Steffani Jemison: "Plant You Now, Dig You Later"

“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 Universityand lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Have a business or nonprofit idea you want to realize? Want to meet other entrepreneurially minded students and community members?

Join us for Techstars Startup Weekend, an annual 3-day startup event where students and community members come together to develop a business or nonprofit in 54 hours. No prior entrepreneurial or business experience needed!

Sponsored by the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship and RAIN Eugene, Techstars Startup Weekend Eugene is a full weekend-long experience. Your ticket includes:


7 full (and delicious) meals over the course of the weekend
Prizes for the top ideas/teams
One-on-one time with amazing mentors
A new network of developers, designers, and entrepreneurs eager, like you, to change the world.
All the internet and coffee you can consume.


Students can obtain a significantly reduced ticket by using the promotional code 'UODUCKS' and registering with their uoregon.edu email address (cost is $6 for entire weekend with this code).

For more information including obtaining a ticket, go to the Techstars Startup Weekend Eugene website. Or contact Kate Harmon, Undergraduate Program Manager, Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship, at kharmon2@uoregon.edu.

Megan Foster: “Illuminating”

Megan Foster’swork 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.

Whitney Hubbs: “Trials, Errors, and Some Successes!”

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.

Amy Franceschini: “Provisions… for Situations Yet to Come”

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.

 

Shadi Harouni: “Of Myth and Monument”

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.

Aesthetics of Gentrification: Art, Architecture, and Displacement

International Conference
UO Portland, April 5-6, 2019

Organized by SLOW LAB, this interdisciplinary conference at UO Portland’s historic White Stag Block brings together scholars from across the humanities, social sciences, and art and design fields to explore the aesthetic dimensions of gentrification in the present era of accelerated urbanism.

Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis and unaffordable cities, scholars speak of eco-gentrification, techno-gentrification, super-gentrification, and planetary-gentrification to describe the different forms and scales of involuntary displacement occurring in vulnerable communities in response to current patterns of development and the hype-driven discourses of the creative city, smart city, and sustainable city.

In this context, how do contemporary practices in art, architecture, and related fields help to produce or resist gentrification? What does gentrification look and feel like in specific sites and communities, and how is that appearance or feeling implicated in promoting stylized renewal to a privileged public? To what extent do the aesthetics of displacement travel globally between cities and cultures? And in what ways do those aesthetics express contested conditions of migration and mobility? Addressing such questions, this conference seeks to examine the relationship between aesthetics and gentrification in contemporary cities from multiple, comparative, and transnational perspectives.