Drawing on the collection of the Austrian Ludwig Foundation and beyond, this one-day symposium focusses on New York art practices of the 1960s and 70s by engaging with the works of Rosemarie Castoro (1939–2015), Lee Lozano (1930–1999), and Howardena Pindell (*1943). Intersecting in various ways with notions of abstraction, Minimalism and Postminimalism, the three artists’ works were also formed against the backdrop of their respective relationship to and involvement with political movements of that period such as the Art Workers’ Coalition, burgeoning feminism as well as the Black Power movement. 

The symposium takes US scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of “beside” as a starting point in order to make meaningful connections between the artists’ practices that resist a linear logic and allow for a complex and contradictory range of spatial, temporal, and aesthetic relations. Through a series of talks, conversations, and a roundtable discussion with a number of international speakers, the symposium positions the three artists’ practices not only within the cultural, social, and political contexts of the US in the 1960s and 70s. It also seeks to engage with them from a contemporary curatorial perspective through which institutional exhibitions and the global art market are connected with art historical discourses and artists’ more recent works. 

Afternoon Program
Saturday, January 31, 2026, 2.30 to 6 pm

2.30 pm
Welcome
Introduction Alena Williams

Part 2: HOWARDENA PINDELL 

2.45 pm
SCREENING
Howardena Pindell, Free, White and 21, 1980, 12 mins.

3 pm
Sarah Louise Cowan 
Title tbc

Part 3: ROSEMARIE CASTORO 

3.30 pm
Anna Lovatt 
Eruptions: Writing in the Work of Rosemarie Castoro

4 pm
“Time = the space between the appointment and the meeting”
A conversation on Rosemarie Castoro with Sabeth Buchmann and Werner Pichler

4.30 pm
Concluding round table with Manuela Ammer, Helena Vilalta, Bärbel Vischer and others, moderated by Barbara Reisinger

5.30 pm
Audience questions

The symposium will be in English.