The annual Nasher Prize Graduate Symposium offers master’s and doctoral students from any academic discipline the opportunity to present scholarly work on a host of questions and topics related to each year’s new Laureate. Addressing a broad audience of art historians and museum professionals, participants will receive feedback from fellow presenters, an invited keynote speaker, and audience members. Students selected to present papers will also have their work published in the annual symposium compendium, together with the paper delivered by the keynote speaker.

Keynote Speaker / Benjamin Buchloh

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences since 2005, teaching courses on the history of Weimar culture and Post WW II American and European art history. 

Buchloh is the author of the seminal 1992 essay on Isa Genzken's work, “Isa Genzken: The Fragment as Model" on the occasion of her exhibition, Everybody Needs at Least One Window, at the The Renaissance Society of Art in Chicago, May 14-June 28, 1992. 

A selection of his essays on American and European artists of the post WWII period, has been published in two volumes, Neo Avantgarde and Culture Industry (MIT Press, 2006), and Formalism and Historicity (MIT Press, 2016). A third volume, Refuse and Refuge is currently being prepared for publication. With Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Yve-Alain Bois and David Joselit, Buchloh is the editor of the two volume history of the arts of the Twentieth Century, Art since 1900 (Thames & Hudson).

As a co-curator of the retrospective exhibition of the work of Gerhard Richter at the Metropolitan Museum/Met Breuer, New York in 2020, Buchloh will publish his forthcoming monograph on the artist on that occasion.

Buchloh was awarded the Golden Lion for Contemporary Art History and Criticism at the Venice Biennale in 2007.

Moderator / Stephen Lapthisophon

Stephen Lapthisophon is an artist and educator working in the field of conceptual art, critical theory, and disability studies. His early work combined poetry, performance, sound art, and visual art with postmodern philosophical concerns. 

Lapthisophon received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979 and a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin. He also studied Comparative Literature and Theory at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. He has exhibited extensively across the United States, including recent exhibitions at Nasher Sculpture Garden and Goss Michael Foundation in Dallas, and in a solo exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art in 2013-2014. He has been included in international exhibitions in Sweden, Germany, Spain, France and the UK. He has been the recipient of several grants and residencies. Lapthisophon currently teaches art and art history at the University of Texas at Arlington and is an adjunct professor at the University of Texas Dallas in the school of Arts and Humanities. 

Presenting Sponsors: JP Morgan Chase & Co. 

Media Partners: 

Presenting: Belo Media Group  

KERA’s Art & Seek and PaperCity

Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) is the public transportation partner for Nasher Prize Month.

DART to Nasher Prize Month – Take DART Rail (any line) to Pearl / Arts District Station or St. Paul Station and walk three blocks North to Flora Street. For more information or schedules, please visit DART.org.