Maud Lavin

Visual & Critical Studies Forum
Wednesday, February 24, 10am – 12pm      
Boardroom, San Francisco campus

Maud Lavin is currently working on a book about images of women’s lust and aggression in American art and mass culture. Titled Push Comes to Shove: New Images of Aggressive Women, it will be published in fall 2010 by MIT Press. Lavin’s other interests and hobbies include pilates, swimming, goofing off, and reading mysteries.

Her CCA lecture—”Bring It On!”—will explore the new, complex, expansive, and mainly positive representations of feminine aggression in American culture since the 1990s. As mass-cultural examples she will look at the recent wave of women and sports movies, for instance the cheerleading movie Bring It On! and the gymnast movie Stick It. Lavin will also explore the expression of aggression within and from art and activist groups such as Toxic Titties.

Lavin is chair and professor in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoech and Clean New World: Culture, Politics and Graphic Design, and editor/coauthor of The Business of Holidays and The Oldest We’ve Ever Been. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

(photo by Kate Gardiner)