Eric Gottesman, George Washington University

Watch a recording of Eric Gottesman’s lecture on our YouTube channel.

At a pivotal moment in history, artist Eric Gottesman will be speaking about his collaborative work over the past 25 years, which has fused photography, art, teaching, and civic action by incorporating interpersonal interaction as an essential component of authorship. Gottesman has never made an artwork alone, nor, would he argue, has anyone who has made or done anything done so in isolation. Shifting our lens from the individual to the collective fundamentally changes the artistic, national, global, and personal possibilities available to us in the future. Gottesman will show how it has done so for him and for the participants in projects he has worked on.

Gottesman teaches, organizes, writes, and makes artworks with other people that address nationalism, migration, structural violence, history, and intimate relations. He is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, a Creative Capital Artist, a Fulbright Fellow, a co-founder of For Freedoms (an artist-led organization that centers art as a catalyst for creative civic engagement), and he co-created the books Sudden Flowers (2014) and For Freedoms: Where Do We Go From Here? (2024). Gottesman is a mentor in the Arab documentary photography program in Beirut, Lebanon and the W.W. Corcoran Visiting Professor in Community Engagement at George Washington University.