Sam Rose & Mónica de la Torre: The Weight of Words

An online critical discussion with art historian Sam Rose and poet and critic Mónica de la Torre.
Sam Rose’s most recent book Interpreting Art surveys the history of interpreting art and how that history has shaped art criticism.
Mónica de la Torre is a poet and critic who has worked extensively on the exchanges between artists and poets and between Latin American and North American creative communities.
Together they discuss cultures of reception and how those cultures reflect the societies they emerge from.
About the speakers
Sam Rose
Sam Rose is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews where he teaches modern art and the history and theory of writing on art.
He is the author of two books: Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism (Penn State, 2019) and the open access Interpreting Art (UCL, 2022). He is currently working on a book on pictorial representation in twentieth century art, focused in particular on David Hockney.
Mónica de la Torre
Mónica de la Torre is the author of six books of poetry, of which the most recent, Repetition Nineteen, centres on experimental translation. Other collections include The Happy End/All Welcome - a riff on a riff on Kafka’s Amerika - and Public Domain (Roof Books). Several of her books have been published in Mexico, among them Acúfenos and Taller de Taquimecanografía, written jointly with the eponymous women artists’ collective she co-founded.
Recent essays on art focus on Cecilia Vicuña’s Palabrarmas series, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Photostats, Ulises Carrión’s bookworks, Lucy Raven’s film Ready Mix, and Katherine Hubbard’s photo-based performances. She coedited Women in Concrete Poetry 1959-79.
She is the recipient of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry and a 2022 Creative Capital grant, and teaches poetry at Brooklyn College.