Laurie Anderson: About Time

Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most renowned and daring creative pioneers. She is best known for her multimedia presentations and innovative use of technology. As writer, director, visual artist, and vocalist she has created groundbreaking works that span the worlds of art, theater, and experimental music. Ms. Anderson has published seven books, and her visual work has been presented in major museums around the world. In 2002 she was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA, which culminated in her 2004 touring solo performance The End of the Moon. Her film Heart of a Dog was chosen as an official selection of the 2015 Venice and Toronto Film Festivals and received a special screening at the Rubin Museum, where she joined in conversation with Darren Aronofsky. Ms. Anderson has made many appearances at the Rubin, and has been in conversation with Wim Wenders, Mark Morris, Janna Levin, Gavin Schmidt, Neil Gaiman, and Tiokasin Ghosthorse. She also hosted the premiere season of the Rubin’s AWAKEN podcast.

Jane Hirshfield is writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine). She is the author of two now-classic collections of essays, and the editor and co-translator of four books presenting world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and 10 editions of The Best American Poetry. A lay-ordained practitioner of Soto Zen and former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019. Her most recent book is The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023).

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose books are often structured around repetition, recess, and delay, and reject linear models of time in order to explore the looping, jarring, out-of-sync temporalities that color late modernity. His first novel Remainder sees the victim of an unspecified technological disaster use his compensation funds to stage elaborate reenactments of half-remembered scenes from his own past. His latest novel The Making of Incarnation (2021) is an unpacking of the history of time-and-motion study. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. Born in Scotland, he is now a Swedish citizen and lives in Berlin.

The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi is an innovative thinker, philosopher, educator, and polymath monk. He is president and CEO of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a center dedicated to inquiry, dialogue, and education on the ethical and humane dimensions of life. The Center is a collaborative and nonpartisan think tank, and its programs emphasize responsibility and examine meaningfulness and moral purpose between individuals, organizations, and societies. Six Nobel Peace Laureates serve as the Center’s founding members, and its programs run in several countries and are expanding. Venerable Tenzin entered a Buddhist monastery at the age of ten and received his graduate education at Harvard University with degrees ranging from philosophy to physics to international relations. He is a Tribeca Disruptive Fellow and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi’s memoir, Running Toward Mystery: The Adventure of an Unconventional Life, was recently released and tells the beautiful story of a singular life compelled to contemplation, sharing lessons about the power of mentorship and an open mind.

Benjamín Labatut is a Chilean fiction writer whose English-language debut When We Cease to Understand the World seeks to understand the minds of physicists and mathematicians. His latest work of fiction The MANIAC centers on John von Neumann whose discoveries laid the groundwork for computer science and nuclear weapons.

Tim McHenry is a founding Rubin staff member and was in charge of programs at the Museum for its first 20 years. He specializes in art-contextual experiences that break the traditional mold, presenting audiences with what the Huffington Post has called “some of the most original and inspired programs on the arts and consciousness in New York City.” 

McHenry’s public programs have explored the wider implications of the Rubin’s objects and collection of Himalayan art through music, film, performance, immersive engagement, and intimate conversation. He is the curator of the Mandala Lab, now on view in a free-standing version that has traveled to Bilbao, London, and Milan.