Giorgio Griffa Paths in the Forest

Featuring Robert Wiesenberger, Kamrooz Aram, and Matilde Guidelli-Guidi

Wednesday, September 30, 2026 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Curator Robert Wiesenberger and artist Kamrooz Aram join curator Matilde Guidelli-Guidi for a conversation on Zoom.

Visit Giorgio Griffa: Paths in the Forest on view at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, through October 12, 2026 →

Kamrooz Aram (b. 1978) has built his practice on dismantling the divide between ornament and fine art, renegotiating the art historical hierarchies that privilege Western forms of abstraction above others. His paintings and sculptures do not simply cross categories; they probe the structures that enforce them. Born in Shiraz, Iran, Aram emigrated to the United States in the 1980s, where he found himself forced to come to terms with a multitude of identities imposed upon him. These experiences left a lasting mark. Categories, he discovered, do not merely describe identity—they invent it. This recognition drives his work, which asserts that non-Western ornamental traditions carry the same intellectual weight and conceptual rigor Western art history has long reserved for itself.

Robert Wiesenberger is a curator and historian of modern and contemporary art. Currently he is the John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Previously, he served as Curator of Contemporary Projects at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. There he presented work by such artists as Yuji Agematsu, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Tauba Auerbach, among others, many in their first solo institutional exhibitions. Ecology and the more-than-human world, artists’ books and print culture, and architecture and design are some of the throughlines in Wiesenberger’s research. He holds a BA from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Columbia University.

Matilde Guidelli-Guidi is a curator and co-head of the curatorial department at Dia Art Foundation, where she organized exhibitions of work by Duane Linklater, Senga Nengudi, Cameron Rowland, Kishio Suga, Richard Tuttle, Meg Webster, and Jack Whitten, among several others, and edited numerous publications. She is responsible for overseeing Dia’s permanently sited works by Walter De Maria, Max Neuhaus, and Joseph Beuys, and as the organizer of the Artists on Artists Lecture Series, she commissions a growing roster of contemporary artists to respond to their peers and Dia’s institutional history.

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨