The Walter Hopps Colloquium, an ongoing series of lectures and discussions in modern and contemporary art, funded in part via the Hopps Chair, will begin with a lecture on artist Edward Keinholz, with whom Hopps founded the Ferus Gallery in 1957.
This fall quarter, the colloquia will run alongside Professor George Baker’s graduate seminar AH232 Contemporary Art, which proposes to reexamine and open up LA art history in the 1960s and 70s by thinking it through global and other networks.
The first lecture will take place on Monday, October 20, 2025 at 3:30 PM in Dodd Hall, Room 247 with independent artist and editor, Julian Myers.
For event details, please see the events page here.
Julian Myers, “Sadism on Tour, or: Kienholz at Documenta”
Produced at the height of his fame and among a sprawling cohort of family and friends, Edward Kienholz’s ambitious tableau Five Car Stud depicted a horrific scene: the graphic castration of a Black man by life-sized figures wearing masks of Hollywood monsters. “Sadism on Tour” tells the story of the tableau’s early 1970s realizations: its staging in the parking lot of Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles; its documentation book; and its first public showing, after some failed attempts, at the German exhibition documenta 5. Once described as a “three-dimensional representation of a lynching photograph,” this lecture grapples with the estrangements within this realism, including those that surfaced as the artist’s phantasmatic portrait of American violence met a European audience.
Julian Myers is an art historian and editor based in Los Angeles. Myers was founding faculty in the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts, 2003–20, and was senior editor of the journal The Exhibitionist, 2014–17. Myers’s edited volume of writings by curator and museum director Zdenka Badovinac, Comradeship: Art, Curating, and Politics in Post-Socialist Europe, was published by ICI in 2019. Recent and forthcoming writings include essays on Arthur Jafa, Christina Fernandez, Nancy Holt, the Société Anonyme, and the history of the art center as a laboratory. Since 2011, Myers has worked with Joanna Szupinska in the collaboration grupa o.k. They have produced critical and curatorial projects for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, Poland, and other institutions.
