Join us for a workshop on making critical art that matters with Los Angeles-based illustrator and pop artist, Hal Hefner. His talk, Critical Art: A Constant Evolution will focus on making art that borrows and appropriates to critique celebrities, politicians, media and society. It will be followed by a Q&A with participants.

The talk will coincide with the launch of the 4th Annual UO ©ritical A®t Show, which will be an immersive experience. The show is produced and curated by 20 first-year UO students, and features their work and many guest submissions. Links to the show and livestream will be posted on our website. 

Thinking & feeling about the future of work and beyond

The Center for Art Research is thrilled to present Jea Alford and Ariana Jacob’s Precarious People’s Party (PPP). Please join us for PPP's Think & Feel Tank, a virtual roundtable on Saturday, December 12 from 2:00- 4:00 p.m. live on Zoom. This event is free and open to all- register here. PPP is the first in a series of projects Dismantling the House: Programs on Power curated by Yaelle S. Amir, 2020-21 CFAR Curator-in-Residence and made possible by the Ford Family Foundation.

PPP connects members of the contingent economy – those who are without secure full-time work – to envision and advocate for economic and political futures where we can all live and love powerfully.

PPP hosts conversations that link people working in various sectors of the “gig” economy, including artists, adjunct faculty, and workers in the “sharing” economy. This platform provides a place for individuals to gather to discuss contingent worker solidarity, experiment with ways to actualize the potential freedom of underemployment and explore the possible paths forward for the future of work and/or a post-work society.

Building on conversations with organizers, artists and contingent workers in fall 2020 as part of their CFAR residency, PPP will launch Think & Feel Tank, on December 12, 2020 to develop a pragmatic and imaginative policy platform by and for precarious people from diverse work settings. As part of a virtual roundtable, participants will be invited to collectively re-imagine possible futures for our global and local economies—moving through discussions of inequitable and exploitative conditions and towards ones that build a foundation for an empowered personhood and solidarity across sectors of the contingent workforce.

Conversations from the Think & Feel Tank will help shape the PPP platform – a set of policy proposals that will be published in customary ways, including as part of CFAR’s Papers on Power in spring 2021, as well as nontraditional ways, such as weaving projects, sign spinning and social media campaigns, to manifest later in the year. Invited Think & Feel Tank participants include Susan Cuffaro, Gig Workers Collective; Brian Dolber, Rideshare Organizer and Labor Historian; Hannah Gioia, Food Service Organizer; Anna Gray, Adjunct Faculty Organizer and Artist; Cat Hollis, Sex Work Organizer; Anna Neighbor, Adjunct Faculty Organizer and Artist; Larissa Petrucci, Graduate Teaching Fellowship Federation Organizer and Researcher: Service Work & Scheduling; Sean Raich, Co-Chair of the Unemployed Workers Council; Emmett Schlenz, Burgerville Workers Union; Lise Soskolne, W.A.G.E Organizer and Artist; Patricia Vasquez Gomez, Adjunct Faculty Organizer and Artist.

PPP is the first in a series of projects, “Dismantling the House: Programs on Power“ curated by Yaelle S. Amir, 2020-21 CFAR Curator-in-Residence project and made possible by the Ford Family Foundation.

Department of Art Visiting Artist Lecture Series

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. 

Fred H. C. Liang received a BFA from the University of Manitoba and an MFA from Yale University. His honors include Massachusetts Cultural Council Arts Grants in both painting, printmaking and works on paper. Liang’s work is in numerous public and private collections including Fidelity, the Gund Collection, Addison Museum of American Art and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. He recently exhibited work at the Currier Museum of Art in NH, Inside Out Museum in Beijing and the ICA, Boston. Liang’s most recent exhibitions include the Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Addison Museum of American Art in Massachusetts, XC.HuA Gallery in Berlin and Jerez de la Frontera Gallery at University of Cadiz.  He just completed a residency at the Museo de Arte Contemporary in Sandiago de Chile and the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai, China.  His work was recently interviewed by Huffington Post, WBUR Open Studio and reviewed in The Boston Globe.  Liang is a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Massachusetts, USA where he is the Coordinator of the Printmaking Department. Liang is also a 2020 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant recipient.

University of Oregon Department of Art Visiting Artist Lecture Series

 

Diana Guerrero-Maciá will discuss her recent exhibitions and long-time interests within the expanded fields of textiles and painting. Guerrero-Maciá is an artist working in the expanded fields of painting and textiles.  She values craft, hybridity, sustainability, and material metaphor.  Guerrero-Maciá is most known for her unpainted pictures – paintings constructed with textile cutwork, stitching, collaging, and dye.   Color and decoration, in all their expansiveness and elusiveness, are integral to Guerrero-Maciá’s work.  As a Latinx child of exile, she recognizes that history, form, and identity are ever-changing and her art champions transformation. 

Guerrero-Maciá’s notable exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Art Pace San Antonio, Elmhurst Art Museum, Crocker Museum of Art, and South Bend Museum of Art.  She is a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award winner and MacDowell Colony Fellow.   She is a Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fiber & Material Studies + Painting & Drawing.  She is represented by Traywick Contemporary and Carrie Secrist Gallery.

University of Oregon Department of Art Visiting Artist Lecture Series
George and Matilda Fowler Lecture

 

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.

University of Oregon Department of Art Visiting Artist Lecture Series

Jillian 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.

University of Oregon Department of Art Visiting Artist Lecture Series

 

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.