On Thursday, March 4 at 6 PM ET, American-Scandinavian Foundation invites you to an opening celebration for the digital exhibition Conversations with a Shipwreck, a multimedia meditation on the Swedish warship Vasa created by ASF Fellows Joan Wickersham and Adam Davies! On view beginning March 4 through scandinaviahouse.org, Conversations with a Shipwreck is a unique collaboration by two award-winning artists inspired by a mysterious vessel that was both destroyed and preserved by catastrophe. In tonight’s celebration, artists Joan Wickersham and Adam Davies will be joined in conversation with author Darcy Frey (Director of Creative Writing, Harvard University) to discuss the exhibition and the works on view, as well as the enigmatic artifact that it explores.
On view in a unique interactive platform through June 5, Conversations with a Shipwreck presents poems by Wickersham and large-format photographs by Davies, accompanied by short durational video and audio, and responds to the legendary warship — which sank only minutes into her maiden voyage — exploring themes of memory and oblivion, technological triumph and fiasco, permanence and impermanence, mortality and time.
Beginning at 12 AM ET on opening day, viewers will have the opportunity to experience the works while exploring information about the Vasa ship’s history; the artist talk will go live at 6 PM and remain available to stream here throughout the weekend.
The conversation will take place as a Premiere event on this page as well as YouTube and Facebook; please set reminders at the links for a notification when the event begins. Click here to view the exhibition.
About Joan Wickersham
Joan Wickersham’s memoir The Suicide Index (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) was a National Book Award finalist, and appeared on “best books of the year” lists including The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, New York Magazine, Salon, and The Week. Her most recent book, The News from Spain (Knopf) was named one of the year’s best fiction picks by National Public Radio, Kirkus Reviews, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Her fiction has appeared multiple times in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, as well as many other publications. For the past ten years, Joan has been a regular op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe. She has been awarded fellowships by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Joan graduated from Yale with a degree in art history and has taught fiction and memoir at Harvard, Emerson, UMass Boston, and the Bennington Writing Seminars.
About Adam Davies
Adam Davies is a recipient of grants from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Vira Heinz Endowment, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and has attended residencies at Chinati Foundation, Creative Alliance, Fine Arts Work Center, and Yaddo. He has worked as a Lecturer & Media Specialist at the National Gallery of Art, Washington and taught at Carnegie Mellon, Catholic, Robert Morris, and Harvard Universities. In 2015, Adam was named as Outstanding Emerging Artist at the DC Mayor’s Arts Awards and was the recipient of the Clarence John Laughlin Award. Between 2016–19, he was an artist-in-residence at Creative Alliance in Baltimore where his 2018 exhibition featured collaborations with Los Angeles-based musician Alex Zhang Hungtai and Chicago-based percussionist Adam Rosenblatt. In 2019 he presented his project, Reroutings, at the Mid-Atlantic TED Talk in Washington, DC.