Kelli Anderson, “This Book is a Camera” (2015). (Photo: Courtesy of the artist)
Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist Lecture: Kelli Anderson
Artist, designer and animator Kelli Anderson will deliver the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist Lecture.
Known for reinventing commonplace objects in ways that disrupt audience expectations, artist, designer, and animator Anderson is the creator of — among other projects — “This Book is a Camera” (2015), a pop-up book that transforms into a working camera, and “This Book is a Planetarium” (2017), which explores how paper taps into larger phenomena of light, time, sound and mathematics.
About Kelli Anderson
Kelli Anderson uses design magic to connect people with the depth and possibility of the world.
Pushing the bounds of publishing, she created This Book is a Camera (MoMA)—which transforms into a working camera—and This Book is a Planetarium (Chronicle)—which houses paper devices (including a planetarium) and has sold more than 100,000 copies. Other projects include a viral paper record player and—with The Yes Men—a utopian counterfeited New York Times, which won the Ars Electronica Prix. Doctors have used the award-winning Tinybop Human Body app to communicate treatment in childrenʼs hospitals and to Indigenous Australians.
Clients include NPR, The New Yorker, the Guggenheim, MoMA, Apple, and The New York Times. Anderson has redesigned brands such as Russ & Daughters and Momofuku. She has exhibited internationally; her independent projects have been supported by the Japan Foundation, Exploratorium, Adobe, Center for Book Arts, MASS MoCA, ITP, and Letterform Archive.
Upcoming Public Lectures
Nov 11 at 5:30pm • Kemper Art Museum
Roots and Rhizomes: Relational Networks in the Art of Carolina Caycedo
In 2022, Carolina Caycedo stewarded the planting of an indigenous shadbush tree in a community garden in New York City’s East Harlem (El Barrio). This living organism, whose metaphorical seeds grew from Caycedo’s ongoing “Genealogy of Struggle” series, inspires Susanna V. Temkin’s exploration of the artist’s work within larger relational networks. Expanding ecological and symbolic concepts associated with roots, seeds, and branches, Temkin considers connections within Caycedo’s practice and across broader art histories of the Americas. In particular, Temkin will address connections to other artists in Caycedo’s work, along with broader histories of protest, ecofeminism, solidarity, and resistance.
This talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Carolina Caycedo: Growing Deep Roots”, as well as the forthcoming presentation of Confluencias at El Museo del Barrio, New York (originated at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo).
About the Speaker
Susanna V. Temkin is an art historian and the interim chief curator at El Museo del Barrio, where she has worked since 2018. Temkin earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her research focused on modern art in the Americas, with a concentration on Cuba. At El Museo, her curatorial credits include the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, "Culture and the People" (2019), “La Trienal” (2020, 2024, and forthcoming 2027 edition), and the recent monograph of photographer Sophie Rivera (2026), among others. Prior to El Museo, she served as assistant curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin contributed essays to several exhibition catalogues and publications and is currently serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.