister as Co-Director & Artistic Director of The Wanås Foundation together with Mattias Givell. At the Wanås sculpture park, she has explored sculpture in relation to viewer participation, dance, and performance. She has also presented new permanent outdoor works by artists including Igshaan Adams, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, and Yoko Ono, and she is currently working with William Forsythe. For several of the site-specific works she has arranged for artists to work together with the local community.

Prior to the Wanås Foundation, Millqvist was a Curator at Magasin III Museum & Foundation for Contemporary Art in Stockholm for eight years. There she curated several exhibitions including Sol LeWitt: 7 Wall Drawings (2010), a solo exhibition with Maria Nepomuceno (2010), and Santiago Sierra (2008). She worked as the curatorial intern at Dia Art Foundation in New York (2001–2002) and as Curatorial Assistant at The Wanås Foundation (2000–2001). Millqvist holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History from Stockholm University and studied journalism at Gothenburg University. She is the author of several exhibition catalogues and worked with Janine Antoni on the artist book Moor in 2004 and was co-editor for Jeppe Hein: A Smile for You, published by Koenig Books in 2013, to name a few. In 2011, she initiated a children’s books series inviting artists and writers to collaborate, which includes five titles to date.

Helen Pheby is the Senior Curator of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, an international center for modern and contemporary art set in 500 acres of historic parkland, with four galleries and an eighteenth-century chapel. Recently curated or co-curated Yorkshire Sculpture Park exhibitions include Fiona Banner: WP WP WP, Henry Moore: Back to a Land, and Caro in Yorkshire. She has initiated the Art by Email platform, including virtual residencies, for artists in countries such as Iraq, Iran, and Syria and heads up the Visiting Artist and Graduate Award programs.

Helen’s Ph.D. and continued research considers the relationship between art and public. Her offsite projects include A Place in Time (2016) at NIROX Sculpture Park in the Unesco Cradle of Humankind, South Africa, and the Kyiv Sculpture Project (2012), the first open-air display of contemporary sculpture in Ukraine.

She is regularly invited to share her expertise such as a lecture tour of India, a talk at the Johannesburg Art Fair, and conferences at Tate and The Henry Moore Institute. Publications include KAWS (2016), Caro in Yorkshire (2015), Henry Moore: Back to a Land (2015), Hester Reeve: Ymedaca (2015), Jordan McKenzie (2014), James Capper: Divisions (2013), Sophie Ernst: Home (2012), and Miró: Sculptor (2012). She is a curatorial partner of Art Role, Kurdistan-Iraq, and is a member of the Arts Council of England Collection Acquisition Committee.