Amy Brener uses inventive mold-making and casting techniques to fuse everyday objects and personal imagery into her sculptures. The resulting forms are at once familiar and strange, resembling otherworldly monuments, reliquaries and garments. Her work seeks to level hierarchies between sacred and mundane material, questioning what we choose to preserve and discard.

Amy Brener was born in Victoria, BC, and moved to New York City in 2007. Since graduating with an MFA from Hunter College in 2010, her sculptures have been exhibited at galleries and institutions across the US, Canada, Europe and China. Highlights include MoMA PS1 and Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Galerie Pact in Paris, Wentrup Gallery in Berlin and Riverside Art Museum in Beijing. Her work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Art in America, CURA, Artnet News and The Brooklyn Rail. She is represented by Jack Barrett Gallery in New York, where she will present a solo exhibition in the fall of 2021.

amybrener.com

Flexi-Shield (Eostra), 2019, platinum silicone, pigment, larkspur and chrysanthemum, flowers, fern leaves, miscellaneous objects, 72 x 50 x 8 inches.

"I always keep my drawings up while I paint. I look over, remember a line, and then absorb it to translate it. Drawings live in my studio as a beginning—a middle and an end to the work. They are preparatory but also the point of the work. They are the end game and also the research. My project in art is all about language. Words are entirely abstract—the forms in my work shift from defined to ambiguous shapes that refer to animals, symbols, and glyphs. Drawing challenges my hand, my memory as well as my eyes. I see my drawings as no different than a larger 'painting'. It’s a healthy ecosystem and I trust in it. Community engagement is critical to me. My positions as faculty and critic enrich my life and my experience in the arts. I find all of these facets of my work and life as one and feel I need them all to varying degrees. I am excited to talk about the levels of inclusivity that the art world now has—despite the proclivity to think otherwise. I will share ideas of collaboration as learning, curating as influence, outreach as sustainability and finding one’s voice in the arts." - Catherine Haggarty, 2021

Catherine Haggarty is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Haggarty’s paintings and curatorial work have been reviewed by and featured in Bomb Magazine, Hyperallergic, Artnet, Two Coats of Paint, Brooklyn Magazine, The New York Times, Maake Magazine, Art Maze Magazine, The Observer, Art Spiel and Sound and Vision Podcast. Solo exhibitions include Massey Klein Gallery, This Friday Next Friday, Bloomsburg University, One River School of Art and Design, Proto Gallery, and Look and Listen in Marseille France. Catherine has been a visiting artist & lecturer at Boston University MFA, Hunter MFA, Denison University, Purchase MFA, Brooklyn College MFA, and in 2018 she was the Anderson Endowed Lecturer at Penn State University. Haggarty earned her M.F.A from Mason Gross, Rutgers University in 2011. Currently, Haggarty is an adjunct professor at The School of Visual Arts (SVA) and also co-founded and co-directs the NYC Crit Club.

catherinehaggarty.com

Catherine Haggarty.

Dianna Frid will share her interest in the wormholes she has found in ancient books. Using these material texts as a springboard, she will discuss her textile and related works and also speak of time: the time it takes to make something, the rhythm of work, the time of minerals and asteroids.

Dianna Frid is an artist working at the intersection of material texts and textiles. Her artist’s books and mixed-media works make visible the tactile manifestations of language. In her work, embroidery is a prominent vehicle for exploring the relationships between writing and drawing, and the overlaps of transcription, translation, and legibility. Frid was born in Mexico where she was first exposed to textiles as complex codes of material writing. This point of reference helps her situate her work alongside lineages that embrace art and needlework without pitting them in hierarchical opposition. Time, Rhythm, Process, and Matter are never in opposition. English is Dianna Frid's stepmother tongue. She does not check boxes. Frid is Director of Graduate Studies and Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, Art Department.

diannafrid.net

Dianna Frid.

Lumi Tan will speak about the ways in which performance practices shift institutional value systems through her work curating time-based art for the white cube gallery, black box theater, and most recently, the computer screen. Thinking of issues of process, intimacy, documentation, audience, and site, Tan will connect this current work to the historical context of The Kitchen and the role of small scale institutions in the contemporary art ecosystem.

Lumi Tan is Senior Curator at The Kitchen in New York, where she has organized exhibitions and produced performances with artists across disciplines and generations since 2010. Most recently, Tan has worked with Kevin Beasley, Baseera Khan, Autumn Knight, and Kenneth Tam. Previously she curated projects with artists including Gretchen Bender, Meriem Bennani, Liz Magic Laser, The Racial Imaginary Institute, Sahra Motalebi, Sondra Perry, Tina Satter/Half Straddle, Anicka Yi, and Danh Vo and Xiu Xiu. Prior to The Kitchen, Tan was Guest Curator at the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Nord Pas-de-Calais in France, director at Zach Feuer Gallery, and curatorial assistant at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Mousse, Cura, and numerous exhibition catalogues. She was the recipient of 2020 VIA Art Fund Curatorial Fellowship.

This lecture is made possible by the Critical Conversations program, a partnership between the Ford Family Foundation and the University of Oregon Department of Art's Center for Art Research with Reed College’s Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Pacific Northwest College of Art, and Portland State University.

thekitchen.org

Amy Yao will present slides ranging from her experiences playing in the punk band Emilys Sassy Lime in 1993, to her most recent work in progress involving soil analysis used in ceramics, language and theories about "invasive species" and algae-based polymers.

Amy Yao is a contemporary visual artist making work in many different mediums informed by ideas of waste, consumption, and identity. She is represented by Various Small Fires in Los Angeles and 47 Canal in New York City. Yao is a lecturer in visual arts at Princeton University, NJ.

"Queer Morphologies & Digital Spirits" will share an overview of Huang's mixed media filmmaking career which interweaves live action, visual effects, puppetry and animation with his passion for folklore, mythology and queer futurism. The lecture will explore the process of world building and focus on the emergence of hybrid methodologies within one's visual practice. This talk will also explore how combining digital tools with performance can enable new forms of self-reinvention and the construction of digital identities.

Filmmaker and artist Andrew Thomas Huang crafts hybrid fantasy worlds and mythical dreamscapes. A Grammy-nominated music video director, Huang’s collaborators include Bjork, FKA Twigs and Thom Yorke among others. Serving as creative director for Bjork’s VR exhibition Bjork Digital, Huang created multiple immersive experiences for the pioneering traveling installation. His films have been commissioned by and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, The Sydney Opera House and the Museum of Contemporary Art, LA. Inspired by his Chinese heritage and queer Asian mythology and folklore, Huang continues his foray into narrative with his first feature film TIGER GIRL which has received support from Film Independent and the Sundance Institute. Huang graduated with a degree in Fine Art and Animation from the University of Southern California.

This lecture is made possible by the Davis Family Endowed Fund in Art.

andrewthomashuang.com

Utilizing media spanning video, sculpture, drawing, and installation, Pei-Hsuan Wang’s practice inquiries into personal insecurities navigating between the East and the West, two cultural and geographical delineations that have shaped her upbringing. Drawing from trauma, memory, family history, and aspirations, Wang’s work mines the vulnerabilities, contradictions, and beauty that reside in identity formation as an Asian woman in diaspora. 

The artist’s 11-year-old niece Iris, a White and East Asian mixed-heritage, first-generation Taiwanese American, has inspired a body of work that imagines racial and cultural hybridity alongside various architypes in nature and in myths. Zoomorphic beings become a kind of guardian and portal, giving form to the inner experience, and opening up narratives that empower from the visceral as well as the imaginative. 

Pei-Hsuan Wang holds a BA from Macalester College, MN and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, MI, USA. She was resident at ISCP, New York (2018), Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, Korea (2018), and guest resident at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2019). Wang is the winner of Special Jury Price of the 2019 Huayu Youth Award in China and is currently a candidate laureate at the Higher Institute of Art (HISK) in Ghent, Belgium. 

This lecture is made possible in part by the Robert James Foundation.

pei-hsuanwang.com

​​​​​​

In 1967, the radical feminist and writer Valerie Solanas sold copies of her newly authored SCUM Manifesto on the streets of New York’s Greenwich Village, charging $1 ($2 if the buyer was a man). It opens with an incisive description of her project: “[. . .] SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men), which will eliminate through sabotage all aspects of society not relevant to women (everything), bring about a complete female take-over, eliminate the male sex and begin to create a swinging, groovy, out-of-sight female world.”  

This lecture will follow the trajectory of Justine Kurland’s photography ending with her new collage work, SCUMB Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books). These object-based tactile continue themes explored in her earliest body of work, Girl Pictures (1997–2002), and again in Mama Babies (2004–07). Seeking and picturing freedom, imagining a matriarchal paradise is at the core of much of Kurland’s work. It is located here in the artistic act itself: the nature of collage—heterogeneous, pulled apart, shape-shifting, disrupted, cyborg, fantasy—has long made it a feminist strategy in life and in art. 

Justine Kurland, known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and their fringe communities, has spent the better part of the last twenty years on the road. In her recent work, Kurland cuts and collages the pages of photography books in her personal library authored by canonized white men. These tactile objects are a continuation of Kurland’s ongoing project of creating space for women. Kurland (born in Warsaw, New York, 1969) received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA from Yale University. Her work is in the public collections of institutions including the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and International Center of Photography, among others. 

justinekurland.com

Lezley Saar will be talking about the different series that she’s done and the various themes that deal with notions of race, gender, sanity, literature, heritage, escapism, and marginalization. These series include: Anomalies, Mulatto Nation, Autist’s Fables, Madwoman in the Attic, Monad, Gender Renaissance, A Conjuring of Conjurors, and Black Garden. She will delve into her decision-making process for her next theme/exhibition, which takes forever, as well as all the research. She will touch on her materials and the role they play in illuminating the subjects of her portraits. She will also mention a bit about her past, what she finds interesting today, and her hopes for the future. 

Lezley Saar is a mixed media artist currently living in Los Angeles. While majoring in communications at San Francisco State University, she worked at KPFA radio in Berkeley as part of a collective; The Souls of Black Folk. There she started illustrating for her writer friends. In the 80s, she began making altered books. Her works now include paintings, drawings, altered books, banners, collages, dioramas, and installations. Saar’s various recent series; Anomalies, Mulatto Nation, Tooth Hut, Autist’s Fables, Madwoman in the Attic, Monad, Gender Renaissance, A Conjuring of Conjurors, and Black Garden deal with notions of race, gender, beauty, normalcy, escapism and sanity. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and is in museum collections such as The Kemper Museum, CAAM, MOCA Los Angeles, LACMA, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Ackland Art Museum, The Crocker Art Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston,The Schnitzer Museum, Oregon, and The Santa Barbara Museum of Art. 

Co-sponsored by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and the Department of Art. 

lezleysaar.wordpress.com 

​​​​​​

Vanishing Points is a long-term photography project that focuses on significant sites of Indigenous American presence, including sacred landforms, earthworks, documented archaeological sites and contested battlegrounds. The sites Sherwin chooses to visit and photograph are literal and metaphorical vanishing points. They are places in the landscape where two lines, or cultures, converge. While visiting these sites, Sherwin reflects on the monuments our modern culture will presumably leave behind and what the archaeological evidence of our civilization will reveal about our time on Earth.  A major monograph on the Vanishing Points project was published in July 2021 by Germany-based publisher, Kehrer Verlag, one of the leading publishers of fine art photography in the world. 

Michael Sherwin is a multimedia artist exploring scientific, cultural, and historical interpretations of the natural world. He has won numerous grants and awards for his work and has exhibited widely, including recent exhibitions at the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, Morris Museum of Art, Huntington Museum of Art, and the Center for Fine Art Photography among others. Reviews and features of his work have been published on numerous outlets, including The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Lenscratch and on National Public Radio. He has also lectured extensively about his work at universities and conferences across the nation. Sherwin earned an MFA from the University of Oregon in 2004, and a BFA from The Ohio State University in 1999. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Art in the School of Art and Design at West Virginia University. 

This lecture is made possible by the Laverne Krause Lectures and Exhibitions endowment. 

www.michaelsherwin.com

John Wayne Point, Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, AZ.

Yuji Hiratsuka mixes influences of east and west in his work. There is less of an emphasis on socio-cultural commentary and more of an emphasis about the placement and interplay of the visual effects. Hiratsuka plays with the metaphorical aspects of his subjects and their settings by portraying the irony, paradox, and satire in people’s daily lives. His images bear a slight resemblance to traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, which were frequently decorative, brightly colored and featured highly stylized exaggerated and distorted figures, while also expressing contemporary aspects of the western world. Hiratsuka will explain the unique technique of his multicolor intaglio (etching) printmaking process. The process begins with a deep etching printed on a sheet of Kozo (mulberry) paper in black, after which the plate is reclaimed and re-etched for subsequent printing in yellow, red, and blue. In addition, Hiratsuka often applies the fifth or six extra layers of color as desired to enhance the image. 

Yuji Hiratsuka was born in Osaka, Japan, and received a bachelor’s degree in art education from Tokyo Teachers’ University in 1978. He taught art at several high schools and junior high schools in Osaka until he moved to the United States in 1985 to pursue graduate degrees in printmaking at New Mexico State University and Indiana University. He taught printmaking, book arts and drawing at Oregon State University for the past three decades. His intaglio prints are in public collections including the British Museum, London, UK; State Museum of Oriental Arts, Moscow, Russia; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Freer/Sackler, The Smithsonian’s Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C.; The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; University of Oregon, Eugene, OR; de Young Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, CA. 

This lecture is made possible by the Gilkey Foundation Fund. 

www.yujihiratsuka.com

​​​​​​

Shawna X (BFA ’09, Digital Arts) is a visual artist based in New York City, known for her vibrant and graphical image-making. Her works are manifestations in the discovery of her personal journey, cultural identity, motherhood, and rekindling connection between mind and body. Currently, she is exploring the synchronicity between visceral and emotional explorations via traditional and AI expressions.  

shawna-x.com

​​​​​​

Liz Magor will talk about her recent studio work, how to entertain contradiction, and how to be untopical yet relevant.      

Liz Magor is a Vancouver-based artist who produces sculptural and photographic works concerned with the latent, affective range of familiar materials, images, and objects. Her process and studio practice were featured in Season 8 of the PBS series Art 21, "Art in the Twenty-first Century" and her work has been exhibited in major international exhibitions such as Documenta VIII, Kassel; the 41st Venice Biennale, and the 4th Biennale of Sydney.  In 2019 Magor presented an exhibition titled BLOWOUT at the Carpenter Center for Visual Art, Cambridge, Mass. The exhibition traveled to the Renaissance Society in Chicago accompanied by a publication.  Recent exhibitions include "Downer" at Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver and "I Have Wasted My Life" at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY. 

This lecture is made possible by the George and Matilda Fowler Endowment Fund.  

catrionajeffries.com/artists/liz-magor/works/

​​​​​​

This talk focuses on the solo exhibition of the costume designer and performer, Machine Dazzle, and the relation of his work to creative spheres cutting across art, craft, design, theatre, and nightlife.  

Elissa Auther is the Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). She provides the strategic direction and creative oversight for exhibitions, acquisitions of works of art for the Museum’s collection, publications, and exhibition-related public programming. She has published widely on a diverse set of topics, including the history of modernism and its relationship to craft and the decorative, the material culture of the American counterculture, and feminist art. Her book String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art focuses on the broad utilization of fiber in art of the 1960s and 1970s and the changing hierarchical relationship between art and craft expressed by the medium’s new visibility. Her most recent exhibitions for the Museum of Arts and Design include Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro and Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle. 

www.elissaauther.com

“I will show and talk about the thrust of my photography practice over the last fifty years. I have primarily been very interested in the culture, history, and migration of people in the African American Diaspora. This comes from my roots as the offspring of southern born parents who came west as part of the Great Migration of the Twentieth Century. My work has traced evidence of that journey in the landscape, the culture, belief, artifacts and faces of those who moved. I have also documented the source and roots of that migration, having photographed in the south, as well as in other destination in the west and north. This research has recently expanded to tracing patterns of culture and migration of the diaspora in Europe and Africa. I have also collected artifacts and historical literature as the vehicles that mark these journeys.” – Lewis Watts, 2022 

Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist, curator, and Professor Emeritus of Art at UC Santa Cruz. His research and artwork centers around the “cultural landscape” primarily in communities in the African Diaspora in different parts of the world. He is the co- author of “Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era” Heyday Books Berkeley 2020, “New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition” UC Press 2013 and “Portraits” EditionOne Press Berkeley 2020. His work has been exhibited at and/or is in the collections of The Zimmerli Museum, Rutgers University, Staatiche Kunstammiunger, Dresden Germany, Autograph London, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, The Oakland Museum of California, The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, Hartford, Conn, and The McEvoy Foundation, San Francisco among others. He is affiliated with the Rena Bransten Gallery San Francisco. 

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. 

lewiswatts.sites.ucsc.edu

With a particular focus on his activities as an exhibition maker, this richly illustrated talk will attempt to investigate the ways in which Simon Starling’s materially diverse art practice pushes and pulls at our understanding of time. From futuristic Zig-Zag chairs made of 45,000-year-old wood to the phantasmagorical effects of masquerades, from defunct craftsmanship to cutting-edge image production, from still photography to motion-control technology, this anachronic journey through the artist’s career will confront a uniform and absolute notion of time with possible divergent, convergent and parallel alternatives.

Simon Starling was born in Epsom, England, in 1967. He graduated from the Glasgow School of Art and was professor of fine arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt from 2003 to 2013. His practice spans a wide variety of media, including film, installation and photography. Starling won the Turner Prize in 2005 and was shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize in 2004. He represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and has had solo exhibitions at Frac Ile-de-France, Le Plateau n Paris (2019), Musée regional d’art contemporain in Sérignan (2017), Japan Society in New York (2016), Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City (2015), Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2014), Monash University Museum of Art in Melbourne (2013), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in Germany (2013), Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan (2011) and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams (2008). Starling lives in Copenhagen.

This lecture is made possible by the Davis Family Endowed Fund in Art.

themoderninstitute.com

“My photographic images are highly influenced by my simultaneous interests in sculpture and drawing. By using the still life as a stage for the camera, I am interested in a conceptual and aesthetic building of the image. The camera ultimately lets me assign the eye to a fixed vantage point, where the resulting image both amplifies and denies the sculptural aspects of the work placed in front of the camera. These images use elements of drawing by requiring light to both reveal and obscure an object, or to use positive/negative forms to push and pull the image in the frame. I see this working process as a means to create images that are simultaneously easily understood and distinct abstractions of the subject itself.” - John Mann, 2020

John Mann is an artist who explores the visual complications of photography, the sequence and the still life though printed images, artist books and sculptural works. His artwork has been exhibited at venues such as Aperture, (NYC), Light Work (Syracuse, NY) Daniel Cooney Fine Art (NYC), Hyeres Festival of Photography (FR), Phillips de Pury (London), PDX Contemporary (Portland), Newspace Center for Photography (Portland), The Print Center (Philadelphia), Privateer Gallery (Brooklyn), and the Houston Center for Photography (TX). He has had artist residencies at Light Work (NY), The Visual Studies Workshop (NY), Virginia Center for Creative Arts (VA) and was a Research Fellow at the Lacoste School of the Arts (FR). He earned a BFA i(Studio Art) from Arizona State University and an MFA (Photography) from The University of New Mexico. He currently lives and works in Chicago and is a member of the Cake Collective photography network.

johnmannstudio.com

Jenna Sutela will share some of her ongoing artistic research on biological and computational systems. Sutela's talk will focus on an understanding of oneself as interconnected with the wider environment. It proposes a profound shift in subjectivity—one beyond anthropocentrism and individualism.

Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and other living media, such as Bacillus subtilis nattō bacteria and the “many-headed” slime mold Physarum polycephalum. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela's work has been presented at museums and art contexts internationally, including Guggenheim Bilbao, Moderna Museet, and Serpentine Galleries. She was a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-20.

jennasutela.com

Grappling with how space gets articulated, Perlitz's work takes many forms - traversing performance, sculpture, and drawing. The work considers landscape and the ways in which define and seek to recognize ourselves within it.

Perlitz's work has appeared in a variety of venues such as playgrounds, fields, galleries, and museums, including the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Socrates Sculpture Park in NY, Cambridge Galleries in Canada, De Fabriek in The Netherlands, and aboard the Arctic Circle Residency. Born in Toronto, Canada, Jess is a graduate of Bard College, received her MFA from Tyler School of Art, and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance. Jess is a 2019 Hallie Ford Fellow currently based in Portland, Oregon where she is Associate Professor of Art and Head of Sculpture at Lewis & Clark College. Jess was recently an artist in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, NE, and included in the 2019 American Academy of Arts & Letters Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts in NYC. Her project, Chorus, is currently installed at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA as part of the museum’s ongoing artists installation series.

Co-sponsored by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and the Department of Art and made possible by The Ford Family Foundation in conjunction with Hallie Ford Fellows in the Visual Arts (2017-19).

jessperlitz.com

Art, Engagement, Economy: the Working Practice of Caroline Woolard proposes a politics of transparent production in the arts, whereby heated negotiations and mundane budgets are presented alongside documentation of finished gallery installations. Audience members will follow the behind-the-scenes work that is required to produce interdisciplinary art projects, from a commission at MoMA to a self-organized, international barter network with over 20,000 participants. With contextual analysis of the political economy of the arts, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the COVID pandemic of 2020, this talk suggests that artists can bring studio-based sculptural techniques to an approach to art-making that emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration and dialogue.

Caroline Woolard (b.1984) is an American artist who, in making her art, becomes an economic critic, social justice facilitator, media maker, and sculptor. Since the financial crisis of 2007-8, Woolard has catalyzed barter communities, minted local currencies, founded an arts-policy think tank, and created sculptural interventions in office spaces. Woolard has inspired a generation of artists who wish to create self-organized, collaborative, online platforms alongside sculptural objects and installations. Her work has been commissioned by and exhibited in major national and international museums including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and Creative Time. Woolard’s work has been featured twice on New York Close Up (2014, 2016), a digital film series produced by Art21 and broadcast on PBS. She is the 2018–20 inaugural Walentas Fellow at Moore College of Art and Design and the inaugural 2019–20 Artist in Residence for INDEX at the Rose Museum, and a 2020-2021 Fellow at the Center for Cultural Innovation.

carolinewoolard.com

Much of Fred H. C. Liang’s recent work combines jianzhi, the folk art of cut paper, with porcelain to explore cultural exchanges between the East and West. The assemblage of his work explores the complex global exchanges and the subsequent dissemination, appropriation, and transformation of cultural ideas and peoples. Life is more bewildering than fiction, and hidden, historical narratives more beguiling than those preconceived.

In his work, Liang takes viewers down the rabbit hole of domestic and global events, where our collective understanding of history is disassembled and linked as unexpected chains of events—and descending through the burrow allows an alternate reality to reveal itself. In much of his work, he excavates familiar global narratives to illuminate the complexity of events that impact both Eastern and Western societies in unanticipated ways. Doing so encourages a visual dialogue that examines the intangibility of the past, present and future by considering the tangibility of personal rituals, cultural traditions and shared iconography. Such considerations expose the fragility and impermanence of things both large and small. Through forms and materials, Liang’s work re-contextualizes art and deconstructs cultural traditions from places far and near—reflecting societies’ cultural and economic exchanges.

Mayer shares her works and ideas that speak to the fluid nature of her process as an artist. Identity formation, experience, digital vs analog environments, value, legacy, and dependency are just some of the themes that will likely be discussed. Mayer hopes this will be somewhat entertaining.

Jillian Mayer’s practice—spanning videos, sculptures, painting, photography, performances, and interactive installations—reflects upon how new technologies affect our sociality, bodies, identities, and conceptions of self. Throughout her work, Mayer models how to subvert capital-driven modes of technological innovation. By investigating the points of tension between our physical and virtual worlds, Mayer makes work that seeks to inhabit the increasingly porous boundary between the two.

Mayer has exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times. She is an alum of the Sundance Institute's New Frontiers Lab and a recipient of the Creative Capital Fellowship.

My installations meticulously cultivate the mechanisms and peculiarities of human cognition in response to uncertainty. They trigger embedded root sociological, anthropological, architectural and scientific cues through furniture, ergonomics, space, light and haunting animal activity. This stagecraft of untethering is designed to produce an expansive sense of empathy and investigation. Questions frame reality. What are the borders between science, nature and superstition? Is an object the cure or the disease? How do social protocols for the domestic, sacred or scientific intersect? Through these encounters with the unknown, viewers construct their understanding, a process psychologists call apophenia. — Laura Fritz, 2020

Laura Fritz is a Portland-based artist who works with a range of media, including, sculpture, video, and light. Her immersive installations explore the cognition of uncertainty. Her work Alvarium 2, currently on display in Laura Fritz/Rick Silva: Encounters at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene) presents a mysterious structure inhabited by a spectral swarm of bees. Recently, her Apex Series solo show at the Portland Art Museum explored surreal architecture, swarms, and the psychology of cognition. She has also exhibited at the Des Moines Art Center, Reed College, Portland; Soil, Seattle; Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, New Jersey; University of Oregon, Portland; and the Couture Stipend Series at the New American Art Union in Portland. Fritz received an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in the Visual Arts (2014). She holds a BFA from Drake University, and also attended the Pacific Northwest College of Art (CE program), Portland.

Co-sponsored by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and the Department of Art.

Hamza Walker is the director of the Los Angeles nonprofit art space LAXART and an adjunct professor at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to joining LAXART in 2016, he was director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society, a non-collecting contemporary art museum in Chicago, for 22 years where he organized numerous shows and public programming and wrote extensively on the field of contemporary art.

Notable shows at the Renaissance Society include “Suicide Narcissus” (2013), “Black Is, Black Ain’t” (2008) and “New Video, New Europe” (2004). In addition to his work at the Renaissance Society, Walker also co-curated the Made in L.A. 2016 biennial. He has won the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement in 2014 and the prestigious Ordway Prize in 2010 for his significant impact on the field of contemporary art.

Mahfuz Sultan is an architect, writer, and founder of CLOCKS, a research and design practice based in Los Angeles.

The Visiting Artist Lecture Series is presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research. This lecture is made possible by the Critical Conversations program, a partnership between the Ford Family Foundation and the University of Oregon Department of Art's Center for Art Research.

Drawing from his new book, Craft: An American History, Glenn Adamson will engage in conversation with Anya Kivarkis. They will discuss the implication of race, gender and class in US craft history, and focus particularly on the relationship between craft’s economic and material presence, and its rich symbolic dimension. There are important differences between real and ideal, yet each influences the other in a complex exchange.

Glenn Adamson is a curator, writer and historian based in New York. He has previously been Director of the Museum of Arts and Design; Head of Research at the V&A; and Curator at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee. Adamson’s publications include Thinking Through Craft (2007); The Craft Reader (2010); Postmodernism: Style and Subversion (2011, co-edited with Jane Pavitt); The Invention of Craft (2013); Art in the Making (2016, co-authored with Julia Bryan-Wilson; and Fewer Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects (2018). His newest book is Craft: An American History, published by Bloomsbury, and he is co-host of the online interview series Design in Dialogue.

glennadamson.com

Alison Saar’s prints and paintings address issues of race, gender and spirit. She studied art and art history at Scripps College and received an MFA from the Otis Art Institute. Her awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, National Endowment Fellowships, and the United States Artists Fellowship. Saar has exhibited at many museums, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Whitney Museum of American Art, Her art is represented in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She currently resides in Los Angeles and is represented by L A Louver Gallery.

Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), and For Freedoms, the first artist-run initiative for art and civic engagement. In 2017, For Freedoms was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. Thomas is also a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), the Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a member of the New York City Public Design Commission. Thomas’ first comprehensive survey Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal…opened in the fall of 2019 at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, OR and traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Bentonville, AR (February 8 – July 13, 2020) and ended at the Cincinnati Art Museum in Cincinnati, OH (September 4–November 8, 2020).

Made possible by the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation and presented by the Department of Art, Center for Art Research, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and Ford Family Foundation Critical Conversations Program in conjunction with the exhibition of works by Hank Willis Thomas and Alison Saar from the Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer at the JSMA, on view through June 14, 2021.

Rebecca Morris is an abstract painter whose work deeply investigates materials, form, processes, and outcomes. A showcase for her extensive arsenal of techniques and ideas, her ambitious large-scale canvases incorporate different manners of mark-making and inventively explore questions of frame dynamics and figure/ground illusions, often within a remarkably shallow pictorial space.

Rebecca Morris, b.1969 in Honolulu, Hawaii; lives in Los Angeles, California. BA, Smith College; MFA, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is a Professor in the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include: Bortolami, NYC (2020); Blaffer Art Museum, Houston TX (2019); Mary Boone Gallery, NYC (2017); 356 S. Mission Rd, Los Angeles (2015); The Bonnefantenmuseum, The Netherlands (2014); Kunsthalle Lingen, Germany (2013); Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (2017, 2013, 2009, 2006); Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago (2016, 2013); Harris Lieberman, New York (2012, 2010); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2005); and Santa Monica Museum of Art (2003); forthcoming, ICALA, Los Angeles (2022). Group exhibitions include: “Made in LA” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Whitney Biennial, NY (2014); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland; The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Victoria Miro Gallery, London; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; David Zwirner Gallery, NYC; Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Vienna, Austria; The Hessel Art Museum at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, NYC; The Pit, CA. Morris was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Tiffany Foundation; The California Community Foundation; The City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Award; The Durfee Foundation; Art Matters; and the Illinois Arts Council.

Amir Zaki has an ongoing interest in the rhetoric of authenticity, as it is associated with photography as an indexical media. Simultaneously, he is deeply invested in exploring digital technology’s transformative potential to disrupt that assumed authenticity. However, his interest is not in utilizing digital trickery as illustration to undermine a photograph’s veracity. In fact, Zaki often creates hybridized photographs that carefully use the vocabulary of the documentary style so that the viewer’s belief in its veracity remains intact, at least initially. He constructs scenes that are somewhat off-register, ‘out of key’, and ever so slightly faux. He often uses the architectural and organic landscape of California as a subject, as it seems particularly appropriate to his process. This is largely because, either through media myth, reality or a combination of the two, the architecture and surrounding landscape in California is itself an evolving bastardization of styles and forms, in other words a pastiche. California is home to a collision of high modernist ideals, suburban McMansions, high-rise density, endless asphalt grids, deserts, mountains, beaches, Los Angeles urbanism, Inland Empire sprawl, Orange Curtain conservatism, the Crystal Cathedral, and the Integratron. It should be made clear that although Zaki is fascinated and inspired by this architectural and cultural entropy, his intention is not to record, replicate or simply document a preexisting postmodern pastiche. More precisely, his work begins with the familiar, by looking at objects, structures and locations that are often pedestrian and banal. And by capitalizing on the presumed veracity that photographs continue to command, along with the transformative, yet invisible digital alterations he employs, his images depict structures that that aspire to be added to the list of the hodge-podge built landscape that creates the California mythology.

Natalie Ball was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She has a Bachelor’s degree with a double major in Ethnic Studies and Art from the University of Oregon. She furthered her education in New Zealand at Massey University where she attained her Master’s degree, focusing on Indigenous contemporary art. Ball then relocated to her ancestral homelands to raise her three children. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including the Half Gallery, NY; Vancouver Art Gallery, BC; Blum & Poe, LA; Portland Art Museum, OR; Gagosian, NY; Seattle Art Museum, WA; Almine Rech Gallery, FR; and SculptureCenter, NY. Natalie attained her M.F.A. degree in Painting & Printmaking at Yale School of Art in 2018. She is the recipient of the 2020 Bonnie Bronson Award, 2020 Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant, 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and the 2018 Betty Bowen Award from the Seattle Art Museum.

natalieball.com

Mario will discuss some of his past projects and discuss the important role of the individual and collaborative artist in relationship to creating and in finding ways to tell one's family's stories and other marginalized narratives that have guided his artistic practice. He will engage audiences in creative strategies/tools for thinking and making Art.

Mario Ybarra Jr., is a visual and performance artist, educator, and activist who combines street culture with fine art in order to produce what he calls “contemporary art that is filtered through a Mexican-American experience in Los Angeles.” His work has been included in many group exhibitions, including Installations Inside/Out: Armory 20th Anniversary Exhibition, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California; San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; and Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York (2008). He is co-founder of an artist run organization located in the Harbor area of Los Angeles, called Slanguage Studio (2002–present).

This lecture is made possible by the George and Matilda Fowler Endowment Fund.

Surveying the past ten years of his curatorial work, Orendorff will explore the intersecting threads of DIY and/or craft-oriented cultural production, myriad histories of grassroots social-justice activism, and related theories of gender and sexuality that have together driven his research, exhibition and writing projects. From collectively-made queer videos and massive textile collaborations, to kink-inspired tableaux vivants and plein air paintings of banks on fire, Orendorff will detail past and present curatorial efforts that all pursue an aesthetic of non-normativity, cooperation, resistance and liberation.

Danny Orendorff is a curator and writer working as Executive Director of Vox Populi, a non-profit gallery, performance space and art collective in Philadelphia, PA. Founded in 1988, Vox Populi serves as an enduring model for how a radically independent and experimental arts organization can sustain itself through collective effort and constant evolution. Formerly, Orendorff was Curator of Public Programs for the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City and Program Director for non-profit Chicago gallery Threewalls. As an independent curator, Orendorff has organized large group exhibitions for such venues as DePaul Art Museum (Chicago, IL), The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design (Asheville, NC), SFCamerawork (San Franicsco, CA), and The Charlotte Street Foundation (Kansas City, MO), amongst others. He has taught in the Fiber & Material Studies Departments of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Tyler School of Art at Temple University.

Throughout his career, Hank Willis Thomas (American, born 1976) has addressed the visual systems that perpetuate inequality and bias in bold, skillfully crafted works. Through photographs, sculpture, video, and collaborative public art projects, he invites us to consider the role of popular culture in instituting discrimination and how art can raise critical awareness in the ongoing struggle for social justice and civil rights.

Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), and For Freedoms, the first artist-run initiative for art and civic engagement. In 2017, For Freedoms was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. Thomas is also a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), the Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a member of the New York City Public Design Commission.

This lecture is made possible by a grant from the Division of Equity and Inclusion, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and the Department of Art.

hankwillisthomas.com

Muellner will present a scripted slide lecture based on the opening essay of his forthcoming book, “Lacuna Park: Essay and other Adventures in Photography”. Intertwining memoir, reportage, fiction and theory, Muellner’s newest work asks: what is existentially at stake today in the making and viewing of photographs?

Nicholas Muellner is an artist who operates at the intersection of photography and writing. Through books, exhibitions and slide lectures, his projects investigate the limits of photography as a documentary pursuit and as an interface to literary, political and personal narratives. His recent image-text books include The Photograph Commands Indifference (A-Jump Books, 2009) and The Amnesia Pavilions (A-Jump Books, 2011). His 2017 book, In Most Tides An Island (SPBH Editions, 2017), was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo Photobook of the Year Award, and he is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography. He Co-Directs the Image Text MFA and Press at Ithaca College.

nicholasmuellner.com

Artist and activist Angela Washko will present several different strategies for performing, participating in and transforming online environments that are especially hostile toward women. She will introduce her long-term performative intervention “The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft” alongside several interventions, interviews, performances, written works and video games works she has created about the manosphere and online men’s seduction communities. She will additionally introduce her newest project Workhorse Queen, a documentary film about drag queen and former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant Mrs. Kasha Davis and her life and career post-reality-television.

Angela Washko is an artist, writer and facilitator devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in spaces frequently hostile toward it. Since 2012, Washko has operated The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, an ongoing intervention inside the most popular online role-playing game of all time. Washko's most recent project, The Game: The Game, is a video game in which professional pick-up artists attempt to seduce the player using their coercive and often dangerous signature techniques sourced from their instructional books and video materials. A recent recipient of the Impact Award at Indiecade, a Franklin Furnace Performance Fund Grant, and a Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier Grant, Washko's practice has been highlighted in The New Yorker, Frieze Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian, ArtForum, The Los Angeles Times, Art in America, The New York Times and more. Her projects have been presented internationally at venues including Museum of the Moving Image, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milan Design Triennale, the Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennial and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Angela Washko is an Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

This lecture is made possible by the George and Matilda Fowler Endowment Fund.

angelawashko.com

Julie Rodrigues Widholm is Director and Chief Curator of DePaul Art Museum where she leads the strategic and artistic vision to promote equity and interdisciplinary education in art museums. Prior to taking the helm at DPAM in September 2015, she was Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art. She has organized more than 100 solo and group exhibitions, including Julia Fish: bound by spectrum, Brendan Fernandes: The Living Mask, Barbara Jones-Hogu: Resist, Relate, Unite, Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks, Doris Salcedo, ;Unbound: Contemporary Art after Frida Kahlo, Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City, which have been presented at museums across the U.S. such as DePaul Art Museum, MCA Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Perez Art Museum Miami, the Nasher Museum at Duke University, MIT List Visual Arts Center, among others. She grew up in Brazil, Mozambique, Portugal, Germany, and across the U.S.

resources.depaul.edu

“Research is both process and product, and I want to practice different ways of telling the story of how craft research fills my days—and lengthens my years—with you.

A colleague of mine showed me how he reads a forest, pointing out what shows itself now after 100 years of growth, and mapping a vision of what will come 100 years from now. It brought sculptor James Surls to my mind, who once said, "I make objects. It takes so long. It would take me a lifetime to build just what I can dream in one day. I want a hundred lifetimes and one day."

For a decade, my days were about making exhibitions in a craft museum. Today, my work is about research. I develop a low-residency graduate program focused on craft histories and theory, where a day’s work of teaching may not surface for years. Now, my writing lives mostly in words, not spatial essays—and is not so photogenic.”—Namita Gupta Wiggers, 2019

Namita Gupta Wiggers is a writer, curator, and educator based in Portland, OR. She is the Director of the recently launched Master of Arts in Craft Studies at Warren Wilson College, North Carolina. She is the Director and Co-Founder of Critical Craft Forum, and from 2004–14, Wiggers served as Curator and then Director and Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR. Wiggers contributes regularly to online and in-print journals and books. She serves on the Editorial Boards of Garland magazine and Norwegian Crafts. Recent curatorial projects include: Across the Table, Across the Land with Michael Strand for the National Council on Ceramic Education in the Arts; Everything Has Been Material for Scissors to Shape, a textile-focused exhibition at the Wing Luke Museum of Asian American Experience, Seattle; a forthcoming publication with Wiley Blackwell Publishers; and Gender + Adornment, an ongoing research project with Benjamin Lignel. Wiggers is the Center for Art Research's inaugural writer-in-residence for 2019–20.

warren-wilson.edu

“I work intuitively and analytically, building from a conceptual groundwork that questions language, semiotics, identity and gender. Drawing influence from Philip Guston, Audre Lorde, Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse, my work uses humor and sensibilities of the handmade to critique systems of power and absurdities of existence. My most recent body of work expanded from a 2017 printed zine titled Glossary of Terms and Symbols in which I created personal definitions for historically symbolic forms, such as infinity symbols, arches and knots. The new sculptures refer to symbols of intersection, such as hands interlocking, a foot stomping on mud, or water slipping between fingers. They capture my reaction to current political situations, specifically feelings of frustration, struggle, and a search for empathy. I consider the trajectory of my work to be one continuous body evoking movement and motion through universal symbols to address an overarching primordial narrative.”
—Julia Haft-Candell, 2019

Julia Haft-Candell (b. 1982, Oakland, CA) received a BA from University of California, Davis before graduating from the MFA program at California State University, Long Beach in 2010. She spent a summer residency in 2016 at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Madison, ME, and has been awarded multiple grants from the Center for Cultural Innovation and most recently the California Community Foundation Fellowship in 2019. Haft-Candell has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally, and is represented by Parrasch Heijnen Gallery in Los Angeles.

juliahaftcandell.com

In this lecture, artist Theo Triantafyllidis will present recent work together with a sneak peek in current projects and behind the scenes material. The focus of the presentation will be on the use of the game engine as an artistic tool and the construction of alternative realities, performative systems and open narratives.

Theo Triantafyllidis (b. 1988, Athens, GR) is an artist who builds virtual spaces and the interfaces for the human body to inhabit them. He creates expansive worlds and complex systems where the virtual and the physical merge in uncanny, absurd, and poetic ways. These are often manifested as performances, virtual and augmented reality experiences, games, and interactive installations. He uses awkward interactions and precarious physics to invite the audience to embody, engage with, and challenge these other realities. Through the lens of monster theory, he investigates themes of isolation, sexuality, and violence in their visceral extremities. He offers computational humor and AI improvisation as a response to the tech industry’s agenda. He tries to give back to the online and gaming communities that he considers both the inspiration and context for his work by remaining an active participant and contributor. He holds an MFA from UCLA, Design Media Arts and a Diploma of Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens. He has shown work in museums, including the Hammer Museum in LA and NRW Forum in Dusseldorf, DE and various galleries such as Meredith Rosen Gallery, the Breeder, Sargent’s Daughters, and Young Projects. He was part of Hyper Pavilion in the 2017 Venice Biennale and the 2018 Athens Biennale: ANTI-. Theo Triantafyllidis is based in Los Angeles.

slimetech.org

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s lecture will look at the idea of supernaturalisms as a form of resistance. Starting with a film he made with The Propeller Group called The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music, Nguyen will trace this idea through two of his recent films and his newest film project for the Sharjah Biennial 2019.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen graduated from the Fine Arts program at the University of California, Irvine in 1999 and received his Masters of Fine Arts from The California Institute of the Arts in 2004. His work explores strategies of political resistance through ritual, the making of objects [both as testimony and as devotion], supernaturalism and the impact of mass media on these moments of resistance. In his continual attempts at reworking the power dynamics of public space and mass media in general, he initiated The Propeller Group in 2006, a platform for collectivity that situates itself between an art collective and an advertising company. He was also a co-founder and board member of Sàn Art, an artist-initiated exhibition space and educational program in Sai Gon, Viet Nam.

This lecture is made possible by the George and Matilda Fowler Endowment Fund.

This lecture is free and open to all.

tuanandrewnguyen.com
the-propeller-group.com

Over the past 15 years Shana Moulton has been developing her ongoing video/performance series Whispering Pines, in which she plays the role of "Cynthia", both a fictional figure and the artist's alter ego. This talk will present a chronological-anecdotal outline of Moulton's work and forces that shaped it, with video and performance highlights.

Shana Moulton is a California born and based artist who works in video, performance, and installation. In 2002, she began the video series Whispering Pines, in which she performs as Cynthia, both an alter-ego and an avatar for the artist when she is alone. Moulton has had solo exhibitions at the Palais De Tokyo, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Fondazione Morra Greco, Kunsthaus Glarus, and a retrospective of work at The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. She has performed and screened videos at MoMA, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Performa 2009, The Kitchen, Art in General, The Andy Warhol Museum, SFMOMA, The Hammer Museum and Cricoteka, among many others. Her work is distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix and she is a featured artist on Art21’s New York Close Up.

This lecture is free and open to all.

shanamoulton.info

Every work evolves a form. In this artist presentation, Daniel Canty will attempt to untangle some of the threads that course through his works. Mapping imbricated orbits, tracking transformations of scale, he will endeavour, through the telling, to expose the lines of force of his poetics, which takes the wonders of the written word as its starting point, and modulates their wavelength into a host of living forms. There will be talk of the fidelity to images, of mise en livreand electric art, naïve science and chains of chance, of the aesthetics of friendship and a very loose doctrine of cycles. He will try to expose how the poetics of language, of taking one thing for another, and coming up with something else, can lead one back into the thick of things, to touch the texture of time.

Daniel Canty is a writer, director and artist living in Montréal, Québec. He started producing works on the cusp of the new century. His directorial debut was an online adaptation of Alan Lightman’s fiction,Einstein’s Dreams, his first book, a history of automata in 19th century American literature. Since then, he has been creating a host of living forms, working at the crossroads of literature and bookmaking, film and theatre, the visual arts and design. His practice, which stems from the poetics of writing, and the ethics of directing, extends the written word’s wavelength to encompass a vast range of possibilities. He is fond of works that invent their own form. Over the years, he has written and devised an astonishing array of books and films, interfaces and exhibitions, and collaborated on such improbabilities as “transfrontier odysseys” or librettos for automata. He is steadfastly mapping a universe where the enchantments of language assert their import in the weave of time.

This lecture is free and open to all.

danielcanty.com

Shannon R. Stratton will present a lecture on work as a curator, founder of a visual arts not-for-profit and co-creator of multiple visual arts platforms. With a studio art background in fiber, Stratton will talk about how her craft training has informed her work as a curator/producer/administrator and how sometimes platforms need to be un-made in order to discover a new use-value.

Shannon R. Stratton is the William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. She has worked in the visual arts as an artist, writer, curator, professor, publisher and arts administrator with an emphasis on artist-run initiatives and concepts in contemporary craft. After completing her MFA in 2003 she co-founded the artist-run organization, Threewalls (Chicago), where she was artistic and then executive director for 12 years. At Threewalls, she organized exhibitions with over 100 artists; created The Propeller Fund award in collaboration with Gallery 400 for artist’s self-organizing; conceived and published 4 volumes of PHONEBOOK, a national guide to grass-roots and artist-run organizations across the US; and co-organized the first Hand-in-Glove conference which would lead to the founding of Common Field, a national organization in support of artist-focused organizations. In 2015 she left Threewalls to assume the role of Chief Curator at The Museum of Arts and Design in New York and pursue her interest in the future of craft. At MAD she has reimagined the artistic vision of the institution, programming the exhibition calendar, including curating eight exhibitions, from fall 2015 until present. She continues to organize exhibitions independently, with a particular research interest in expanded concepts of the self-taught and grass-roots cultural production.

This lecture is free and open to all.

shannonraestratton.com

Narratives, objects and spaces are processed and understood through their parts. Whether deconstructing a life, a city, a tool, or a sentence, the fragmented nature of things both proceed and conclude cycles of identity and meaning. Ebitenyefa Baralaye will discuss his work and shifting narratives around the things we build, use, and break. Baralaye’s work explores overlaps in personal, spiritual, and cultural semiotics and considers how material, form, and context together mediate our sense of social and psychological presence.

Ebitenyefa Baralaye is a ceramist, sculptor, and designer. His work explores cultural, spiritual, and material translations in form/objects, text, and symbols interpreted through a diaspora lens and abstracted around the aesthetics of craft and design. Baralaye received a BFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MFA in Ceramics from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Baralaye was an Emerging Artists Program recipient at the Museum of the African Diaspora in 2017 and recently an AICAD Teaching Fellow at the San Francisco Art Institute.

This lecture is free and open to all.

For this lecture, Alexandria Eregbu walks us through her creative process as a multidisciplinary artist. She begins with her middle name, ‘Ijeoma’ an Igbo name that is traditionally given from Nigerian fathers to their daughters, meaning ‘safe or good journey.’ Here, Eregbu draws connections between personal, familial, and diasporic histories that have emerged within her artistic practice. In doing so, Eregbu further examines the role that origin stories and community storytelling have played in her commitment to narrative/world building—forums which the artist believes, lead to the preservation and empowerment of the individual and collective spirit. Topics addressed in this lecture include: 1.) Materiality + Textile Studies 2.) Visual Communication + Design in Nature 3.) West African Performance, Art, + Philosophy 4.) Surrealist Discourse + The Marvelous.

Alexandria Eregbu is a visual artist and independent curator. At her core, Alexandria is most passionate about re-imagining 21st century possibilities for creative practice through service and support structures that promote sustainability and accessibility for artists and communities engaging the arts. As an artist, her practice has illuminated pathways globally, nationally, and throughout the Midwest. She has held fellowships with ACRE (Steuben, WI); HATCH Projects, Stony Island Arts Bank, (Chicago, IL); The Center for Afrofuturist Studies (Iowa City, IA), Independent Curators International (New Orleans, New York City, Martinique); and The Camargo Foundation/3Arts Residency (France). Among her curatorial projects includes du monde noir, an artistically run collective which seeks to identify contemporary evidences of Surrealist activity produced by visual artists and writers of the African diaspora in the U.S. and abroad. Forthcoming projects include Oh, Heavenly Father, Mother Ocean, and Cosmic Seed…! her solo show at Ditch Projects in Eugene, OR.

This lecture is made possible in part by the Fibers Foundation. This lecture is free and open to all.

alexandriaeregbu.com

Julia Bryan-Wilson is the Doris and Clarence Malo Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley; she is also the Director of the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (2016); and Fray: Art and Textile Politics (2017), which was awarded the 2018 Robert Motherwell Book Prize. Bryan-Wilson’s influential writings on feminist and queer theory, craft histories, and contemporary art in the Americas have been widely published in venues that include Afterall, Artforum, Art Bulletin, Bookforum, differences, Grey Room, October, Oxford Art Journal, and Parkett, and she is the cocurator of the traveling exhibition Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen.

Julia Bryan-Wilson

“I am an interdisciplinary artist who uses time-based, photographic, and discursive platforms to examine ‘progress’ and its alternatives. My current work uses transparency and opacity as material and metaphor, with a particular focus on the politics of privacy. Plant You Now, Dig You Later is a black vernacular phrase meaning ‘see you soon;’ it connects my interests in language, the archive, faith, and the future.” - Steffani Jemison, 2018 




Steffani Jemison’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions and commissioned performances at MASS MoCA, Nottingham Contemporary, Jeu de Paume, the Museum of Modern Art, LAXART, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and others. Her work is in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Kadist. Jemison has completed many artist residencies and fellowships, including a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard University, the Rauschenberg Residency, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Studio Museum in Harlem AIR, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Jemison holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She is an Assistant Professor at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

steffanijemison.com

Megan Foster’s work suggests a narrative by presenting a frozen moment in time. She aims to preserve and give authority to the everyday experience through a mix of art, architecture, design and science. Using appropriated images, film stills, magazine clippings and staged photographs as a starting point, she depicts banal scenes that have the potential to be spectacular and fantastic. She portrays often-overinflated expectations of the way we live and how we try to better ourselves from previous generations.

Megan Foster earned her BFA from RISD and her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Black and White Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Mixed Greens Gallery, NYC; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, China; and the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, among other venues. Before joining the faculty at RISD in the fall of 2016, Foster taught at The City College of New York where she was the head of Printmaking and director of the MFA program. She was also master printer at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies and is the co-founder of Moonlight Editions.

meganfoster.net

With a 20-year history of picture making, Whitney Hubbs explores both straightforward and uncertain modes of image production. Educated as a traditional documentary photographer and as a conceptual artist examining the role of photographs, Hubbs brings a rigorous approach to her work. Her subject matter has included staged poems to the landscape, the figure in the landscape, self-portraits, and literal and abstract examinations of the female body.

Born and raised in Southern California with a brief stint in Portland, Oregon, Whitney Hubbs was involved in the punk rock riot grrrl community from a young age, where she made fanzines, organized art shows, participated in performances and worked as an activist. She later received her BFA from the California College of Arts in 2005 and an MFA at UCLA in 2009.

Hubbs has participated in group exhibitions at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Gallery Luisotti, and Shulamit Nazarian Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; The California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA; Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX; Yancey Richardson Gallery, Fresh Window Gallery, and Situations Gallery in New York City, NY. Her book, Body Doubles, was published by Hesse Press (Los Angeles) in 2016, and in 2019 she will publish a book with Self Publish Be Happy. Hubbs is represented by M+B Gallery in Los Angeles and Situations Gallery in New York City. Hubbs is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Alfred University, Alfred, New York and lives and works in New York State.

whitneyhubbs.com

In this lecture, Amy Franceschini will present the work of Futurefarmers, an international group of artists, activists, farmers and architects with a common interest in creating frameworks of participation that recalibrate our cultural compass. She will discuss how their work uses various media to enact situations that disassemble habitual apparatus. Through public art, architecture, museum installations, publications and temporary educational programs inside institutions, they have transformed public policy, urban planning, educational curricula and public transportation plans. Futurefarmers’ work often creates relational sculptures and tools for audiences to gain insight into deeper fields of inquiry- not only to imagine, but also to participate in and initiate change in the places we live.

Amy Franceschini (b. 1970 Patterson, CA, US) lives and works in San Francisco and Gent, Belgium and is the founder of Futurefarmers. Amy received her BFA from San Francisco State University in 1992 and her MFA from Stanford University in 2002. Amy has taught as an adjunct and visiting professor in the graduate programs in art at California College for the Arts, Stanford University and San Francisco Art Institute since 2003. Her work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Whitney Biennial in New York, MOMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, the 2014 Venice Architectural Biennale, the 2017 Sharjah Biennale, the 2018 Taipei Biennale and she is the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Herb Alpert Award for Visual Arts and a 2019 Rome Prize Fellow in Design.

This lecture is made possible in part by the Departments of Art, English/Moore Fund, and Landscape Architecture.

futurefarmers.com

Shadi Harouni will consider the metaphysics of hope alive in contested bodies, forbidden objects and forgotten histories. Her lecture looks at mountain and monument, both erected and imagined, as sites of humor and resistance, forgetting and despair. She will discuss the development of her practice and recent completed, ongoing and failed projects.

Shadi Harouni is an artist based in New York and Tehran. Harouni's practice ranges from site-specific interventions and sculptures, to printmaking, photography and film. Her research is centered on disavowed and marginalized histories of dissent and resistance, chiefly in the Middle East. Harouni’s projects have been exhibited at Queens Museum (NY), Kunstmuseum Bonn (DE), Prague City Gallery (CZ), University of Toronto (CA), Fondazione Ratti (IT), Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NY). Her work has been featured in Art Forum, The New York Times, The Guardian, Flash Art and Mousse, among others. She has been awarded a Gattuso Prize for Outstanding Exhibition, Harpo Foundation Grant for Artists, AIR Fellowship, residencies at Skowhegan (ME), SOMA (MX), LES Printshop (NY). Harouni holds an MFA from NYU (2011) and a BA from University of Southern California (2007). She serves as Visiting Assistant Professor and Director of the Undergraduate Program in Studio Art at New York University, Steinhardt.

Pope.L will present a compact survey of several strands in his art practice to-date. Pope.L (b. 1955, Newark) is a visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture to create art works in various formats, for example, writing, painting, performance, installation, video and sculpture. Building upon his long history of enacting arduous, provocative, absurdist performances and interventions in public spaces, Pope.L applies some of the same social, formal and performative strategies to his interests in language, system, gender, race and community. The goals for his work are several: joy, money and uncertainty— not necessarily in that order.

Pope.L is represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, University of Chicago, Chicago

This lecture is made possible by the Davis Family Endowed Fund in Art.

miandn.com/artists/pope-l

“Every morning I walk to the studio before the sun comes up. Five years ago, on that walk, a meteorite streaked overhead and lit everything like day. It was a terrifying and wonderful moment. Painting is that same experience. The bits and details of that flash of brilliant clarity would pass by if not for the practice of painting. A painting is a structure for the extraordinary and informative events of nature that are otherwise invisible.” – James Lavadour, 2013

Born in 1951, James Lavadour is one of the Northwest’s most revered living painters. Lavadour’s family are descendants of the Walla Walla tribe of the modern day Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. He has lived his life in Northeastern Oregon where he is an enrolled tribal member and has lived and worked on the reservation for the past 38 years. His sense of service and commitment to the tribal community have lead him to work for the tribal government in education, housing, alcohol and drug treatment, and natural resource management. In 1993 Lavadour and a group of supporters founded Crow’s Shadow Institute for the Arts, a not for profit print studio/arts organization that provides a creative conduit for social, economic, and educational opportunities to Native Americans through artistic development.

James Lavadour’s work was featured as one of only 102 artists selected for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s seminal survey exhibition, State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now and at the 55th Venice Biennale in Personal Structures.

His works are included in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK; the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA; the Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID; the Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN; the Hallie Ford Museum, Salem, OR; the Hood Museum, Hanover, NH; Bank of America, San Francisco, CA; the Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA as well as numerous private collections.

pdxcontemporaryart.com/lavadour

William Powhida will discuss his recent show “After the Contemporary” at the Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art. The exhibition was the artist’s first museum solo show and offered a fictive survey of The Contemporary, a period of art history from 2000–2025 defined by the expansion of the art market. The exhibition also included a retrospective of the artist’s works from 2004–2047, made possibly by the 2050 setting of the exhibition. The lecture will cover works included in the show as well previous exhibitions and projects that informed “After the Contemporary”.

William Powhida makes fun of the art world to highlight the paradoxes and absurdities of economic and social value systems that keep the sphere of visual art afloat on a tide of inequality. His work relies on research and participation to diagram, list, perform and critique the forces that shape perceptions of value. He is responsible or partly responsible for exhibitions including "Overculture" at Postmasters Gallery, "Bill by Bill" at Charlie James Gallery, "POWHIDA" at Marlborough Gallery and "#class" at Winkleman Gallery.

Powhida is also an infrequent contributor to ArtFCity and Hyperallergic on issues that alarm him. His complicit criticism has been rewarded with gallery representation, numerous exhibitions and critical debate. He was born in 1976 in upstate New York and still lives and works in New York City despite the crushing cost of living and working. He is represented by Postmasters Gallery in New York, Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles, Gallery Poulsen in Copenhagen, and Platform Gallery in Seattle.

williampowhida.com

Stanya Kahn is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in video with a practice that includes performance, writing, sound, drawing, painting and ceramics. Humor, pathos and the uncanny emerge as central modes in a hybrid media practice that seeks to re-work relationships between fiction and document, the real and the hyper-real, satire and sincerity, narrative time and the synchronic time of impulse.

Kahn is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video. Recent exhibitions include Marlborough Contemporary, NY; Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles; Weiss Berlin; Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK; the New Museum, New York, NY; and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. She has shown at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; the2010 California Biennial; and Rodeo, London, UK recently. Her collaborative work with Harry Dodge has shown at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York; the 2008 Whitney Biennial; the Sundance Film Festival; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modenr Art, New York; ZKM Karlsrühe; among others. She was a contributing writer, performer and costumer on the feature film By Hook or By Crook. Her writings and drawings are in multiple publications including Die Laughing (2nd Cannons Publications), It's Cool, I'm Good (Cornerhouse Publications), Abstract Video (University of California Press), among others.

stanyakahn.com

“I am an artist, and collector of visual sensation. Observation, for me, is a critical tool for identifying spaces between mass culture and the individual. Daily errands, chores, and daily exchanges for carrying out getting from A to B are the vehicle for examination. For me, art takes place in these gaps. Specific gaps which define a present situation, personal or global which is always moving. Moving fast, out of grasp, constant flowing information, changing always. Art, for me, happens in conjunction with decoration, and is always fighting decoration. The activity of the agreement of art and decoration, or the battle of it are truly engaging for me.” - Nancy Shaver

Nancy Shaver is faculty at the Milton Avery School of Graduate Studies, Bard College. Shaver's work was presented in a solo show at Derek Eller Gallery in summer 2016. She has been part of the Greater New York show 2015 MoMA PS 1, Queens, NY as well as in Robert Gober's "The Heart Is Not a Metaphor" at MoMA, New York, NY. She currently has work in VIVA ARTE VIVA! the 57^th Venice Biennale 2017. She has received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and Anonymous Was A Woman award. She has been in collaboration with Maximilian Goldfarb and Allyson Strafella to present art in an experimental viewing station in Hudson, New York called Incident Report for the last 10 years.

Shaver lives and works in Jefferson and Hudson, New York.

nancyshaverartist.com

Jan Verwoert will address the existential condition of critical writing. "The model of one person passing judgment on others has become ridiculous,” he says. "Art, life, politics—we're in it together after all, even and especially now that societies are forcefully split. What does it take for a voice to articulate intuitions and observations in a manner that allows for very different people to relate to a public thinking process? Urban satire can do it. Is this because laughing at the state of the world awakens a sense of grotesque, yet fateful connectedness?"

Jan Verwoert is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory, based in Berlin. His writing has appeared in different journals, anthologies and monographs. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam. He is a professor for theory at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and guest professor at the UdK Graduate School, Berlin. He is the author of Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, MIT Press/Afterall Books 2006, the essay collection Tell Me What You Want What You Really Really Want, Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute 2010, together with Michael Stevenson, Animal Spirits — Fables in the Parlance of Our Time, Christoph Keller Editions, JRP, Zurich 2013, a second collection of his essays Cookie! published by Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute 2014 and editor of the anthology on artistic knowledge No New Kind of Duck — Would I know how to say what I do?, Diaphanes & UdK Graduate School, Zurich-Berlin 2016.

Jenni Sorkin is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a PhD in the History of Art from Yale University.

Sorkin writes on the intersection between gender, material culture, and contemporary art. Her book, Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community was published by University of Chicago Press in 2016. She has also published widely as an art critic, and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Art Monthly, NU: The Nordic Art Review, Frieze, The Journal of Modern Craft, Modern Painters, and Third Text. She has written numerous in-depth catalog essays on feminist art and material culture topics, and lectures nationally and internationally.

Special thanks to the Department of the History of Art and Architecture for their support.

arthistory.ucsb.edu/people/jenni-sorkin

Artist Wendy Red Star will present a chronological look at major past works starting in 2006 to 2017. Red Star works across disciplines to explore the intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, both historically and in contemporary society. Raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Red Star’s work is informed both by her cultural heritage and her engagement with many forms of creative expression, including photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts, and performance. An avid researcher of archives and historical narratives, Red Star seeks to incorporate and recast her research, offering new and unexpected perspectives in work that is at once inquisitive, witty and unsettling. Intergenerational collaborative work is integral to her practice, along with creating a forum for the expression of Native women’s voices in contemporary art.

Red Star has exhibited in the United States and abroad at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fondation Cartier pour l’ Art Contemporain, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Portland Art Museum, Hood Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, among others. She served a visiting lecturer at institutions including Yale University, the Figge Art Museum, the Banff Centre, National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Dartmouth College, CalArts, Flagler College, Fairhaven College, and I.D.E.A. Space in Colorado Springs. In 2015, Red Star was awarded an Emerging Artist Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. In 2016, she participated in Contemporary Native Photographers and the Edward Curtis Legacy at the Portland Art Museum, and recently mounted a solo exhibition as part of the museum’s APEX series. Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles. She lives and works in Portland, OR.

This lecture is made possible in part by the Gordon W. Gilkey Endowed Fund, the Department of Art, the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa will lecture about intersections between pictures and words. Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer, writer and teacher based in New York City. He is the former editor of the contemporary photography website The Great Leap Sideways (2011—2017), contributed essays to catalogues and monographs by Vanessa Winship, George Georgiou, and Paul Graham, was an artist-in-residence at Light Work, guest edited the Aperture Photobook Review, and wrote for Aperture, FOAM magazine and The Photographer’s Gallery.

Wolukau-Wanambwa has a BA in Philosophy & French from Oxford University, UK and an MFA in Photography from Virginia Commonwealth University. His photographic work addresses questions of patriarchy, race, history, and identity.

Karthik Pandian will touch on the involuntary in art and how it has inflected his work from monument to animal choreography. Pandian makes works in moving image, sculpture and performance. He has held solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Bétonsalon, Paris, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis and White Flag Projects, St. Louis, amongst others.

His work was featured in the inaugural LA Biennial at the Hammer Museum and La Triennale: Intense Proximity at the Palais de Tokyo as well as in group exhibitions such as Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015, at Whitechapel Gallery; Film as Sculpture at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; and the 4th Marrakech Biennial, Higher Atlas. He has recently been touring his first stage performance – a collaboration with choreographer Andros Zins-Browne – at theaters throughout the US and Europe.

Pandian holds an MFA from Art Center College of Design and a BA from Brown University. In 2011, he was the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. Pandian is currently Assistant Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

federicaschiavo.com/Artists/Karthik-Pandian

Mike Andrews is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the Executive and Creative Director at the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency. Andrews received a BFA from SAIC and MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Fueled by dynamic relationships between bright and dull colors, hard and soft materials and a range of scale, his sculptures and tapestries pointedly occupy the gallery. His work is informed by the grandeur of historical tapestries, non-representational abstract painting, and the delirium of home craft. His tapestries simultaneously function as both object and image.

Over the past 15 years Shana Moulton has been developing her ongoing video/performance series Whispering Pines, in which she plays the role of "Cynthia", both a fictional figure and the artist's alter ego. This talk will present a chronological-anecdotal outline of Moulton's work and forces that shaped it, with video and performance highlights.

Shana Moulton lives and works near Yosemite, California. Moulton has had solo exhibitions or performances at The New Museum, SFMOMA, MoMA P.S.1, Performa 2009, The Kitchen, Electronic Arts Intermix, Art in General, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Migros Museum in Zurich, The Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Times Museum in Guangzhou. Moulton's work has been reviewed in the Village Voice, Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail, the New York Times, Artnet Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Art Review, Artpress and Flash Art. She is a featured artist at Electronic Arts Intermix and Art21.

shanamoulton.info

Anna Sew Hoy lives and works in Los Angeles. She has produced solo projects at the Aspen Art Museum in 2015 and the San Jose Museum of Art in 2011. She has exhibited at the Hammer Museum, LAXART, and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles; Koenig & Clinton, NY; and the 2008 California Biennial among others. Her work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, SFMOMA, LACMA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. Sew Hoy was awarded a Creative Capital Grant for Visual Arts in 2015, the California Community Foundation Grant for Emerging Artists in 2013 and the United States Artists Broad Fellowship in 2006.

Sew Hoy received her MFA from Bard College in 2008.

This lecture is made possible by the Davis Family Fund.

annasewhoy.info

Crystal Z Campbell considers the internet as the site in which everything and nothing can be erased––prompting questions about what stories these digitally curated remains can reveal for progeny. Campbell's creative practice uses found footage or historical references, often gleaned from both tangible archives and internet sources. These narratives of yesteryear are often processed through film, light, sound, performance, installation, ceramics, painting, writing, and community projects to interrogate present notions of justice and the politics of witnessing. Most recently, Campbell has investigated Henrietta Lacks' immortal cell line, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and gentrification. Campbell uses art as a tool for transmitting historical memory, time-travel, and proposing social change.

Crystal Z Campbell is an interdisciplinary artist and writer of African-American, Filipino & Chinese descents. Campbell's work has been exhibited and screened internationally: ICA Philadelphia (US), Artericambi (IT), Artissima (IT), Studio Museum of Harlem (US), Futura Contemporary (CZ), Project Row Houses in Texas (US), Children's Museum of San Diego (US), Art Rotterdam (NL), de Appel Arts Centre (NL) and SculptureCenter (US) amongst others. Selected honors and awards include Pollock-Krasner MacDowell Colony Fellow, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten, Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program Van Lier Fellowship, Sommerakademie Paul Klee, Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, Mondriaan Fonds, Fondazione Ratti and a recent Smithsonian Fellowship. Campbell is a currently a second-year Tulsa Artist Fellow in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

crystalzcampbell.com

Morehshin Allahyari is an artist, activist, educator, and occasional curator. She is the recipient of the leading global thinkers of 2016 award by Foreign Policy magazine. Allahyari was born and raised in Iran and moved to the United States in 2007. Her work deals with the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day. She thinks about technology as a philosophical toolset to reflect on objects and as a poetic means to document our personal and collective lives struggles in the 21st century.

Allahyari is currently an artist in residence at Eyebeam’s one-year Research Residency (2016–2017) in NYC where she is developing a new body of work on Digital Colonialism and ‘re-Figuring’ as a Feminism and de-colonialism practice, using 3D scanners and 3D printers as her tools of investigation. Researching dark goddesses, monstrous, and djinn female figures of Middle-Eastern origin, Allahyari devises a narrative through practices of magic and poetic-speculative storytelling, re-appropriation of traditional mythologies, collaging, meshing, scanning, and archiving.

Allahyari has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops around the world including Venice Biennale di Archittectura, Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, Tate Modern, Queens Museum, Pori Museum, Powerhouse Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Jeu de Paume, Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, Museum für Angewandte Kunst. She has been an artist in residence at BANFF Centre (2013), Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (2015), Autodesk Pier9 Workshop in San Francisco (2015), and the Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research in association with Transmediale, Berlin (2016). Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Huffington Post, Wired, National Public Radio, Parkett Art Magazine, Frieze, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, and Al Jazeera, among others.

morehshin.com

“The lecture will focus on my most recent video work contextualized within the evolution of my process over the years. I will present an overview of different inspirations, discuss my approach with analog and digital video, reflect on the potential extension of video in the context of presentation, and I will talk about the different themes contained into my work such as architecture, utopia and dystopia, the real and the virtual.” - Sabrina

Sabrina Ratté is a video artist based in between Montreal and Paris. Her practice investigates virtual environments generated by analog technologies. Electricity, as raw material, is sculpted, transformed and altered digitally to be reborn as luminous and vibrating architectures. Her videos exist between abstraction and figuration, utopia and dystopia, architecture and landscape.

Her works include installations, prints, sculptures and live performances. Previous exhibitions: Dolby Gallery (San Francisco), Young Project Gallery (Los Angeles), Whitney Museum of Art (NYC), Paddles On! 1st Digital Art Auction at Phillips (New York), HEK (Basel), EMPAC (Troy), Museum of the Moving Image (New York), International Digital Arts Biennal - Bian (Montreal), PHI Center (Montreal), Arsenal (Mtl), the Lampo series (Chicago), Atonal Festival (Berlin), Elektra, MUTEK (Mtl, Mexico, Barcelona). She is represented by the Laffy Maffei Gallery in Paris.

Special thanks to the Department of Cinema Studies for their support.

sabrinaratte.com