Artist Talk featuring Shimon Attie, Lehigh University's Horger Artist-In-Residence (2021-22) in the Department of Art, Architecture and Design. Invited to create a new body of work, Attie has created an artwork which interrogates Bethlehem's past and present as a microcosm of America. In this talk Attie discusses this artwork which makes up the exhibition Starstruck: An American Tale.

Shimon Attie is an internationally renowned visual artist whose practice includes creating site-specific installations in public places, immersive multiple-channel video and mixed-media installations.  For two decades, Attie has made art that allows us to reflect on the relationship between place, memory and identity. In many of his projects, he engages local communities in finding new ways of representing their history, memory, and potential futures, and explores how contemporary media may be used to re-imagine new relationships between space, time, place and identity.  For his project in Bethlehem, Attie is filming members of the community in four or five specific locations around the city, hoping to distill "some of [the] curious intersections of different layers [from] Bethlehem's past and present."

Among his many accomplishments, Attie has developed works of public art in Berlin, Tel Aviv, Rome, New York, Boston and San Francisco. His work also has been featured in numerous exhibitions including at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago and The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize and Guggenheim Fellowship, and holds the Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award in Art.

Attie will be the Horger Artist-in-Residence with the Department of Art, Architecture and Design through Fall 2022, engaging students in the development of his new work. In addition, Attie will teach a seminar course encompassing public art, community engaged practices, site specific installation, performance and a range of topics related to social practice.

For more information visit Shimon's website here.

This event was held on September 13, 2022.