Art. Neural Science, and Music: A Discussion and Music Performance with Nancy Princenthal & Joseph DeDoux

Joseph LeDoux is a University Professor of Neural Science at New York University, where he also directs the Emotional Brain Institute. His work is focused on the brain mechanisms of emotion, memory, and consciousness. An elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, LeDoux has received a number of awards for his research and is the author of several books, including The Emotional Brain, Synaptic Self, Anxious and The Deep History of Ourselves. His newest, The Four Realms of Existence, comes out in October. A recent documentary about his life, work and music is available on Amazon Prime. He is also the lead singer and songwriter in the rock band, The Amygdaloids

Nancy Princenthal is a New York-based art writer whose 2015 book Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art received the 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. She is also the author of Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s (2019) and Hannah Wilke (2010). Her essays have appeared in monographs on Doris Salcedo, Robert Mangold, Willie Cole and Gary Simmons, among many others. A Contributing Editor (and former Senior Editor) of Art in America, she has also written for the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Bomb, Apollo and elsewhere. Princenthal has lectured widely, and taught at Bard College, Princeton University, Yale University, and the School of Visual Arts. She is currently working on a biography of Louise Bourgeois.

Princenthal will talk about Bourgeois’s distinctive understanding of the unconscious, an important resource for her convention-shattering work. Bourgeois’s thinking about internal experience was influenced by a deep involvement with psychoanalysis, itself subject to the radical cultural shifts of her time.

LeDoux will give a brief summary of his research on mind and brain, and talk about the birth of his music, Heavy Mental. Putting Heavy Mental in action, he will then perform some of the songs he has written about consciousness, fear, love and the life of the mind. He will be joined by his frequent musical partner, singer-songwriter Colin Dempsey.