Performative Lecture: Burning

Atlanta-based artist and writer Courtney McCellan will present "Burning" a performative lecture that weaves personal narrative, research about stress, American mythology around progress, and the work of Eadweard Muybridge. Through the study and manipulation of Muybridge’s animal locomotion images, McClellan will address how Muybridge’s work more than 100 years ago staged film and the personal computer, and in doing so, impacted nearly all aspects of contemporary life. Additionally, she will consider how movement and the creative process combat burnout.
 
Courtney McClellan is an artist and writer from Greensboro, NC. She served as the 2013-2014 Fountainhead Fellow in the Sculpture and Extended Media Department at Virginia Commonwealth University and the 2016-2018 Sculpture Fellow at the University of Georgia. She was a 2017-2018 SMFA at Tufts Traveling Fellow; a 2019-2020 Working Artist Project Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia; and the 2019-2020 Roman J. Witt Artist in Residence at the University of Michigan. McClellan’s work has been shown at SculptureCenter in Long Island City, NY; the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, MI; and the Atlanta Contemporary in Atlanta, GA. Her practice has been supported by residences at McDowell, Yaddo, the Hambidge Center, and Wassaic Projects, and her work has been written about in Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Burnaway. She is a contributor at Art Papers. Most recently, she was named the 2021 Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
 
Image Credit: Running for Running: After Eadweard Muybridge, Courtney McClellan, 2021.