Ydessa Hendeles, who received her doctorate from the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, is a curator, philanthropist, and artist. For twenty-five years she presented exhibitions at the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation in Toronto that brought together exceptional contemporary art and cultural objects in entirely new ways. After the influential international exhibition, “Partners” at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2003, that featured her own installation art, the “Teddy Bear Project,” Ydessa has created exhibitions in New York (“The Wedding” at Andrea Rosen), Berlin (“The Bird that Made the Breeze to Blow” at Johann König), and Marburg (“Marburg! The Early Bird!” at the Marburger Kunstverein). Her almost legendary innovations in curating are easily retrieved from many major reviews and accolades; Art News named her as one of the 50 most influential people in the art world. Her work has opened almost endless conversations about the conditions in which art is made and received, about the social and cultural institutions that form us, and about the freedoms and constraints of the psyche. Hendeles Lecturers have included Georges Didi-Huberman, William Kentridge, Yve-Alain Bois, Michael Fried, Andreas Huyssen, and Yvonne Rainer.
| Date | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 November 9 | Krista Thompson | "Tom Lloyd and Black Art Study" |
| 2016 October 27 | Yvonne Rainer | “What’s So Funny? Laughter and Anger in the Time of the Assassins” |
| 2013 October 10 | Georges Didi-Huberman | “Image, Lament, and Rage. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘La Rabbia’” |
| 2013 September 30 | William Kentridge | “Second-Hand Reading” |
| 2006 April 3 | Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University | “A Modernist after Postmodernism—Guillermo Kuitca, Painter of Space” |
| 2003 November 21 | Michael Fried | “Barthes’s Punctum” |
| 2002 March 6 | Yve-Alain Bois | “Noncomposition in 20th-Century Art or the Modern Desire to Erase Oneself” |