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

Aurora Tang is a curator and researcher, often working at the intersections of contemporary art, architecture, and landscape studies. In this lecture, Aurora will share recent curatorial and research projects, produced as an independent curator, as well as with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a non-profit arts and culture organization interested in exploring and understanding contemporary landscape issues in the United States.  

Aurora Tang is a curator and researcher based in Los Angeles. She has worked with the Center for Land Use Interpretation since 2009, and currently serves as its program director. As an independent curator, Aurora has organized recent exhibitions at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, MOCA Tucson, and Armory Center for the Arts. She has also worked at non-profit art and research organizations including the Getty Research Institute, Getty Conservation Institute, and High Desert Test Sites, where she was managing director from 2011–15, and has taught at schools including Otis College of Art and Design and the University of Southern California. She is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Research 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. 

Lectures are also live streamed and archived on YouTube

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

“Over the years, I have created artwork in various media, including paintings, sculptures, graphic design, video installations, VJ performances, and projection mapping. In this lecture, I will discuss my desire to establish emotional connections with people, particularly through the feelings of fear and curiosity. I will delve into the significance of passion and personal feelings in the creation of impactful artwork and my ongoing exploration of new media as a means to expand artistic boundaries.” Motomichi, 2023 

Motomichi Nakamura is a Japanese-born, award-winning Projection Artist and Animator based in Croton On Hudson, NY. His work is known for the use of black, white, and red and he creates monsters with minimalistic graphic elements inspired by Cryptozoology and Mythology. He has exhibited globally in numerous museums and galleries including the New Museum in New York, Moscow Contemporary Art Center Winzavod, MARCO in Monterrey Mexico, Olympia Park Munich, Maison de la culture du Japon à Paris, La Gaîté Lyrique, among others. His animated films have been screened at Sundance Film Festival, Onedotzero Festival, and Edinburgh International Film Festival and his recent film “Okami” won in The Leeds International Film Festival. His clients include EA, MTV, USA Networks, and Sony, and he has produced music videos for artists including Nicola Cruz and the Swedish band, The Knife. 

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

Gracelee Lawrence’s sculptures, relying equally on digital fabrication and hand augmentation, examine the relationship between food, the body, and technology at an exaggerated scale. A physical origin point is isolated and translated to digital space, often influenced by what is found in our ever more real and familiar internet world. As the barriers between digital and physical spaces dissolve, our perception of reality also shifts, and the compartmentalization encouraged in digital space leads to a new world less and less concerned with the human touch, yet Lawrence’s work dips into both territories with equal aplomb. 

Lawrence conjures a bushel of digitally-skewed fruits and vegetables dealing with hybridity, reproduction, humor, and sexuality. The sculptures are created from a combination of 3D scanned material, virtual reality sculpting, and fully digitally created assets, then 3D printed by Lawrence in their studio. The objects are all printed with polylactic acid (PLA) filament, a vegetable derived bioplastic most commonly made from fermented corn starch, continuing to link material and content. The interplay between the physical and digital methods, material poetics, and intrinsic humor creates a unique web of logic that Lawrence is known for. Considering produce as a vehicle for understanding hegemonic systems of power and control, nutrition and intimacy, and technological invention, Lawrence’s sculptures dangle in the transfigurative space between digital and physical reality. 

Lawrence has attended twenty residencies in the US and abroad and opened her second solo show in New York at Postmasters in June 2022 with a glowing review by Roberta Smith in the New York Times. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University at Albany, SUNY. Recent exhibitions include Peter Gaugy (Vienna, Austria), PRIOR Art Space (Barcelona, Spain), Patrick Mikhail (Montreal, CA), Kavi Gupta (Chicago, IL), Turley Gallery  (Hudson, NY), and more. She has installed large-scale outdoor sculptures at the Upstate Immersive (Poughkeepsie, NY), Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), Museum of Museums (Seattle, WA), Franconia Sculpture Park (Shafer, MN), Mary Sky (Hancock, VT), and others. She is a recipient of the 2021-22 Individual Artist DEC Grant, a 2019 Jerome Fellow at Franconia Sculpture Park, a 2016-17 Luce Scholars Fellow, a recipient of the 2015 UMLAUF Prize, 2013 Eyes Got It Prize, and the 2011-12 Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artist Grant. Press for her work includes The New York Times, The New Yorker, ArtNet, Hyperallergic, Artspace, The Creative Independent, and MAAKE Magazine, among others. She is an enthusiastic dancer, a lifelong horsewoman, and a passionate gardener. 

Lectures are also live streamed and archived on YouTube

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

This lecture will consider art made in the age of the mainframe, when computers filled entire rooms and had on average 256K of core memory.  "Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982" relates to the recent LACMA exhibition of the same name and will focus on the earliest forms of digital art and the innovative artists who created them. Long overlooked, “computer art” (as it was called at the time) will also be considered in relation to the work of artists associated with contemporary mainstream movements like Op and Conceptual Art who also employed systems and algorithms as a generative practice (albeit without computers), as well as with that of artists responding to popular media perceptions of computers as, for example, “electronic brains”.  

Leslie Jones was Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 2005-2023, where she organized numerous exhibitions including Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982 (2023), Ed Moses: Drawings from the 1960s and ’70s and Drawing in L.A.: the 1960s and ’70s (both 2015),Drawing Surrealism (2012), and John Baldessari: Pure Beauty (2010). Jones writes regularly on the subject of modern and contemporary drawings and prints. Recent publications include: “Marks, Slowed Down: The Intaglio Prints of Julie Mehretu” (Julie Mehretu, Whitney and LACMA, 2019), and Allen Ruppersberg Drawing (Christine Burgin, 2014). Jones previously worked at The Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 1993–94 and received her PhD from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2003 with a dissertation on the ink drawings of Henri Michaux.  

Lectures are also live streamed and archived on YouTube

Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) is pleased to host an ongoing series of lectures by traveling fellows whose research and expertise include feminist science fiction, Oregon lesbian intentional communities, the novelist Ken Kesey, conservative and libertarian political movements, as well as print and print culture. Talks are free, open to the public and held virtually on Zoom. More information, including applications for future fellowships, is available on SCUA’s website here.

December’s discussion features Zoey Kambour, 2023 Martha Thorsland Baker Fellow. 

Zoey Kambour is a PhD student in medieval art history at CUNY's Graduate Center and an adjunct lecturer in art history at Pace University. They received their MA in art history from the University of Oregon in 2021, where they wrote a thesis on eleventh century Beatus manuscripts. After their MA, they served as the Post-Graduate Fellow in European and American Art at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, where they conducted independent research on the manuscript they are presenting on in addition to their curatorial duties at the museum. They are hoping to write a dissertation on the marginal faces created by Christian, Muslim, and Jewish students in the Middle Ages, inspired by this project.