Artist Talk & Activation: Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford

Artist Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford brings to the Arts Club of Chicago Garden a modern-day take on the classical gipsoteca, or cast room, reconsidering the neoclassical copy with a garden of multiples gone slightly awry. Imagery of The Art Institute’s Nemean Lion sculpture displays alongside an homage to Youtube cat videos and an 18th-century marble Hercules. Hulsebos-Spofford talks with historian Jonathan Levy (Associate Professor in History and the College, The University of Chicago) about the role of reproduction in taste-making, value, status-signaling, and social relations. Following the conversation, stay tuned for a performative activation of the garden, kicking off a constantly multiplying array of reproductions throughout the project’s duration.

Jonathan Levy is a historian of economic life in the United States, with interests in the relationships between business and economic history, political economy, legal history, and the history of ideas. His research and teaching span the 19th and 20th centuries and are concerned with global and comparative questions. His first book, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard University Press, 2012), is a history of risk in the United States. The book has a dual focus, tracing the simultaneous rise, in the context of slave emancipation, of a new individualist creed that equated freedom with risk-taking and a new corporate financial system of risk management. Freaks of Fortune won the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Ellis W. Hawley Prize, and Avery O. Craven Award, and the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize.