Lawrence Weschler and Alva Noe in Conversation

The Chinati Foundation and the Marfa Book Company are pleased to welcome writers Lawrence Weschler and Alva Noë in conversation at the Marfa Book Company on Saturday, December 5, 2015 at 6:00 PM. The event is free and open to the public. Weschler and Noe are on the road together, each contributing to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Strange Pilgrims currently on view at The Contemporary Austin.

Lawrence Weschler is a writer of narrative and creative non-fiction. As a staff writer for The New Yorker for over twenty years, his work focused on culture, politics, philosophy and art, and his many books, essays and interviews follow in this vein. He won the National Book Critics Circle award in criticism for his book, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (2006), and was short listed for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995). His “Passions and Wonders” series was launched with Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982), which has recently been expanded, comprising thirty years of conversations with Robert Irwin. Weschler is a regular contributor to a number of publications, including McSweeney’s, Vanity Fair and The New York Times Sunday Magazine. He is the director emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, the artistic director emeritus with the Chicago Humanities Festival, and is currently the distinguished writer in residence at the Carter Journalism Institute at NYU.

Alva Noë is a writer and a philosopher living in Berkeley and New York. He works on the nature of mind and human experience. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004); Out of Our Heads (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009); and most recently, Varieties of Presence (Harvard University Press, 2012). The central idea of these books is that consciousness is not something that happens inside us, or to us. It is something we do. Alva’s new book on art and human nature, called Strange Tools, will be released on September 15, 2015. Noë received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1995 and is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. He previously was a distinguished professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has been philosopher-in-residence with The Forsythe Company. Alva is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a former fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a weekly contributor to National Public Radio’s science blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture.