Art Theory and Practice

Welcome to the Department of Art Theory & Practice (AT&P) at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University. The department has both an undergraduate program, offering a baccalaureate degree, and a graduate program, offering a Masters of Fine Arts degree.

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recent visiting artists

2009-2010

Anna Biller | Mike Hoolbloom |
Theaster Gates

2008-2009

chang image

Patty Chang's work is motivated by the duality of “attraction and repulsion” in videos and photographs that document rather ambiguous situations using sexual undertones to confuse the viewer. Her most recent project, Patty Chang: Shangri-La, examines the concept of Shangri-La, the mythical hamlet of James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon. The novel and the subsequent 1937 film by Frank Capra propelled the notion of Shangri-La into the collective cultural vocabulary. In 1997, a rural farming town in South Central China near the Tibetan border declared itself the place upon which Shangri-La was based. Subsequently a dozen other towns in the area claimed that they were the real Heaven-On- Earth, resulting in a relentless marketing battle that continued until the Chinese government intervened by officially naming one town Shangri-La. Chang’s Shangri-La is about the reality and fiction inherent in the idea of a place that exists in both real and mythical incarnations. Her work explores the idea of making a real journey to an imaginary place. Chang was born in 1972 in San Francisco and currently lives in New York City. She received her Bachelors of Arts degree in 1994 from the University of California, San Diego. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid; FRI-ART Centre d’Art Contemporain Kunsthalle, Fribourg, Switzerland; and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.