Laurie Anderson Discusses The Creative Process At Ross School

The first guest in the Nexus Summer Series at the Ross School is Laurie Anderson, an icon of American art and music, who will speak on Saturday, July 27, at 6 p.m.

Ms. Anderson’s career has spanned the avant–garde art scene, from 1970s New York City to the top of the pop music charts in the 1980s, to international fame as one of the most influential multimedia artists working today. She will come to Ross to discuss the complexities of the creative process and how that process is shaped by the world around us.

One of America’s most renowned, daring, and inventive artistic voices, Ms. Anderson initially trained in violin and sculpting, but pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. Since that time, she has gone on to create large-scale theatrical works which combine a variety of media—music, video, storytelling, projected imagery, sculpture—in which she is an electrifying performer. She is also a visual artist and her work has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo and at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She has also released seven albums for Warner Brothers, including “Big Science,” featuring the song “O Superman,” which rose to number two on the British pop charts. In 1999, she staged "Songs and Stories From Moby Dick," an interpretation of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel. She lives and works in New York City.

Ms. Anderson received the 2019 Grammy award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for “Landfall,” a collaboration with Kronos Quartet from Nonesuch Records. The album, which blends electronic and traditional string music, was inspired by Hurricane Sandy, which devastated much of New York City in the fall of 2012. Other recent projects have included an ongoing interdisciplinary installation at MASS MoCA and the 2015 documentary “Heart of a Dog,” which was shortlisted for the best documentary Oscar and released by the Criterion Collection.

The Nexus Lecture Series was created to bring Ross School and the East End community together to exchange ideas and share insights. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A and an opportunity to mingle over hors d’oeuvres and refreshments. Tickets are $75.

Next up at the Nexus Summer Series at Ross School on August 10, at 7 p.m. will be Oscar-nominated composer Carter Burwell, at 7 p.m. His scored feature films include “Miller’s Crossing,” “Barton Fink,” “Rob Roy,” “Fargo,” 
”Gods and Monsters,” “Twilight” and others. The Ross School is located at 16 Goodfriend Drive in East Hampton. For more information visit ross.org.