Mona Bismarck Guided Tour with Artistic Director Raina Lampkins-Fielder

On Friday April 15, the Paris Inside Out students met with Raina Lampkins-Fielder, Artistic Director of the Mona Bismarck American Center, who presented the current exhibition Wasteland: New Art from Los Angeles.

“Drawing on T.S. Eliot’s seminal modernist poem, The Waste Land, as the thematic thread between the 14 artists – all based in or strongly influenced by Los Angeles – the exhibition presents a reflexive, complex, multi-dimensional conversation about the poetics of despair, the search for true connection, the tenuous state of morality, and the uncertainty, yet necessity, of the future”.

Thanks to Raina’s intervention, students were invited to reflect on the works, their materiality, their forms, how they respond to the exhibition space, the dialogue they created between themselves, as well as the relevance they have for each student’s practice.

Raina Lampkins-Fielder is the former deputy editor of SOME/THINGS Magazine: a bi-annual international curated arts and culture journal, and director of arts programming at SOME/THINGS SECRET Gallery in Paris. She was simultaneously the Director of Academic Advising at Paris College of Art. Previously, she served as Associate Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art overseeing education and public programs. She has worked for over 15 years in museums, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Follow Raina on Instagram: @rainambac and #monabismarckamericancenteroutandabout

Mona Bismarck American Center for art and culture
34 Avenue de New York, 75116 Paris