NEW YORK, NY.- In honor of the late Walter H. Annenberg, philanthropist, patron of the arts, and former ambassador, the Whitney Museum of American Art established the Walter Annenberg Annual Lecture to advance this country's understanding of its art and culture. In this fourth Annenberg Lecture, John Baldessari will speak about his work in conversation with Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney's Alice Pratt Brown Director. For more than fifty years, Baldessari has masterfully juxtaposed painting, photography, sculpture, and other media to probe how meaning is created through images, objects, and text.

John Baldessari was born in National City, California. He attended San Diego State University and did post-graduate work at Otis Art Institute and Chouinard Art Institute and U.C. Berkeley. He taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia from 1970 to 1988 and at the University of California at Los Angeles from 1996 to 2007.

His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe and in over 750 group exhibitions. His projects include artist books, videos, films, billboards and public works. His awards include the Americans for the Arts lifetime achievement award, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, the Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts in California, the Oscar Kokoschka Prize from Austria and the Spectrum- International Award for Photography of the Foundation of Lower Saxony, Germany. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 2008, and the 2008 B.A.C.A. International. Baldessari has exhibited in numerous Whitney exhibitions since 1969 and was most recently included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.