100 Years Pati Hill
A day of readings live streamed
11:00–18:00
Pati Hill would have celebrated her 100th birthday on the 3 April 2021. We are taking this opportunity to celebrate an artist who disregarded borders, genres and conventions in her artistic practice, with a body of work that remains astonishingly fresh to this day. As a visual artist, Pati Hill created a huge archive of photocopied works which are currently on view in a generous solo presentation at Kunsthalle Zürich. Hill was, however, also a writer, completing four novels and publishing several artist’s books, poetry collections, essays and magazine columns.
On Saturday 3 April invited artists, curators and friends of Kunsthalle Zürich read aloud from Pati Hill’s literary oeuvre from a sound studio on site from 11am until 6pm. The readings were broadcast as a livestream over the internet so all our visitors – and followers at home – could listen in.
Readers and texts in the recording:
0:00:46 Artist Sally Schonfeldt reads Some Notes on My Life, 2000, and excerpts from an interview of Pati Hill by Avis Berman (read by Daniel Baumann), Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Oral History Project, 2010
0:29:50 Curator Matthew Hanson reads One thing I know, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1962
1:00:48 Director of Kunsthaus Pasquart Felicity Lunn reads Cats, Paris Review, 1955
1:29:50 Artist Clare Kenny reads excerpts from The Nine Mile Circle, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1957 and The Falcon, Paris Review, 1976
2:03:27 Artist Jack Pryce reads the opening of Pati Hills memoir The Pit and the Century Plant, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1955
2:30:12 Artist Jack Pryce and Aoife Rosenmeyer read The Art of Fiction No. 17, an interview with Truman Capote, Paris Review, 1957
3:01:25 Dancer and choreographer Declan Whitaker reads further chapters from The Pit and the Century Plant, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1955
3:33:40 Artist Vanessa Billy reads from The Snow Rabbit, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1961, and Impossible Dreams, Alice James Books, Cambridge, 1976
3:56:52 Artist Sam Porritt reads Impossible Dreams, Alice James Books, Cambridge, 1976 and The Snow Rabbit, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1961
4:28:57 Jeremy Waterfield reads excerpts from Pati Hill's unpublished Versailles Journal
5:03:20 Curator Michael Birchall reads Ben, Paris Review, 1956
5:30:08 Artist Leila Peacock reads Dreams Objects Moments, Paris Review, 1978 and Linda, Paris Review, 1953
6:00:38 Artist Brigham Baker reads further from Linda, Paris Review, 1953
6:34:00 Artist and curator Clare Goodwin reads from Letters to Jill, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1979, and the final chapter of The Pit and the Century Plant, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1955