NARS is pleased to present Sixteen Memos for the Next Millennium, an exhibition featuring the works of our 2018 Season IV artists-in-residence. The exhibition takes its title from Italo Calvino’s ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium,’ a series of Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures he was invited to give at Harvard University over the course of the academic year between 1985-1986 regarding the literary values he identified as being of most importance for the coming millennium. He had intended to deliver eight lectures in total, but at the time of his departure to Massachusetts, he had written only five of them, which are teeming with references to stories of folklore, mythology, philosophical thought, etc. The sixth, his wife Esther Calvino revealed in the forward of the book, was planned to refer to Herman Melville’s story of ‘Bartleby,’ the scrivener who ‘preferred not to.’

Calvino denoted the values as follows:

Lightness
Quickness
Exactitude
Visibility
Multiplicity
And the 6th was intended to be ‘Consistency.’ The exhibition as an adaptation of Calvino’s poetic values refers to any type of poetic communication, whether in the sense of the literary, the musical, and more specifically in this case, the visual. These values resonate across the multi-disciplinary practices, mediums, and concepts in which the Season IV artists in residence at NARS have engaged with as part of their creative processes as we transition into the new year, and toward the end of their residencies.