The 30th Annual Norma U. Lifton Lecture in Art History

Hannah B. Higgins
Tuesday, September 11th
6:00-7:30pm
SAIC Ballroom, 112 S. Michigan Ave.

USA  Surpasses All Genocide Records: The Perspective from 9/11
On the 50th anniversary of 1968 the world is again in a state of upheaval as a result of a shifting cultural paradigm, this time away from the social values normally associated with the civil rights, student and anti-war movements of the 1960s. This lecture will look at the use of George Maciunas's protest flag "USA Surpasses All Genocide Records" of 1966 from the perspective of the protest movements of 1968 and the reappropriation of the flag in a historic performance in Odense Denmark on 9/11/2001.

Hannah Higgins is Professor of Art History and Director of the IDEAS program in CADA, which launched last year thanks to the support of Dean Everett and Judith DeJong. Along with articles on food and art, early computer art, the avant-garde and experimental education in the arts, her books include Fluxus Experience (2002) and The Grid Book (2009) and the anthology Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art (2012). She has received DAAD, Getty Research Institute and Philips Collection Fellowships in support of her research on sensation, cognition, and information across the avant-gardes, and contemporary material culture. She is co-executor of the Estate of Dick Higgins and the Something Else Press. With the support of Steve Everett and Judith DeJong, Higgins developed the first online course in CADA, a global survey of art, in 2015.

Image Credit: George Maciunas, U.S.A. Surpasses All the Genocide Records, U.S. Surpasses All Genocide Records,  21 3/8 × 34 5/8" (54.3 × 88 cm), offset lithograph, Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift.

The Norma U. Lifton Endowed Lectureship has sponsored a quarter century of talks by eminent art historians, including Eleanor Heartney, Linda Nochlin, Whitney Chadwick, Griselda Pollack, Johanna Drucker, Kristine Stiles, Tsongzung Chang, Gerardo Mosquera, Ann Gibson, Jerry Saltz, Anne Higonnet, Roberta Smith, and Hollis Clayson at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The fund, administered by SAIC’s Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, has been established in memory of Norma U. Lifton, former Visiting Lecturer in the department.