Sign up to watch live online » Tuesday, October 10, 2017 6 – 7:30 p.m. Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre Symphony Space 2537 Broadway at 95th Street New York, NY Tickets: Sold out!

Since 2008, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has become a household name in the United States and around the world. Celebrated for both his creativity and his activism—and the unique place where they meet—Ai Weiwei has led the fight against censorship, shed light on the international refugee crisis, exposed government corruption, and more.

“Literature is a place where we can construct new realities together, but unless the literature available to us is representative, those new realities threaten to reconstruct the prejudice and discrimination of the world we live in. ” — Ai Weiwei

The artist will share the stage with PEN America President and writer Andrew Solomon for an intimate conversation on life as a dissident, the impact of his celebrity status on his art, and new and renewed threats to artistic expression in both China and the United States. Ai Weiwei is renowned for making strong aesthetic statements that resonate with timely phenomena across today’s geopolitical world. From architecture to installations, social media to documentaries, Ai uses a wide range of mediums as expressions of new ways for his audiences to examine society and its values. Andrew Solomon is a writer and lecturer on politics, culture, and psychology; a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center; and the president of PEN America. Solomon is an activist in LGBT rights, mental health, education, and the arts.

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