In How Art Can Be Thought: A Handbook for Change Allan deSouza writes that “even under the regimes of constraint (and there are never not such regimes), desire is unruly, irrepressible, excessive, bursting into visibility often through codes of gesture, metaphor, insinuation, association; the glance askew, the tilted head, the stretched foot, the curled foot.” The works included in Everybody’s Got a Hungry Heart reject the notion of the guilty pleasure. They are love letters, power ballads— gushing, blushing, overflowing. These are the codes and codexes of hunger, abundance, lust, and excess that elude the grasp of legal, moral, and economic structures. 

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Dana Buzzee

Agnese Cebere

Kara Clarke

Noelle Herceg

Erin Langley

Caroline Lichucki

Hannah Petkau

Tyler Stoll

New artwork by Abhishek Kulkarni.

New artwork by Aïna Freixa.

University of Oregon Winter 2022 Visiting Artist Lecture Series

Presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research

Lectures will also live stream on the UO IS Media Services YouTube.

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.

New artwork by Jack Buechler.

University of Oregon Winter 2022 Visiting Artist Lecture Series

Presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research

Lectures will also live stream on the UO IS Media Services YouTube.

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.

University of Oregon Winter 2022 Visiting Artist Lecture Series

Presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research

Lectures will also live stream on the UO IS Media Services YouTube.

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.