Marking the publication of Theogony, the influential artist Lydia Venieri, art historian Anastasia Aukeman and writer and reporter Michael Skafidas discuss the book and the work of this prolific artist. Venieri's most recent video art project The Dolphin Conspiracy will also be screened.

Lydia Venieri erects entire mythologies and symbolic systems from the already phantasmagoric world of news media. Her stories are played out using dolls and childlike imagery to counter media dementia, in painting, drawing, photography, video and the internet. Theogony explicates Venieri's universe surveying two decades of work.

Copies of Lydia Venieri: Theogony are available for purchase and signing at the event.

An Art Book Series Event with Lydia Venieri, Anastasia Aukeman, Michael Skafidas Wednesday May 25, 2011 6:00 p.m. Margaret Liebman Berger Forum Room 227 (2nd Floor) The New York Public Library Stephen A. Schwarzman Building 5th Avenue at 42nd Street New York , NY 10018 917-275-6975 www.nypl.org directions Room 227 opens to the public at 5:30 p.m. All events are FREE and subject to last minute change or cancellation.
Anastasia Aukeman is an art historian and curator living and working in New York City. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art History at Parsons The New School for Design. The recipient of the Newhall Fellowship in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (2007-2008), she holds an M.Phil. degree in Art History from the Graduate Center , City University New York and specializes in photography as well as modern and contemporary art. She has published numerous articles and reviews in Art in America, Art on Paper, and Artnews magazines, as well as exhibition catalogue essays and encyclopedias. Her most recent scholarship is a consideration of the profound influence of assemblage and the California avant-garde of the 1950s and '60s on later twentieth-century art movements. Michael Skafidas is a writer and a professor of Comparative Literature at Queens College of the City University of New York. His most recent academic essay “Fabricating Greekness: from Fustanella to the Glossy Page” appeared in the book The Fabric of Cultures (Routledge, 2009). He is a contributing editor to Global Viewpoint of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate and NPQ. His articles and interviews with world luminaries have appeared in various international print and electronic publications such as the Huffington Post, Die Welt, La Republica and El Pais. He is also an editor-at-large and columnist for the Greek edition of Marie Claire and Status magazine, the editor of the Greek Edition of NPQ and co-author with Nathan Gardels of Bright Minds at the Turn of the Century (Terzo Books, 2000). In its second season the program series An Art Book , initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni, is a celebration of the essential importance and beauty of art books. The events showcase book presentations and discussions by world renowned and emerging artists, critics, curators, designers, historians and writers. THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY PRESENTS THEOGONY May 25, 2011