Vik Muniz

Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art (2013-2014)

The Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art is a high-profile initiative at the University of Oxford dedicated to promoting the study of contemporary art through its foremost practicing artists. Ambitious in its scope, the Visiting Professorships brings diverse artists of critical acclaim to the University Oxford, where the initiative is recognised as one of the University’s most important channels for engagement with contemporary art.

The initiative enjoys a special relationship with the Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Museums, Galleries and Libraries, often overlapping to provide a dynamic forum for exchange about arts and culture in modern society.

The Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art has been made possible by the generous support of Ivorypress and is hosted by Magdalene College, Oxford.

Vik Muniz is a Brazilian artist and photographer. Muniz is best known for recreating famous imagery from art history and pop culture with unexpected, everyday objects, and photographing them.

How do we look at art? What kind of education do we need to make or appreciate art? How do people learn visual literacy with and without formal arts education? These are the questions that Vik Muniz uses to shape his Humanitas lecture, Class Dismissed . . . Art, Creativity and Education.

Muniz gives an overview of his own career within the context of the arts movements that shaped him and his generation, exploring how people perceive art with different lived experiences. He speaks about the experience of viewing art as a poetic relationship between mind and substance. The power of this process, and indeed the power of art, is that is has the potential to humanise people, challenging our visions of the world.

In a panel discussion with Michael Govan (Director and CEO of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) discusses the difference Between the Artist and the Museum. Artists and those who run museums often inhabit very different worlds, yet it is predominantly museums and galleries that showcases artists to the public. The symposium discusses the complexities of this relationship, exploring the unique moment of co-dependence between artists, museums and audiences that both Govan and Muniz try to capture in their different aspects of work.