Critical Conversations: Sophie Cavoulacos
Art After Midnight: Curating Time-Based Art in the Museum
Thursday, October 15, 2026 at PICA | 6:00 PM
This event is free and open to the public
The Ford Family Foundation in partnership with the University of Oregon Department of Art’s Center for Art Research (CFAR) presents Art After Midnight: Curating Time-Based Art in the Museum. This event is part of Critical Conversations, a platform for dialogue and inquiry that supports Oregon artists and writers.
Art After Midnight: Curating Time-Based Art in the Museum
How can a museum present and preserve art made outside of traditional forms and settings? Critical Conversations visiting curator Sophie Cavoulacos delves into this question through her work at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, whose activities as a film archive & as a presenter of live performance provide generative tools for critically engaging with alternative art movements. Through exhibition case studies, ranging from the 1980s club scene in New York to avant-garde circles in 1960s Tokyo, Cavoulacos shares her curatorial practice, where preservation, oral history, collaboration, and considering site-specificity all play a role in stewarding art made in ephemeral and collective modes within the museum.
Sophie Cavoulacos is a Curator in the Department of Film at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she organizes moving image projects across the museum. She has been a programmer for MoMA’s Doc Fortnight and New Directors/New Films festivals and leads the artist cinema series Modern Mondays. Gallery projects include Nour Mobarak: Dafne Phono (2024), Alexandre Estrela: Flat Bells (2023), and the expanded cinema installation Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver’s Cinematic Illumination (2020-21), all in the Kravis Studio, MoMA’s time-based art space; and Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983 (2017-8). She is also active in the museum’s collection development and displays. Her writing has appeared in monographs and exhibition catalogues internationally.