The Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Colgate University is proud to announce that the 2024 Peter C. Schaehrer Memorial Lecture will be given by artist and geographer Trevor Paglen, recipient of a 2017 MacArthur Award.
Paglen’s art and research focuses on making visible the “invisible” networks and infrastructures of military and corporate power, the surveillance state in the global war on terror, and human rights impacts of all these apparatuses. Paglen received his BA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley — he also holds an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago.
Author of several books, Paglen is most known for his 2009 text Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World.
Paglen utilizes a self-developed method of “limit telephotography” to photograph black sites and secret prisons, seeking to render the invisible visible, or in his own words “see secrecy.” He has published photos of military bases, secret satellites, and underwater fiber optic cables, displaying work in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Vienna Secession, Fondazione Prada (Milan), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His published works include his book Blank Spots on the Map: the Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (2009), which explores the “black world” of covert U.S. operations and The Last Pictures (2012), which explores humanity’s long-term effect on our earth. Paglen was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2016 for his exhibition The Octopus, and he received the MacArthur fellowship in 2017.
In the summer of 2023, Paglen’s exhibition You’ve Just Been F*cked by PSYOPS showed at Pace’s West 25th St. gallery in New York City. The exhibition followed themes included in his earlier work, such as invisibility and the “unids” or unidentified objects orbiting earth. Paglen combined sculpture, photography, video, and exhibition to explore themes of “mind control,” the military, PSYOPS, and disinformation.
The 2024 Schehrer Lecture will take place at 7 p.m. in Golden Auditorium (Little Hall) on Thursday, Sept. 26. A reception in the hallway outside the lecture hall will follow the talk.