Think Olio x Ted Barrow presents “Catfishing: The Artist as Trickster in Factual Fictions”

There’s something fishy happening here. Rooted in illusion and invention, the artist-as-trickster archetype is found all over the world and has endured for millennia. Manifesting as Coyote in North America, Hermes in Greece, Krishna in India, Loki in Scandinavia, the Monkey in China, and the Zulu trickster Thlokunyana in Africa, creative destruction is the trade of these crafty figures.

This interdisciplinary discussion draws on folk mythology, literature, and 500 years of visual art to focus on the subject of fishing, and how angling straddles the line between perception and deception art and belief systems.

Credit: Winslow Homer, “Life-size Black Bass,” 1904

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Ted Barrow

Ted Barrow is an art historian finishing his PhD. at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He teaches in Barnard College’s Pre-College Program over the summer, focusing on the relationship between art and film in New York City, and has taught art history courses at Baruch, City College, the College of Staten Island, and Brooklyn College. His focus is Gilded Age America, and his dissertation focuses on tropical imagery in the age of empire. Barrow currently works as the Assistant Curator at the Hudson River Museum and in his free time he runs a popular Instagram account about skateboarding (@feedback_ts).

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