October 14: 5:30–7 pm, keynote lecture by Walter Benn Michaels, Anderson Hall, Rice School of Architecture
October 15: 10 am–3 pm, symposium, Moody Center for the Arts, with a lunch break and followed by exhibition viewing and reception.

The symposium Reading the City: Perspectives on the Contemporary Global Metropolis coincides with the group exhibition Urban Impressions: Experiencing the Global Contemporary Metropolis at the Moody Center for the Arts.

Presenting a wide-ranging selection of contemporary international artists, the exhibition illustrates how we see and experience the city, psychologically and physically, focusing on overarching aspects of urban life that affect its inhabitants. The arts play a key role in a global conversation about the effects urban agglomerations are having on the lives, bodies, and minds of individuals. With the selected works as an interpretive resource, the accompanying lecture and symposium will consider how “urban impressions” in the contemporary arts affect conceptions of our planetary “city.”

The program opens with a keynote lecture by Walter Benn Michaels on architectural photography, the representation of the city and its urban life. In the symposium on the following day, scholars and practitioners of the visual arts, will reflect upon and discuss how the aesthetic perceptions and representations of artists, given the sensory complexity of contemporary experience, insightfully and provocatively transform our understanding of the city. The presentations will address concern for the sociopolitical, environmental, spatial, and material injustices of our local and global conditions and the way these injustices are made sensibly manifest in works of art, be they displayed in museums or constitute the contemporary urban world itself.