Place-as-Medium and New Grounds for Thinking in Contemporary Art

Katherine Paige Farrington is an artist-philosopher and currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Liberal Arts at Montserrat College of Art and Affiliated Faculty at Emerson College. Her artworks include “Future Monument to the Trees of the Public Garden” (2024), part of a multi-year public art initiative Un-Monument sponsored by the City of Boston’s Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and supported by the Mellon Foundation. Her art collective, Ocean School Collective (OSC), was selected for the 2025 Goetemann Environmental Artist Residency at the Ocean Alliance in Gloucester, Massachusetts by the Rocky Neck Art Colony.

• INTRODUCTION: Place-as-Medium: An Introduction 1. Thinking Through Place: On Alfredo Jaar 2. Boundaries of Place in Alfredo Jaar’s Public Interventions 3. The Play of Places in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s dOCUMENTA (13 4. Place-as-Medium and the Question of Hospitality5. Towards a Shared Authorship of Place 6. The Swamp School and the Promise of Place-as-Medium as Ecological Thinking APPENDIX: CODA for Place-as-Medium

Kate Farrington conceptualizes a new art form that arises in “thinking through place” toward “mutuality, reciprocity, hospitality, and locality.” A striking new way of thinking about everything, not least, the future of the biosphere, Place-as-Medium could not have appeared at a more prescient moment.George Smith, Founder and President Emeritus, Edgar E. Coons, Jr. Professor of New Philosophy, Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA)Kate Farrington is an artist, art theorist, and philosopher, weaving together the Continental philosophical tradition with some strands of Buddhist practice. The extraordinary range and innovation of her thinking illuminates the artform of place-as medium, which activates “thinking through place.” In her topical and profound meditations, the artistic practice of contemporary artists like the Chilean Alfredo Jaar emerge as poignant and rousing responses to the political and ecological exigencies of our global disorder.Jason M. Wirth, Professor of Philosophy, Seattle University