Koan Jeff Baysa with Donald Kunze | “Swooning over Art – An M.D. and a Ph.D. chase down some rabbit holes”

Wydział Malarstwa Uniwersytetu Artystycznego im. Magdaleny Abakanowicz w Poznaniu ma zaszczyt zaprosić na wykład Koana Jeffa Baysy w dialogu z Donaldem Kunze “Swooning over Art” – An M.D. and a Ph.D. chase down some rabbit holes” (wykład odbędzie się w jęz. angielskim) 

29.04.21 5.p.m.

The Faculty of Painting and Drawing of the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of the Arts Poznan is delighted to announce the lecture of Kōan Jeff Baysa in dialogue with Donald Kunze “Swooning over Art” – An M.D. and a Ph.D. chase down some rabbit holes“

Kōan Jeff Baysa is a medical doctor and a contemporary art curator. Born and raised in Hawai’i, he divides his time between Honolulu, New York, and Los Angeles. His current practice bridges medical culture and social sculpture, and includes clinical research in the neuroscience of memory and olfaction, human sensory perception and misperception, neurodiversity, and the cultural constructs of well-ness, dis-ease, and aesthetics.
Dr. Baysa is a member of the Association of International Art Critics (AICA) and an alumnus of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (ISP). His positions include Chief Medical Officer-Medical Avatar; Co-founder-Joshua Treenial; Senior Founder-Honolulu Biennial; Director-iBiennale; Program Board Advisor-Art Omi; Cultural Advisor-World Council of Peoples for the United Nations; Alumnus-Advisory Committee of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics; Cultural Agent-Curators Network; International Advisor-Dag Hammarskjold Plaza; Advisory Board, Kaus Australis, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

A Ford Foundation grantee asked to survey contemporary art in Vietnam, he has curated exhibitions in China, Japan, Chile, Croatia, Mexico, Korea, Austria, Canada, Ireland, England, Ukraine, Holland, United Arab Emirates, as well as throughout the United States. 

The Pacific Editor for d’Art International in Toronto, Canada, he has lectured at the United Nations, MoMA, Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum, Phillips Collection, Hanoi University of Culture, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University. 

Dr. Baysa was the 2020 Critic-in-Residence for the Great Meadows Foundation in Louisville, Kentucky and serves as the Curatorial Advisor for the Fresh Winds Biennale in Iceland and the Congo Biennale in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

His upcoming projects include Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology opening at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA in August 2021. His section addresses the sequelae of radiation exposure in native peoples from nuclear testing in the Pacific, specifically French Polynesia and Micronesia. Others are looking at similar issues in Greenland, Canada, Australia, Japan and the American Southwest. 

In development with others is an exhibition with the working title: Light and Space Artists 3.0: Time and Experience, an update with newer generation artists influenced by the West Coast art movement of the 60s that was driven by the new technologies and materials of the engineering and aerospace industries located in Southern California within its singular atmosphere of sunlight, land, and ocean.

Donald Kunze (b. 1947, Asheville NC) taught architecture studio, theory, general arts criticism, and seminars on theory, film, and landscape architecture at Penn State, with fellowship semesters at the University at Buffalo (Bahham Fellow), LSU (Russell Fellow), and Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center, an extension of Virginia Tech. His professional degree in Architecture was at N. C. State University in 1970; after internships in Atlanta, he took up graduate studies in Geography, first at Georgia State University for a Master’s degree, then at Penn State University for a Ph.D. He broadened his thesis studies to include critical theory and the philosophy of Giambattista Vico, with side interests in Ernst Cassirer and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. After graduating in 1983, he joined the Architecture faculty at Penn State and later accepted a split position between Architecture and Integrative Arts. He has lectured at University of Pennsylvania, U. at Buffalo, Yale, Carleton, LSU, and Harvard. He revised his dissertation to publish it as a study of Vico’s theory of imagination and place in 1986, with Peter Lang.

He has authored articles on film theory, the sense of place, literature of the fantastic, metalepsis, hysteria, extromission, and the death drive. He co-curated an exhibit, Stereognost and Propriocept, with Kóan Jeff Baysa, MD, in New York, in 2004. In the past ten years he has been increasingly involved with Lacanian psychoanalysis and the work of Slavoj Žižek, and presently is one of the founding members of iPSA, an organization interested in combining architecture and psychoanalysis. With Dr. Baysa, he plans to extend the Stendhal Syndrome effect to the study of the fourth wall of cinema and theater as a model of reception in all the arts, including architecture.

He currently produces instructional videos on anamorphosis and the uncanny in architecture, Vico, and Lacan.

‘The sealed studio’ talks

The lecture of Koan Jeff Baysa in dialogue with Donald Kunze is the sixth one from the series of talks initiated and moderated by Prof. Dominik Lejman, II studio painting course director organized by Faculty of Painting and Drawing, Magdalena Abakanowicz University of the Arts Poznań, with support of Dr hab. Tomasz Kailitko, the dean of the Faculty of Painting and Drawing

The series of on-line lectures is dedicated to encounter with the critical thought of the most renowned contemporary theoreticians, art critics, curators and artists. At the time of the pandemic solitary confinement, we believe that with our effort, the forced physical distance can be reshaped into the advantage of the greater proximity in exchange of ideas.   

‘The sealed studio’ talks

Wystąpienie Koana Jeffa Baysy w dialogu z Donaldem Kunze jest szóstym z cyklu wykładów on-line inicjowanych i moderowanych przez Prof. Dominika Lejmana, kierownika II pracowni malarstwa zorganizowanych przez Wydział Malarstwa i Rysunku Uniwersytetu Artystycznego im Magdaleny Abakanowicz w Poznaniu pod opieką dziekana Wydziału Malarstwa Dr hab. Tomasza Kalitki.

Cykliczne wykłady on-line zadedykowane są przybliżeniu myśli krytycznej najbardziej znaczącyh, współczesnych teoretyków, krytyków sztuki, kuratorów i artystów. W czasie pandemicznego odosobnienia, wierzymy, że dzięki naszym wysiłkom wymuszony dystans fizyczny może przeistoczyć się w korzyść zbliżenia wymiany myśli.

Dominik Lejman 2021