"Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, and Aesthetics"
Less is more. Unclutter the mind. Spark joy. More than a generation has passed since Columbia University’s 1988 Summer Writers’ Festival brought together a roundtable for “Throwing Dirt on the Grave of Minimalism,” but it seems minimalisms are alive and well both in aesthetics and in lifestyles in the twenty-first century. What are the forms, styles, and genres of minimalism today? What is their relation to the heyday of minimalist sculpture, music, literature, and architecture in the 1960s through 1980s? Who are the practitioners of minimalism, and how are various minimalisms gendered, racialized, sexualized, and classed? And under what social, political, and economic conditions are these practitioners drawn to minimalism now?