Join Rachel Valinsky—independent curator, writer, translator, and co-founder of Wendy’s Subway—for a special Outside the Box gallery talk on “Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work.”

Looking specifically at Raymond Pettibon’s explicit repurposing of found language and references to modern literary texts, Valinsky’s gallery talk, “The Fictions of Raymond Pettibon,” will address the artist’s repertoire of sources and strategies for writing images and drawing language within a relatively small selection of works on the first floor of the exhibition. We will also consider Pettibon’s self-reflexive presentation as artist and writer, his play on the art historical trope of the self-portrait and the literary genre of the autobiography, and his destabilization of authorial voice.

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 will address the New Museum’s spring exhibition, “Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work,” in forty-five- to sixty-minute presentations taking place 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 will speak about the exhibition or themes emergent in Pettibon’s works from the various positions they occupy—be they academic, personal, political, or otherwise. With their distinct individual relationships to the artist and works on view, lecturers will engage in rich investigations that illuminate and probe the Museum’s current exhibition program.

Rachel Valinsky is a PhD student in the Department of Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research centers on language-based work and intersections of experimental writing, performance, and visual culture in modern and contemporary art. She has written for publications such as East of Borneo, Millennium Film Journal, BOMB, C Magazine, and Art21, and presented projects at the Judson Memorial Church, Lisa Cooley, Spectacle Theater, and elsewhere. She is the editor of Warm Equations (Édition Patrick Frey, 2016). Valinsky is a co-founder of Wendy’s Subway, an independent library in Brooklyn, and a contributing editor at Éditions Lutanie, Paris. She currently teaches art history at Hunter College.