Apr 13 2023

Book Launch | After Institutions

Thurs | 7PM

Please join us to celebrate the U.S. launch of After Institutions, a book by critic and art historian Karen Archey. On the occasion of the launch, Archey will be joined in a conversation with Shimrit Lee and James Meyer, moderated by Nicholas C. Morgan. 

“Faced with waning state support, declining revenue, and forced entrepreneurialism, museums have become a threatened public space. Simultaneously, they have assumed the role of institutional arbiter in issues of social justice and accountability. The canon of Institutional Critique has responded to the social embeddedness of art institutions by looking at the inner workings of such organizations. In After Institutions, Karen Archey expands the definition of Institutional Critique to develop a broader understanding of contemporary art’s sociopolitical entanglements, looking beyond what cultural institutions were to what they are and what they might become.”

After Institutions
By Karen Archey
Critic’s Essay Series #3
Published by Floating Opera Press
Design by Daniela Burger
Softcover; 116 pp., 14 ills.; 12 × 17 cm
Printed in Germany
May 2022
ISBN: 978-3-9819108-8-9
$17.00

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net. 

Karen Archey is Curator of Contemporary Art at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the author of After Institutions (Floating Opera Press 2022).

Shimrit Lee is a Philadelphia-based educator and the author of Decolonize Museums (OR Books 2022).

James Meyer is Curator of Modern Art ad the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Nicholas C. Morgan is a historian of modern and contemporary art, and teaches at Columbia University.