University of Oregon Visiting Artist Lecture Series Presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research

“My work primarily focuses on sculpture and extends into drawing, image, text, and public projects. I aim to defamiliarize the ordinary, encouraging us to rethink how we form associations, assign value, and construct categories of identity, disposability, and loss. This approach mirrors my personal history, as it engages with experiences of disjunction and dislocation and reflects their lasting effects.

I challenge the boundaries of the "Pop Art" object by deconstructing the commodity and its glossy, overconfident surface—its scale, ambition, and failure to fulfill the promises of progress and emancipation. Inspired by the “poor materials” philosophy, I utilize humble materials to bridge the gap between art and everyday life, reconstructing objects to reveal their latent vulnerability and inherent decay. By incorporating architectural principles, I investigate how subtle, ephemeral, and often overlooked structures shape and sustain civilization—from domestic spaces, the feminine, and the infra-ordinary to the anti-heroic. I inquire: what forms provide habitability and order, contributing to civilization’s fabric yet remaining visually or politically unnoticed or silenced? What do we build when we build?”      -   Ester Partegàs, 2024

Ester Partegàs (Barcelona, 1972) has shown extensively nationally and internationally. Most recent shows include The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2025), Ballroom Marfa (2024), TEA Tenerife (2023), Palazzo Delle Exposizione, Rome (2023) NoguerasBlanchard, Madrid (2022); Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2021); Essex Flowers, NY (2021); Pure Joy, Marfa TX (2020); Conde Duque, Madrid (2020); The Drawing Center, NY (2019); the Museum of the City of NY (2019); Transborder Biennial/Bienal Transfronteriza, El Paso Museum of Art + Museo de Arte Ciudad Juárez (2018), MACBA Barcelona (2018).

She has been the recipient of the 2022-2023 Rome Prize for Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome, a 2014 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, and a 2004 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2004), among others. An artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; MacDowell. She has been faculty at the Yale School of Art, Skowhegan, Virginia Commonwealth University, SUNY Purchase, and since 2017 teaches at Parsons School of Design. Based in New York City, she is a part-time resident of Marfa, TX, and Barcelona.

University of Oregon Visiting Artist Lecture Series Presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research

In this presentation, Ari Melenciano will share a survey of her recent works that use imagination in critical forms. Each reveals vibrant opportunities to imagine the worlds within and around us with depth and expanding possibility, ranging from explorations of the collective subconscious with AI, collecting ancestral memories through sound and dance, or through archiving future worlds through celestial botany.

Ari Melenciano has cultivated an expansive practice within the arts, technology, design, culture, and pedagogy. Her natural ability to combine many disciplines reveals their interconnectedness and reimagines their conventions for new possibilities. Her art practice ranges from using improvisational dance as an ethnomusicological research instrument, to exploring AI through both critical and imaginative lenses, to sonic composition using botanical data. Her work has been exhibited around the world from Dubai's Museum of the Future to the Studio Museum in Harlem. She's a frequent international public speaker, and occasionally designs and teaches courses at New York University, Hunter College, Parsons, and the Pratt Institute. She's the founder of Afrotectopia, a social institution that imagines new possibilities at the nexus of art, design, technology, and culture. Afrotectopia has taken many forms including festivals, think tanks, summer camp, adult continued education programming, international residency, and incubators. Currently, Afrotectopia is on a book tour to promote their recently published kitchen table art book titled, Black Metal, which came out of an incubator between Afrotectopia, MIT Media Lab's Space Exploration Initiative, and NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. And previously, she was a creative technologist at Google's Creative Lab. Some work she did while at Google included creating technologies using machine learning on hardware devices the size of a finger, contributing creative direction for the Google for Africa campaign, and creative strategy for generative AI development.