Los Angeles-based author Bernard Cooper will read from his new memoir, My Avant-Garde Education, with passages about the pioneer of Happenings, Allan Kaprow, and performance artist Vito Acconci.
Presented by AMT / ART MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY
The Bark Room (Orientation Room), Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
2 West 13th Street, Room M101, New York, NY 10011
6:00PM to 8:30PM, Monday February 9, 2015
Cooper is the winner of The PEN / Ernest Hemmingway Award, an O. Henry Prize, a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in literature and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has appeared in five volumes of The Best American Essays. He has taught at Antioch/Los Angeles, for the Masters of Professional Writing program at USC, and at the UCLA Writer’s Program.
My Avant-Garde Education is at once an artist’s coming-of-age story and a personal chronicle of the era of conceptual art, from a writer “of uncommon subtlety and nuance” (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times).
“Many words describe Bernard Cooper’s writing: exquisitely crafted, resonant, melancholy, open-hearted. Reading his memoirs is a bit like sitting next to a friend who is telling you the story of his life – a really interesting friend. His work addresses topics such as growing up gay in the 1950s and 60s in Los Angeles, dealing with mortality, AIDS. A guide on the landscape of memory, he recalls details and situations from more than one perspective, always offering wisdom that might instruct the way we look at our own lives.” (Kimbel Westerson, The Coachella Review)
Bernard Cooper will be introduced by AMT Fine Arts Faculty Mira Schor.
