Dr. Hildegard Kurt

Dr. Hildegard Kurt is a cultural researcher who lives in Berlin, Germany. Her work focuses on art and sustainability, the aesthetics of sustainability, art and agriculture, interculture and the dialogue of cultures.

She is co-founder of  und. Institut für Kunst, Kultur und Zukunftsfähigkeit  http://www.und-institut.de/) (and. Institute for Art, Culture and Sustainability), located in Berlin and Frankfurt/Main. 

Hildegard is involved in several collaborative projects with the SSRU. These include a research project with Volker Harlan and Shelley Sacks linking Goethe and Schiller to social sculpture; co-authoring a Social Sculpture Reader with Wolfgang Zumdick and Shelley Sacks; participating in the Art, Culture and Sustainability research cluster (which draws its name from the und-institut) and working with Shelley on a programme with the Weimar-Jena Academy: from Bauhaus to Social Sculpture. 
(See http://www.weimar-summer-courses.de/2008/kurs-a.html)

In 1999 Hildegard Kurt received her doctorate from the Institute for Cultural Science, Humboldt University, Berlin, with a thesis on "The New Muse - Impulses in Art for Overcoming Consumer Culture". The term "New Muse", coined by Joseph Beuys in his installation "Stag Monuments", stands for the awareness of a creative potential that reaches beyond the art world: a non-technical and non-commercial creativity which cultivates respect instead of superiority; whose objective is no longer primarily the production of artefacts; a creativity which exercises receptivity for transformation processes and no longer separates human beings from nature. 

Hildegard Kurt's research, projects, lecturing and teaching - mainly in Germany, but also in Italy, Switzerland, England, Ireland, Korea, Georgia, Hungary and the USA - all centre around the role art and culture play in shaping a humane and ecologically viable future.

For more information see  http://www.hildegard-kurt.de/ 

BAUHAUS TO SOCIAL SCULPTURE
Summer Programme in Weimar : 22 June - 6 July 2008.

A Short Course in English as part of the 9th International Weimar Summer Programme. 

Under the direction of Dr. Hildegard Kurt and Shelley Sacks.
Enrolment by 15 May