Outside the Box offers a roster of gallery-based talks given by a variety of guest speakers over the course of a season. In this series, lecturers with diverse backgrounds and affinities addressed the New Museum’s summer exhibition, “The Keeper,” in forty-five- to sixty-minute presentations that took place exclusively in the Museum’s galleries. As a way to emphasize the Museum’s strong commitment to new art and new ideas, Outside the Box Gallery Talks are open to the public and are intended to provide participants with multidisciplinary perspectives on New Museum exhibitions. To this end, lecturers speak about the exhibition or themes emergent in select works from the various positions they occupy—be they academic, personal, political, or otherwise. With their distinct individual relationships to the artists and works on view, lecturers engage in rich investigations that illuminate and probe the Museum’s exhibition programs.

Marvin J. Taylor is Director of the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University. In 1994, he began the Downtown New York Collection, which documents the art scenes of SoHo and the East Village from the early 1970s to the present. He is the editor of The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974–1984 (Princeton University Press, 2006) and 101 Classic Cookbooks, 501 Classic Recipes (Rizzoli, 2012).