Revilusion, or the Battle of Utopias

Artist and educator Luis Camnitzer, whose conceptual artwork, The Museum Is a School, occupies the façade of the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion, will combine a personal reflection on revolution with a prescription for renewal without complacency in the overlapping realms of art and education.

Having come of age in Uruguay during a period of widespread revolution in Latin America, Camnitzer grew to distrust immediate, totalizing shifts in the social sphere. Instead, he will explore the potential for “micro-revolutions” based on the idea of the artist as an agent of empowerment and communication, like the best of teachers.

A demonstration of critical thinking by a lifelong skeptic, provocateur, and idealist, this lecture will counter the narrative of exceptionalism by reiterating the essential human right of education, which Camnitzer sees as gradually freeing the collective mind and spirit, one person at a time.

This lecture has been commissioned for the 2016–17 humanities theme of Revolutions. It is cosponsored by Colby’s Art and Philosophy departments, the Education Program, the Center for the Arts and Humanities, and the Colby Museum of Art.