Lydia Matthews
- Title: Lydia Matthews
- Author: Lydia Matthews
- Date: 01.06
- Tags: architecture, design, lecture
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Lydia Matthews is Professor of Visual Studies and Director of the Curatorial Design Research Lab at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City, where she served as Dean of Academic Programs from 2007-2011. Trained as an art historian at University of California,Berkeley and London's Courtauld Institute of Art, she taught for 18 years at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where she co-founded and chaired the graduate program in Visual Critical Studies and also directed the Master’s Program in Fine Arts.
She has published and lectured internationally, and dedicates her research, writing and curatorial work to examining how artists, craftspeople and designers foster lively debates and intimate community interactions in response to a variety of urgent global issues. Her curatorial and pedagogical projects in Tbilisi include curating the U.S. sections of Artisterium International: “Chime In” (2010) and “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” (2008); “One Stop” (2007, curated by Georgian artist collective TRAM, featuring temporary urban interventions in the main boulevard of Tbilisi, Rustavelli Avenue); “Life Beyond Tourism: Countries, Histories, Cultural Tourism Regional Festival” (2009, with the Media Arts faculty of the Tbilisi State Academy of Art); Art Caucasus International; “Consume(d): Creative and Critical Resistance in the San Francisco Bay Area” (2005).
She also collaborated with artist/activists to produce workshops and events in “Against All Odds: Ethics/Aesthetics” at the Benaki Museum Pireos Annex in Athens, Greece (2011), “Spatial Imaginary and Multiple Belonging: The Open House” at the Byzantine Art Museum in Athens (2008) and “Routes and Homes: The Migrant Tree Project” at El Jardin del Paraiso in New York City’s Lower East Side (2010). In 2012 she will be in residence at GeoAIR in Tbilisi and KUAD Gallery in Istanbul, and will serve as a 2012 Fulbright Foundation Specialist in Volos, Greece, organizing a community-oriented curatorial project linking the city’s recently formed T.E.M. informal barter community, the new Ecological Recycling Center, and architecture students and faculty from the University of Thessaly.