Visiting Artist Lecture Series—Visual Arts MFA—Columbia University
Visiting Artist Lecture Series—Visual Arts MFA—Columbia University

Tuesday, January 20, 8 PM: Matthew Buckingham

burglar alarm

Bulglar Alarm, 2008, Pine wood, glue, nails

Until the end of the 19th century house-builders and stair carpenters occasionally included a passive “alarm” system in the homes they built—a “trip-step” rising a few inches higher than the other steps—that would cause an unwary and unknowing intruder to stumble in the night and awaken slumbering occupants. The idea was adapted from an earlier military defense strategy used by medieval stone masons who constructed uneven steps in castle stairwells hoping to thwart invading foreign armies.

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Utilizing photography, film, video, writing, audio, and drawing, Matthew Buckingham’s work questions the role of social memory in contemporary life. His projects create physical and social contexts that invite viewers to reconsider what is most familiar to them.

He has presented solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum; Camden Arts Centre, London; the Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, among others.

His work is included in the collections of K21, Düsseldorf; The Museum of Modern Art, New York
; Tate Modern, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the 
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; 
and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

He has been a resident at Artpace, San Antonio; the DAAD, Berlin, The Freund Fellowship, St. Louis; IASPIS, Stockholm and received fellowships from Apparatus, Art Matters, the New York Foundation for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.

He taught at the Malmö Art Academy of Lund University, Sweden, from 2003 to 2010 and was appointed Associate Professor of Visual Art here at Columbia University in 2013.