6:00pm Reception
6:30pm Chess Match
7:00pm Gallery Talk
Marcel Duchamp was an avid chess player and continually probed the boundaries between chance and choice, luck and skill, in his work. For this event, co-sponsored with the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis in coordination with the 2009 U.S. Women’s Chess Championship held in St. Louis this year, a game combining roulette and chess will be played in the atrium by the newly-crowned Women’s Chess Champion and a special guest. The game, which was inspired by Duchamp’s idea to combine the ultimate game of strategy--chess--with the ultimate game of chance--roulette, was developed for the event by Jennifer Shahade, two-time US Women’s Chess Champion, author of Chess Bitch: Women in the Intellectual Sport, and coauthor of Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess, and chess and art scholar Larry List. The players will spin the wheel to determine which piece they move.
This event will be followed by a gallery talk on seminal works by Duchamp in Chance Aesthetics, led by Bradley Bailey, Saint Louis University assistant professor of art history, co-author of Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess, and curator of the exhibition Marcel Duchamp: Chess Master.
