Visiting Artists & Critics Program

Fall 2018

Wafaa Bilal

Thursday, November 1st

Artist Talk | 7:00 PM | Influx Auditorium, E110

Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal, an Associate Arts Professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, is known internationally for his on-line performative and interactive works provoking dialogue about international politics and internal dynamics. Bilal’s work is constantly informed by the experience of fleeing his homeland and existing simultaneously in two worlds – his home in the “comfort zone” of the U.S. and his consciousness of the “conflict zone” in Iraq. Using his own body as a medium, Bilal continued to challenge our comfort zone with projects like ​3rdi​ and ​...and Counting​. Bilal’s recent body of work, ​Canto III​, premiered in a solo booth at the New York Armory Show in 2015 and went on to be shown in the 2015 Venice Biennale.

Wafaa Bilal is a Boss Foundation Visiting artist. 

Anthony Horse Road

Thursday, November 8th

Artist Talk | 7:00 PM | Influx Auditorium, E110

Anthony Horse Road is an artist, historian and elder in the Lakota Community in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Anthony has been doing quill work and working in various other media for many years, approaching the work through ceremony and ancestors.

Anthony’s talk is co-sponsored by Backyard Phenology.

Sara Cwynar 

Wednesday, September 12

Artist Talk | 7:00 PM | Influx Auditorium, E110

Sara Cwynar ​will discuss the exhibition of her work, ​Image Model Muse​, which​ ​opens at Mia on September 14th. ​Her work explores the subjects of color and design, both in film and photography, and considers the ways they have operated politically, socially and historically, particularly in the context of how we conceptualize beauty.

Within her work, Cwynar builds multi-layered theses that look not just to the history of design and production, but also to how the political realm we inhabit dates, fades, and changes. Cwynar extensively quotes philosophers, cultural theorists, and writers in her films through voiceovers; sources range from the writings of Jean Baudrillard and Martin Heidegger to Lauren Berlant and Toni Morrison. She also considers how a post-feminist landscape can make both the sexism and counter-sexism of earlier decades appear dated, even kitsch. Yet Cwynar constantly returns to the theme of progress and reaction and explores how these are still powerful forces, regardless of the forms they may now take. Cwynar's talk is co-sponsored by the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Pablo Helguera

Friday, September 21

Workshop | 9:00 AM - 1:00 PM | Regis West Performance Space

Artist Talk | 7:00 PM | Weisman Art Museum

Pablo Helguera ​(Mexico City, 1971) ​is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance, and is the education director at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Helguera's four hour workshop will guide students through creation of a performance lecture. In a collaborative process involving the entire group, students will learn how to combine their individual ideas and interests to create a productive collective process of ideation, design and performance. Please watch for an email to sign up for this workshop. Helguera's visit is co-sponsored by the University of Minnesota's Weisman Art Museum, Department of Chicana/o & Latino Studies, and Center for Urban and Regional Affairs.

Liz Tennenbaum

Thursday, October 18

Artist Talk | 7:00 PM | Influx Auditorium, E110

Elizabeth Tenenbaum is an art advisor, collection manager and art appraiser who lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her career began at Art in General, a nonprofit organization that assists artists with the production and presentation of new work. She has been active in the New York City art world for over 20 years working with galleries, assisting artists in residency programs, working as the art director for a nationwide publication and as the assistant director at an art foundation. She is the director of Syzygy, a curatorial study platform focused on unique contemporary works on paper.

Spring 2018:

Land, Body Industry

Panel, Thursday February 1, 7pm

This Panel discussion features three artists in the upcoming show in the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, Land, Body, Industry, curated by Teréz Iacovino. Leslie Grant, Alexa Horochowski, and Rini Yun Keagy respectively use photography, sculpture, and film to investigate the body’s collective and individual relationships to industrial histories, labor, and landscape.

Bo Zheng

Artist Talk, Thursday,  February 22nd, 7pm

In conjunction with the exhibition the Politics of Weeds.

Jeffrey Dell 

Artist Talk, Tuesday,  March 20th, 7pm

Jeffrey Dell utilizes traditional printmaking materials in an unconventional manner. His work responds to and elicits desire and impulse in a playful, illusionary space. Bohemian press is running a workshop with Jeffrey, learning his tricks in screen printing methods and materials by assisting Jeffrey in printing an edition of six layer screen prints on yupo paper.

This artist is sponsored by Bohemian Press.

Cecilia Aldarondo

Film Screening and Artist Discussion, Monday, March 26, 5:30pm

with Jane Blocker, Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities, Professor, Art History Department

Aldorando’s film Memories of a Penitent is a documentary that charts Aldarondo’s excavation of a buried family conflict around her uncle Miguel’s death. It is a cautionary tale about the unresolved conflicts wrought by AIDS, and a nuanced exploration of how faith is used and abused in times of crisis.

This event is co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. Additional sponsors include Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature (CSCL), Moving Image and Media Studies (MIMS).

Nicholas Galanin

Artist Talk Wednesday,  March 28th at 7pm

Galanin’s installations and interventions encourage reflection on the cultural amnesia that actively obscures collective memory and acquisition of knowledge. His practice includes numerous collaborations with visual and recording artists and he is also a member of two artist collectives: Black Constellation and Winter Count. 

This Artist talk is co-sponsored by the Walker Art Center in collaboration with the Department of Art and American Indian Studies.

Patricia Olynyk

Artist Talk Friday, March 30th at 7pm

Patricia Olynyk’s work examines the ways in which culture and institutional structures shape our knowledge and understanding of history, science and the natural world. Appropriating medical imaging technologies and methods of collecting, documenting, and exhibiting scientific artifacts, her work addresses how interpretation fluctuates between fact and speculation. Her installations, sculpture, photography and performances operate at the intersections between sensing and knowing, and order and affect.

This artist talk is supported by the Boss Foundation.

Emer Grant

Artist Lecture April 18, 7pm

Material and Immaterial Architectures: Navigating platform capitalism and institutional critique through exhibition making & artistic practice. Institutions by nature can be limited and limiting. They are excluding, interpersonal, impersonal, hierarchical, bounded and dominating. The rise of global networks of computation has left the institution to face further crisis as digital platforms compete for the data (and responsibility) once accredited to brick and mortar institutions.

Justine Johnson & Bobby Zokaites

Artists Lecture April 19, 7pm

Justine Johnson (London and Wales) and Bobby Zokaites (Arizona) will be participating in the 49th Annual University of Minnesota Iron Pour as resident visiting artists. They will be giving their joint talk here one day before the Iron Pour.

This Artist talk and residency is supported by the Foundry Club and the Sculpture Foundry program.

Cristóbal Martínez: Postcommodity​

Artist Talk April 26, 7pm

Postcommodity's art functions as a shared Indigenous lens and voice to engage the assaultive manifestations of the global market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial and multi ethnic colonizing force that is defining the 21st Century through ever increasing velocities and complex forms of violence.

Marcel van Eeden

Artist Lecture May 1, 7pm

Dutch-born Marcel van Eeden lives and works in Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands. He is known for black-and-white charcoal drawings and graphically powerful work. Van Eeden uses historical documents and found imagery, including photographs, exhibition catalogues, newspapers, magazines, and illustrations, as a basis for his work. 

Fall 2017:

Sangodare

Lecture Wednesday, October 18, 7pm

Sonia Barrett

Lecture Thursday, October 26, 7pm

Hannes Brunner

Lecture Thursday, November 2, 7pm

Dorit Cypis

Lecture Wednesday, November 15, 7pm

Cynthia Daignault

Lecture Thursday, November 30, 7pm

Spring 2017:

Lori Felker

February 9, 2017

Nyeema Morgan

February 16, 2017

Shaurya Kumar

March 7, 2017

Laura Feldberga

March 23, 2017

Hasan Elahi

Boss Foundation Visitor

March 30, 2017

Park McArthur

April 19, 2017

Laida Lertxundi

April 24, 2017

Fall 2016:

Marcel van Eeden

September 13, 2016

Marcel van Eeden presented in conjunction with the Department of Art’s exchange program with the State Academy of Art in Karlsruhe, Germany, where he teaches in the area of Drawing and Painting.



Dutch-born Marcel van Eeden lives and works in Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands. He is known for black-and-white charcoal drawings and graphically powerful work. Van Eeden uses historical documents and found imagery, including photographs, exhibition catalogues, newspapers, magazines, and illustrations, as a basis for his work. 



 

Daniel Barrow

October 6, 2016

Winnipeg-born, Montreal-based artist Daniel Barrow works in video, film, print-making and drawing, but is best known for his use of antiquated technologies, his “registered projection” installations, and his narrative overhead projection performances. Barrow describes his performance method as a process of, “creating and adapting comic narratives to manual forms of animation by projecting, layering and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors”.



 

Sue Coe

Boss Foundation Visitor

October 13, 2016

Sue Coe is one of the foremost political artists working today. Her work has been featured on the cover of ARTnews and in numerous museum collections and exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC. A firm believer in the power of the media to change attitudes, Coe has had artworks published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Blab! and many others. Coe’s books include How to Commit Suicide in South Africa (1983), [Malcolm] X (1986), Police State (1987), and Bully! Master of the Global Merry-Go-Round (2004). Her print cycle The Tragedy of War (2000) was inspired by Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War etchings (1810–20) and examines the phenomenon of human violence and the horrors of combat. The artist is best known for documenting the atrocities committed by people against animals, starting with her award-winning book Dead Meat (1996). Other publications on the subject include Pit’s Letter (2000), Sheep of Fools . . . A Song Cycle for 5 Voices (2005), and Cruel (2012). A series of drawings and paintings, Elephants We Must Never Forget (2008), documents the abuse of elephants in the circus and elsewhere.

Watch the lecture here (UMN Faculty/Staff/Students).

Travis McEwen

November 3, 2016

Travis McEwen was born in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. He received an MFA from Concordia University, Montreal, and a BFA from the University of Alberta, Edmonton. Primarily working within the medium of painting as well as collage his work has been preoccupied with experiences of otherness and peripheral positions especially in regard to western limitations of gender and sexuality. More recently this has extended to Science Fiction and utopian motifs. He has shown work throughout Canada, including shows at Latitude 53 in Edmonton, Galerie La Centrale Powerhouse in Montreal, Owens Art Gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick and at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton in which he was included in Future Station: 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art. Currently he is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Minnesota, Department of Art, Minneapolis. He is represented by dc3 art projects in Edmonton.

Nina Beier

Boss Foundation Visitor

November 15, 2016

Robert Cozzolino

December 1, 2016

Dr. Cozzolino's lecture will be "Bernard Perlin and The Unification of Opposites." In histories of Modern art, abstraction has most often been privileged as the language of the avant-garde. Realism has often been cast as conservative, retrograde. Neither generalization fits and reexamining the American art world ca. 1950 makes this clear. Dr. Cozzolino will discuss the ways in which realism and abstraction were separated by critics but integrated by artists using the work of Bernard Perlin (1918-2014) as a case study.

Spring 2016:

For a complete list of upcoming public programs in the Department of Art, visit the UMN events calendar.

Mary Bates Neubauer
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Mary Bates Neubauer is a sculptor and digital artist. Her sculptures, prototypes, and digital prints focus on the hidden aspects of our surroundings, emphasizing a visual/tactile way of understanding global and metropolitan functions. Working at the intersection of art and science, she exhibits with organizations including Ars Mathematica/ Intersculpt, TeleSculpture, and Art-Science Collaborations, Inc. Her artwork is in a number of public and private collections, and she has completed many public art projects, including several interactive sculptural works involving light and sound. In the past five years, her sculptures and digital images have appeared in national and international exhibitions including New York, Paris, Beijing, New Delhi, Adelaide, and Queensland. She has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, a Fulbright Fellow in Cambridge England, and a Ford Fellow at Indiana University, Bloomington. 

Recent residencies include the Anderson Ranch Center for the Arts, the Tyrone Guthrie Center at Annaghmakerrig, Ireland, the Vermont Studio Center, the John Michael Kohler Arts and Industry Residency at the Kohler Foundry, the Serde Residency in Latvia and the Garfagnana Innovazione, a digital stone carving workshop in Tuscany, Italy. She is a Professor of Sculpture at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, where she is involved in the Partnership for Spatial Modeling and serves as an affiliate to Arts, Media, and Engineering.

Trevor Paglen
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Artist-author-activist Trevor Paglen's work deliberately blurs lines between science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. He is the author of five books, including Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World. His 2012 project The Last Pictures is a collection of 100 images placed on permanent media and launched into space, "a meditation on the intersections of deep-time, politics, and art." New York-based Paglen has appeared on the Colbert Report and Art21, exhibited internationally, and is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the 2014 Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award.

Tamsie Ringler
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Sculptor Tamsie Ringler’s work fuses public spectacle with the production of contemplative spaces and objects. Using iron casting, video, and landscape, her installations and sculptures integrate process, space and cultural communities. She focuses on the populist and environmental traditions of public art where the viewer becomes element, participant and witness. Recent projects explore our relationship with land and the impact of our hunger for natural resources. Ringler is a term assistant professor in Sculpture at the University of Minnesota and serves on the Board of Directors of Franconia Sculpture Park. Recent awards include a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant and a Forecast/McKnight Project Development Grant. Ringler has participated extensively in international cultural exchanges and exhibitions and her work is represented in sculpture parks and public collections. in 2014 she co-directed the 7th International Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art at the Pedvale Open-Air Art Museum in Latvia: Coal.Essence: Iron Forming Art, Ritual and Landscape.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s nuanced work reflects the increasingly transnational nature of the contemporary art world. Akunyili Crosby sensitively negotiates the cultural terrain between her adopted home in America and her native Nigeria, creating collage and photo transfer-based paintings that expose the challenges of occupying these two worlds. She has created a sophisticated visual language that pays homage to the history of Western painting while also referencing African cultural traditions. Akunyili Crosby has a striking ability to depict deeply personal imagery that transcends the specificity of individual experience and engages in a global dialogue about trenchant social and political issues.

Akunyili Crosby creates vibrant paintings that weave together personal and cultural narratives drawn from her experience. She uses an array of materials and techniques in each of her autobiographical works. Collage and photo-transfer provide texture and complexity to the surface of each composition in which photographs from family albums mingle with images from popular Nigerian lifestyle magazines. This varied and inventive use of media serves as a visual metaphor for the intersection of cultures as well as the artist’s own hybrid identity.

Lise Haller Baggesen
Thursday, March 5, 2015
Lise Haller Baggesen left her native Denmark in 1992 to study painting in the Netherlands at the AKI and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She was a recipient of the Prince Bernhard’s grant for promising graduates in 1998 and of the Royal Prize for young Painters in 2002. In 2008 she relocated to Chicago with her family. She completed her MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013, for which she received a fellowship award.

In the meantime, her work evolved from a traditional painting practice toward a hybrid practice including curating, writing and immersive multimedia installation work. She exhibits internationally and her writing has appeared in Bad at Sports, New City, and Third Rail Quarterly. Her first book “Mothernism” was co-published by Green Lantern Press and Poor Farm Press in 2014.

Liz Miller
Thursday, March 12, 2015

Pipo Nguyen-Duy
Thursday, April 2, 2015
Pipo Nguyen-Duy’s photography stems from the traditional style of landscape painting. His work illustrates the psychological fallout experienced in the United States since September 2001, and it is to that end that he relies on the tradition of landscape painting to photographically imagine the fall of man. Pipo’s reliance on the natural world as a theatrical apparatus uncovers collisions between nature and culture, past and present, in carefully crystallized visions that inscribe themselves onto classical western visions of the (un)natural world. Mythological reference and choreographed staging serve structurally and thematically to infuse these imagined landscapes with an eerie sense of art-historical déjà vu. --Jennie Hirsh.

Pipo Nguyen-Duy was born in Hue, Vietnam, immigrated to the United States as a political refugee, and is a professor of photography at Oberlin College. He has received many awards and grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, an En Foco Grant, a Professional Development Grant from the College Arts Association, and an American Photography Institute National Graduate Fellowship, among others. He has lectured and exhibited throughout the United States.

Emmet Ramstad
Thursday, April 9, 2015
Ramstad's art practice investigates the intimate ordinary. He considers the body through transforming physical traces such as hair, clothing, mementos, and grooming implements into mixed media artworks. Ramstad has exhibited in numerous galleries nationally and internationally in Istanbul and Amsterdam. Besides exhibiting visual artwork, Ramstad has made costumes and sets for five touring contemporary dance productions and had residencies at The Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, MANCC in Tallahassee, Les Subsistance in Lyon, France and K3 in Hamburg, Germany. 

He has performed in productions by The BodyCartography Project and given numerous lectures about his work and collaborative work with academic Aren Aizura. Ramstad is a recipient of an Art and Change grant through The Leeway Foundation and Professional Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. He has curated and organized six gallery shows in San Francisco and Philadelphia, as well as many free community art events and exhibitions. His work is in collections at The Weisman Art Museum, MCAD and Second State Press. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Art at The University of Minnesota.

Ruben Nusz
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Born in South Dakota and raised by cowboys, Minneapolis/Saint Paul-based artist Ruben Nusz graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Minnesota in 2001. He has exhibited work at the Walker Art Center, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Blanton Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego), the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Rochester Art Center, the Soap Factory, the Kiehl Gallery, and Weinstein Gallery. His work is featured in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, The Minnesota Museum of American Art, the North Dakota Museum of Art, the Weisman Art Museum and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Nusz has received numerous grants and awards including a grant from the McKnight Foundation in 2013. In addition to contributing as an arts writer for the website mnartists.org, Nusz is also co-founder of Location Books, an independent publisher that provides contemporary artists the opportunity to produce new work in book form. Location is featured in libraries throughout the United States, including the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), SFMOMA, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Midway Contemporary Art. Nusz is represented by Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis.

William J. O’Brien
Thursday, September 24, 2015
View a full video of this lecture here.
Working in two-and three-dimensional mediums alike, William J. O’Brien has been establishing himself as a maker of idiosyncratic installations, sculptures, drawings and paintings that blend influences of folk art, abstraction and expressionism. Both objects and images often feature rich color, intricate patterns and textures on forms that appear raw yet intricate, quickly made and at the same time laboriously crafted. O’Brien has had solo exhibitions at Renaissance Society in Chicago, Almine Rech in Paris, the Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among many others. 

Juan Sanchez
October 10, 2015. View a full video of this lecture here.

Tom Gunning
October 22, 2015. View a full video of this lecture here.

Ana Forchino
October 28, 2015. View a full video of this lecture here.

Kathryn Polk
October 29, 2015.
View a full video of this lecture here.
Kathryn Polk is an Arizona-based artist whose work is well-regarded among the printmaking community and included in permanent collections at museums and universities on several continents. She is the co-owner of a professional lithography studio called L VIS Press, and she is known as a trailblazer in developing and promoting less toxic lithographic procedures and equipment. Polk's narrative works feature female figures that take on issues of alienation and subjugation. Her work presents scenarios of survival, and the ways that humans navigate desire, expectation, and sacrifice.

Karolina Karlic
November 5, 2015.
View a full video of this lecture here.
Karolina Karlic is a Los Angeles-based photographer and film maker, born in Wroclaw, Poland. Her work is invested in the representation of American culture and diasporic existence surrounding industry. Karlic’s artist books including The Dee (2005) and ELEMENTARZ / PRIMER (2014) use the auto industry and her family history in Detroit (and across the US and Eastern Europe) as a framework to discuss current issues in America. Her recent projects include “Rockin’ the Backen” (2012) documenting a modern day boomtown of North Dakota and her newest work Rubberlands (2014) examining Brazil’s rubber plantations and the history of Henry Ford’s forgotten jungle city–Fordlandia, in the Amazon. She received a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and holds an MFA from the California Institute of Arts and a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Edén Torres & Deborah Ramos
December 1st, 2015.
Ana Mendieta: Her Influence on Chicana and Latina Artists.
Presentation by Edén Torres and Deborah Ramos in relation to the exhibition,Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta. Edén Torres is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Chicano and Latino Studies at the University of Minnesota. Deborah Ramos is a Minneapolis-based visual artist. For more information visit: http://z.umn.edu/xa4 and http://z.umn.edu/xa3.

Melissa Riviere
November 12, 2015. View a full video of this lecture here.

Made in MN Panel 
January 23, 2014.
Panel discussion on Made in MN exhibition featuring Eileen Cohen, Rollin Marquette, Judy Onofrio, and Cameron Zebrun

Hartmut Austen 
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Hartmut Austen, Term Assistant Professor for Painting and Drawing in the University of Minnesota Department of Art, is a painter whose work on canvas and paper investigate the various stylistic possibilities in expressive picture making within the context of contemporary painting.

Austen was a recipient of a Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship in 2009, and was named the Grant Wood Fellow for Painting and Drawing at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History for 2012/13. Together with Lynn Crawford, he edited the second issue of “Detroit:Telegraph”, a literary and visual arts journal published by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. His work has been included in group shows, most recently “Lost and Found: Belief and Doubt in Contemporary Pictures” at Passenger Project Space in Detroit and, as member of the Telegraph Art Collective, “Opening Lines: Telegraph in Berlin” at Milchhof Pavilion in Berlin. He has had one-person exhibitions at Paul Kotula Projects, Ferndale, Michigan in 2009, and Sasaki Associates in Watertown, Massachusetts in 2011. Represented by The Butchers Daughter Contemporary Art in Detroit, his exhibition “Approximate Territory” is currently on view in the gallery until the end of February.

Michael Theodore 
Thursday, February 6, 2014
Artist Michael Theodore has had an unusual creative trajectory: trained as a composer, and inspired by observations and experiences of the natural world, Theodore creates dynamic fields of color, light and sound using a variety of media. Theodore is also an active collaborator, working in performance art, music, and experimental film.

Michael Theodore is on the faculty of the University of Colorado Boulder, where he teaches music composition and technology, and interactive media. Theodore was born in 1968 and raised in New York City. Principal teachers include Lewis Spratlan (Amherst College, BA, Summa Cum Laude), Jonathan Berger, Jacob Druckman, and Martin Bresnick (Yale School of Music, MM) Roger Reynolds and Miller Puckette (University of California, San Diego, PhD). Theodore's technology-¬informed work with sound, visual media or both has been presented across the United States, and in Mexico, Trinidad y Tobago, Greece, Spain, Germany, Sweden, France, Australia, Japan, and China.

Robert Brady 
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Robert Brady is a modernist American sculptor who works in ceramics and wood. He was born in Reno, Nevada in 1946. Brady attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California from 1964 to 1968, before entering the University of California, Davis, where he worked with Robert Arneson and received a MFA in 1975. Since 1975, he has taught art at California State University, Sacramento. Brady worked primarily in clay as an art student. In the 1970s, he established his reputation as one of the moving forces in Bay Area figurative ceramic sculpture. Mrs. Fox, a hand-built ceramic sculpture from 1981, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example of this. He began experimenting with wood in 1986, and in this medium was able to create thin, large-scale figures with delicate postures that would be difficult to achieve in clay. He explores the human figure with emphasis on spiritual and mythological archetypes. His figures are typically elongated, with enigmatic symbols lightly carved into the surfaces. 

Artist Panel
Barbara Kreft, Ann Pibal and David Rich 
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
In conjunction with the exhibition From Beyond the Window in the Katherine E. Nash Gallery. Panel discussion of abstract painting and practice between three artists from the exhibition, mediated by Bethel University Professor of Art History, Wayne Roosa.

Barbara Kreft is a German native, based in Minneapolis. Her large-scale abstract paintings are in many public and private collections. She is the recipient of numerous State Arts Board and McKnight Foundation Fellowships. Her teaching appointments have included Hamline Unversity, the College of Visual Art and Macalester University.

Ann Pibal’s work has been exhibited widely at venues in the United States and Europe including MoMA PS1, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Feature Inc., Max Protetch Gallery, Meulensteen, Paula Cooper Gallery, ZieherSmith, Rhona Hoffman and The Suburban in Chicago, Steven Zevitas Gallery in Boston, Slewe Gallery in Amsterdam, Petra Rinck Galerie in Düsseldorf, the Essl Museum in Vienna and dePury and Luxembourg in Zurich. Her work is included in many public collections including The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Yale University Art Gallery. She has received awards from the Tiffany Foundation, The Joan Mitchell Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Rappaport Foundation and most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship Award. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and North Bennington, VT where she teaches at Bennington College.

David Rich explores a particular intersection of abstract painting and urban landscape, with an increasingly organic sense of structure. Exhibitions include Ethan Pettit Gallery, Brooklyn; Robert Steele Gallery, New York; Satori Fine Art, Chicago; and Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore. Upcoming shows include Lehr Zeitgossische Kunst, Cologne, Germany. Lectures and teaching include: Hartford Art School, Maryland Institute College of Art, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, and University of North Carolina. He is presently painting full time in St. Paul and New York.

Wayne Roosa earned his BFA (painting) and BA (art history) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his MA & PhD (art history) at Rutgers University. He has been an Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities grant for work on American painter, Stuart Davis; twice juror for the NEH. His writings include exhibition catalog essays published in Vienna, Rome, Venice, Amsterdam, New York, Washington D.C., Minneapolis, Tokyo, Shiga and Koriyama City, Japan. He has written about numerous contemporary artists including Bill Viola, Barbara Kruger, Archie Rand, Betty Woodman, Deborah Butterfield, William Tucker, Robert Birmelin, Michelle Grabner, Rico Gatson, Guy Baldwin, Chris Larson, Christine Baeumler, Jil Evans and others. He is currently Professor of Art History and Department Chair, Bethel University, St. Paul, Minnesota and Chair of the New York Center for Art & Media Studies. 

Dread Scott 
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. He first received national attention in 1989 when his art became the center of controversy over its use of the American flag. President G. H.W. Bush declared his artwork What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? “disgraceful” and the entire US Senate denounced this work when they passed legislation to “protect the flag.” To oppose this law and other efforts which would effectively make patriotism compulsory, he, along with three other protesters, burned flags on the steps of the US Capitol. This resulted in a Supreme Court case and a landmark First Amendment decision.His art has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, and at the Pori Art Museum in Pori, Finland. In 2012, BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) presented his performance Dread Scott: Decision. 

Mark Siegel 
Friday, March 28, 2014

Terri Fullerton 
Thursday, April 3, 2014
Teri Fullerton is a photographer and multi-media artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She examines idiosyncratic topics such as Internet dating, military families, and soldiers that have experienced war. Her work has been exhibited in solo shows, two person exhibitions and group shows across the United States and she has been published in the New York Times magazine. She is a 2012/13 recipient of the McKnight Artist Fellowship for Photographers, the 2012/13 Minnesota State Artist Initiative Grant and the 2010/11 Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Artists. 

Natalie Tornatore 
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Natalie Tornatore is a ceramic artist whose work resides within the expanded terrain of sculpture, drawing, and mixed media. Through the lens of phenomenology, she constructs site-specific installations that evoke the liminal spaces and shifting temporalities of human experience. Prior to her graduate education, Tornatore completed a two-year fellowship at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has served as an invited artist at the Arrowmont School of Craft, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Bellarmine University in Louisville. Professor Tornatore's work was most recently exhibited in La Mesa: A National Invitational Dinnerware Exhibition presented by Santa Fe Clay, and in The Air and The Ground at Indiana University Southeast. 

Professor Kurt Dyrhaug, Lasmar University and Professor Tobias Flores, Hays State University 
Thursday, April 24, 2014

Mary Jane Jacob 
Thursday, May 8, 2014
Walker Art Center Cinema Mary Jane Jacobs is a curator who holds the position of Professor and Executive Director of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago [SAIC]. As chief curator of the Museums of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Los Angeles, she staged some of the first U.S. shows of American and European artists. Then shifting her workplace from the museum to the street, she critically engaged the discourse around public space with such landmark site-specific and community-based programs as “Culture in Action” in Chicago, and “Conversations at The Castle” during the Atlanta Olympics, and “Places with a Past” for the Spoleto Festival USA-which launched two decades of public engagement in Charleston, South Carolina. More recently her programs have led to co-edited anthologies: Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, Learning Mind: Experience into Art, The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, and Chicago Makes Modern: How Creative Minds Changed Society.

Edie Overturf 
Thursday, October, 2014
Assistant Term Professor in Printmaking Edie Overturf will discuss her studio practice and involvement in the Twin Cities printmaking community. Edie is interested in the use of symbols in image construction, rhetorical situations, allegory in narrative, dualities in language, prosthetics and other replacements, and fire as a destructive and regenerative force. Her woodcut prints and screen prints have a highly-detailed, reflective, and exploratory aspect while questioning the process of narration. Edie holds an MFA in Printmaking from California State University Chico and in 2011 co-founded Leg Up Studio--a printmaking cooperative in Northeast Minneapolis.

J. Morgan Puett 
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
Interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer J. Morgan Puett will give a presentation of her work in conjunction with thinking making living currently on exhibit at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery. J. Morgan Puett is a trans-disciplinary creative producer with accomplished work in the areas of installation art practices, clothing and furniture design, architecture, fine art, film, and more – rearranging these intersections by applying conceptual tools of research-based methods in history, biology, new economies, design, craft and collaboration. Morgan’s early work forged new territory by intervening into the fashion system with a series of storefront installations and clothing/dwelling projects in Manhattan in the eighties and nineties, then produced a long series of research installations on the histories of the needle trade systems in museums around the world. More recently tagged, her work has been innovative in the realm of ‘social engagement’ and the Mildred’s Lane Project continues to forge new ground, citing that being is profoundly a social and political practice.

Ryan Travis Christian 
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Artist and curator Ryan Travis Christian's work investigates flatness through a cast of characters rendered in a retro cell animation language while simultaneously branching out into clunky objects and dizzying installations. Exploring the tension between the restrain of an all black and white palette and opulent compositions which buzz, blur, and vibrate, he traverses the picture plane through a series of parallel lines and zig zags conjuring movement, splintering time and space. Christian has had solo exhibitions at CAM Raleigh, Western Exhibitions in Chicago, Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco, Hasley McKay in New York and has curated numerous shows across the United States.

Nick Satinover
December 5, 2013
Nick Satinover is a term Assistant Professor of Printmaking at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in Minneapolis. He holds a BFA from Wright State University, Dayton, OH and an MFA from Illinois State University, Normal, IL. Nick has been an artist-in-residence at the Frans Masereel Print Centrum in Kasterlee, Belgium, Kala Artist Institute in Berkeley, CA, the Dayton Printmakers Cooperative and the Tofte Lake Center in Ely, MN.

Sigrid Sandstrom
November 14, 2013
Swedish-born artist Sigrid Sandström claims that she paints not to achieve a specific vision, but to "embrace and revel in the obscurities and lost tracks within the process." Her striking compositions, typically using acrylic, often evoke a fragmented version of the landscapes of her native Scandinavia, with abstract geometrical motifs layered over scenes resembling icy mountain ranges or seascapes.

The Department of Art and Visiting Artist Program would like to thank the INMAN GALLERY in Houston, Texas for providing the Visiting Artist Committee with information and material about Sigrid Sandstrom. In addition, the Visiting Artist Program would like to thank the Institute for Global Studies who generously co-sponsored Sigrid Sandstrom's visit to the University of Minnesota.

Fusataro (Taro Asano) 
November 7, 2013
Fusataro, a 25th generation Japanese master sword smith, will be visiting the University of Minnesota’s Department of Art, performing demonstrations and offering educational sword experiences through Tamahagane Arts of Toronto, Canada and the Visiting Artist program in the Art Department. Fusataro will be participating in making of tama-hagane [high carbon steel] using the Tatara, a traditional Japanese smelter on all day on Wednesday, November 6th [ 8 AM- 8 PM] in the Sculpture Courtyard of the Regis Center for Art. Fusataro is one of no more than 200 practicing sword smiths remaining in Japan.  He is recognized by the Japanese Government as a licensed master and has taken it upon himself to elevate the profile of the Japanese sword made in today's world to people outside of Japan.

Art School: Bartholomew Ryan and Mark Schoening
October 29, 2013
Beginning fall semester 2013, the Walker Art Center and the University of Minnesota Departments of Art, Music and Theatre and Dance, will co-sponsor the Art School Lecture Series. The lecture series focuses on issues in contemporary art, design and visual culture to be delivered at the WAC for members, docents, and volunteers, as well as at the Regis Center for Art in conjunction with the Visiting Artists Committee.

This particular lecture will be given by Associate Curator Bartholomew Ryan and MFA candidate Mark Schoening in conjunction with the Walker exhibition, 9 Artists.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian
October 25, 2013
Join Natascha Sadr Haghighian and exhibition curator Bartholomew Ryan for an informal conversation about SOLO SHOW, which debuted at the Museum of Modern Art Bologna in 2008, and will be featured in an exhibition at e-flux, New York, in November 2013. In the context of the University of Minnesota, the conversation explores such questions as which tools and skills are required for a successful artistic career today? What metrics do we use to define such success? What is the nature of artistic authorship, and who owns the right to say a work is theirs? What is the relationship between craft and skill on the one hand, and a critical or conceptual approach to art on the other? And how do young artists navigate, contend with, or even challenge the evolving role of the artist in contemporary society and culture? Haghighian will also talk about works in 9 Artists and ways that she attempts to navigate the complicities and complexities of making art today. Copresented by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

Shannon Fitzgerald
October 17, 2013
Shannon Fitzgerald is Executive Director of Rochester Art Center, Rochester, MN. As a contemporary art curator, museum professional, writer, and educator, her work focuses on international emerging and mid-career artists and thinkers. She has produced original exhibitions, projects, and publications with a prestigious roster of artists including Polly Apfelbaum, Radcliffe Bailey, Michael Paul Britto, Jill Downen, Dzine, Yun-Fei Ji, Meschac Gaba, Kendell Geers, Larry Krone, Michael Lin, Julie Moos, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Karyn Olivier, Ruby Osorio, Keith Piper, William Pope.L, Allison Schulnik, Mary Ann Strandell, Catharina van Eetvelde, Hank Willis Thomas, and Marina Zurkow, among others. She is interested in the diversity of global art making and how culture informs art, which impacts society, and improves communities. She was formerly Chief Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, held a curatorial appointment at Institute of Visual Arts (Inova), at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and has worked independently in Georgia, St. Louis, and Oklahoma City. She has contributed to several national art journals and has taught Art History, Non-Western Art History, and Museum Studies at several universities.

Carol Mavor
October 10, 2013
Conversation with Jane Blocker
Carol Mavor is a writer and artist historian and Professor of Art History at the University of Manchester.

The talk will be a multimedia presentation based on her 2012 book Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetee, Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour, followed by a discussion about her work and some of the issues it raises, such as historical practice, memory, film and photography, trauma and the ethics of witness.

Taking a creative and personal approach to the writing of history, Carol Mavor weaves together diverse artworks from the 19th century to the present day in narratives that are as theoretically sophisticated as they are evocative.  Attentive to the politics of race, gender, and sexuality, she attempts to understand the nature of desire as it is played across 19th-century photography, the stories of Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Anderson, the writing of Marcel Proust and Roland Barthes, and diverse works by contemporary artists such as Sally Mann, Francesca Woodman, Kara Walker, Kiki Smith and Joseph Cornell.

Co-sponsored with the Department of Art History

Mathew Zefeldt
April 25, 2013
Mathew Zefeldt is a Term Assistant Professor in Painting and Drawing at the University of Minnesota. Mathew has had solo shows at Eduardo Carrillo Gallery in Santa Cruz, Skinner Howard Gallery in Sacramento, Micheal Rosenethal Gallery in San Francisco.

Penelope Umbrico
April 18, 2013
Penelope Umbrico works with images from sources such as EBay and Flickr in installation and print formats. "Photography is as much the subject of my work as it is the medium in which I work. I employ traditional photographic techniques and methods of appropriation, extraction, multiple production, and intervention, to explore how we, as a culture, make and use images."  A monograph of her work was published by Aperture in 2011.

Christina Schmid
April 4, 2013
Christina Schmid is an arts writer, critic, scholar, and teacher, though not necessarily in that order. Her arts writing has been published in a number of national and international art journals, including Artforum, Flash Art, afterimage, Foam, and Artpulse. Her essays have appeared in exhibition catalogs, online venues, and anthologies, most recently, in Visual Representations of German National Identity. She has been invited to work with the Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writing Workshop, co-edits Quodlibetica, an online journal devoted to arts writing, and is eagerly anticipating the publication of her first monograph.

Dianna Molzan and Alex Olson
March 14, 2013
Dianna Molzan’s canvases engage in an open and unpredictable dialogue with the history of abstract painting. While she uses a variety of material approaches that differ from one work to the next, each painting exhibits a subtle precision in its intention and execution.

Alex Olson makes abstract paintings that provoke an extended sense of time and elicit prolonged consideration. Working on canvases of modest size, she deftly moves among an array of bold visual cues to create surfaces that speak to their own making and repossess abstract material experimentation as sign.

Laylah Ali
March 7, 2013
The precision with which Ali creates her small, figurative, gouache paintings on paper is such that it takes her many months to complete a single work. She meticulously plots out every aspect of her work in advance, from subject matter to choice of color and the brushes that she will use. In style, her paintings resemble comic-book serials, but they also contain stylistic references to hieroglyphics and American folk-art traditions.

Harmony Hammond Lecture
January 24, 2013
Harmony Hammond is an artist, art writer and independent curator who lives and works in Galisteo, New Mexico. Considered a pioneer of the feminist art movement, she lectures, writes and publishes extensively on painting, feminist art, lesbian art, and the cultural representation of “difference”.

Piotr Szyhalski Lecture
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Piotr Szyhalski is a world-renowned interactive designer working in interactive,installation, sound and visual media. He has been featured in Wired, I.D., Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and Website Graphics: The Best of Global Site
Design. His work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center, the New School, New York; the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and the Museum of Modern Art in Rijeka, Croatia. He was born in Poland and is a Professor in Media Arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Willie Cole Lecture
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Willie Cole is known for his transformations of ordinary domestic objects, such as shoes, irons, and lawn jockeys, into powerful works of art. Cole’s sculptures and images are embedded with references to the African American experience and inspired by West African religion, mythology, and culture. His visit is in conjunction with the production of an edition at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis.

A.D. Coleman Lecture
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Coleman is co-curator of the Nash Gallery exhibition China Insights: Unsettling Consequences. He will speak on contemporary photography in China.

Liu Xuguang Lecture
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Liu Xuguang is one of the artists included in the Nash Gallery exhibition The Great Celestial Abstraction: Chinese Art in the 21st Century. He will speak on abstract painting and its relationship to the history of image-making in China.

Sharon Louden Lecture
Monday, October 3, 2011
New York-based artist Sharon Louden has been commissioned by the Weisman Art Museum to create an installation for the re-opening of the museum in October. This new work will include over 225,000 pieces of aluminum strips installed in a 5,000 square foot space with 21' ceilings. Four students in the Department of Art are assisting Sharon Louden this summer with the installation. When Louden returns to Minneapolis for the re-opening of the museum she will give a public lecture at the Regis Center and visit the studios of the student assistants who worked with her.

Lynn Hershman Leeson Lecture
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Lecture is in conjunction with the exhibition Lynn Hershman Leeson: Investigations, co-organized by the Nash Gallery and the Walker Art Center.

David Little Lecture
Thursday, December 15, 2011
David Little is Curator and Head of the Department of Photography and New Media at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He will speak on the relationship of photography and public space. Lecture is in conjunction with the Nash Gallery exhibitions Paul Shambroom: Power and Public Space (working title) and Regarding Place.

Brenda Child Lecture
Wednesday, February 15, 2011
Brenda Child is Chair of the Department of American Indian Studies, University of Minnesota. Lecture is in conjunction with the Nash Gallery exhibition Mni Sota.

Dyani Reynolds White Hawk
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Dyani Reynolds White Hawk is curator of the Nash Gallery exhibition Tradish (working title). Lecture is in conjunction with the exhibition Mni Sota.

David Dunlap
Dunlap is an artist, walnut farmer, and teacher living in Iowa City, Iowa. Since 1974, he has maintained a practice of keeping daily notebooks filled with drawings, words, lists, photos, dreams and sketches. The hundreds of numbered books are the building blocks for David's unique practice, a constantly evolving and mutating living document, both autobiographical and fiction.

Vandana Shiva 
Vandana Shiva is an internationally known scientist, author and activist, who has fought for changes in the practice and paradigms of agriculture and food. In 1993, Vandana received the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize') "...For placing women and ecology at the heart of modern development discourse. Shiva Spoke at the University of Minnesota's Cowles auditorium on March 25, 2010 as part of the Women & Water Rights Program.

Water Dance Spoken Word
This spoken word event features original poems created by students from the Perpich Center for the Arts, Farnsworth Aerospace Magnet, Battle Creek Middle School and the Lighthouse Program of the Learning Alternatives Community School. The event was held on March 3, 2010 at the University of Minnesota’s Regis Center for Art as a part of WaterDance, a youth celebration about water through music, poetry, visual art and dance.

Gemma Bulos
Gemma Bulos is an activist and composer who founded the non-profit humanitarian organization A Single Drop to address the safe water crisis. Bulos also traveled around the world building a Million Voice Choir featuring the interactive presentation “Water, Music and Unity: The Pathway to Peace and Global Harmony” Bulos Spoke at the Regis Center for Art on March 24, 2010 as part of the Women and Water Rights Program.

Sandy Spieler
Sandy Spieler, Artistic Director of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater spoke at the Regis Center for Art on March 23, 2010 as part of the Women & Water Rights Program. Spieler's presentation examined how she uses art & performance to raise awareness of water rights and conservation issues.

Lucy Lippard
Lucy Lippard is an internationally known writer, activist and curator, who has published over 20 books on feminism, art, politics and place. Lippard spoke at the Cowles Auditorium at the University of Minnesota on 3/4/10 as part of the Women & Water Rights Exhibition and Program.

Gedi Sibony
Gedi Sibony’s constructions draw from the traditions of minimalism in their pared down aesthetics and conception of sculpture as self-contained conceptual objects. Sibony’s objects adopt an impoverished style and are often made from found materials such as cardboard, plastic sheeting, and wood. Through these media, which are associated with both construction and debris, Sibony’s work elevates the humble qualities of everyday ‘stuff’ to create instances of poetic beauty.

Shary Boyle
Shary Boyle is known internationally for her drawing, sculpture and painting and for her audio-visual performances. Informed by the deeply personal and fanciful, her work traverses the terrain from adolescent anxieties and desires to evocative, fairy-tale like realms.

Joseph Grigely
Joseph Grigely is an artist and a critical theorist with a specialty in bibliography and textual criticism. His articles include “White” in Cabinet (Fall 2007), “Blindness and Deafness as Metaphors: An Anthological Essay” in the Journal of Visual Culture (Summer 2006).

Panel Discussion: Contemporary Art in China
Discussion moderator: Wang, Chunchen, curator & professor, Central Academy of Fine Art and featured artists Li, Shuan and Liu, Xuguang.
Liu, Xuguang has been teaching at the Beijing Film Academy since 2004 where he is the course director for the New Media Lab in the Fine Art Department. Li, Shuan graduated from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts where he studied painting. He currently works for the Professor and Vice Dean of the Department of Painting at the Beijing Film Academy.

Chris Atkins
Chris Atkins is Coordinator of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program, a unique curatorial department at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Before starting at the MAEP last March, Chris was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Macalester College where he taught a visual cultures course based on a thematic approach to fine art, national monuments, literature, and cinema..

Beverly Semmes
Beverly Semmes is an internationally recognized artist who has been showing her work since 1990. By the mid-1990s, she was exhibiting work across the United States and in Europe. Semmes attended Yale University School of Art where she was awarded an MFA in Sculpture (1987).

Cast Metal Art Symposium
Artists Paul McMahill, Coral Lambert, Laura Griffith & George Beasley give presentations of their work at the Symposium of Cast Metal Art. The symposium was held at the Regis Center for Art in conjunction with the 40th Annual Minnesota Iron Pour.

Kim Dickey
The Ceramics Collective presents Kim Dickey. Dickey is a ceramic artist who likes to work with the familiar but insists her concepts are too layered in meaning to be described as merely representational. While Dickey shies from the label of whimsical, there is clearly a sense of humor present. One of her earliest, and some say most controversial, works was a series of female urinals called “Lady J's.”

Mark Manders
Mark Manders is a Dutch artist whose body of work consists mainly of installations, drawings, sculptures and short films. Typical of his work is the arrangement of random objects, such as tables, chairs, light bulbs, blankets and dead animals. He is best known for his rough-hewn clay sculptures.

Clive Murphy
Murphy's artist practice draws from the peripheries of visual culture, mining diverse sources such as porn spam, found audio cassette tape, evangelical sermon titles, computer generated technical drawings, folk art embroideries and fairground inflatables. He appropriates and reconfigures familiar signifies in order to explore their wider cultural resonance, uncovering new ground for the proliferation of diverse meanings.

Mark Beasley
Beasley, an indepedent curator, writer, and artist, currently works as curator for Creative Time in New York, he is working as Curator of Creative Time in New York, which “presents the most innovative art in the public realm… working with artists who ignite the imagination and explore ideas that shape society.”

Enrique Chagoya
American artist Enrique Chagoya appropriates and reorganizes images taken from the American mass media, Mexican folk art and religious sources, using them to create biting and often very humorous political and social satire. His art becomes a product of collisions between historical visions, ancient and modern, marginal and dominant paradigms.

Allison Smith
Smith is a visiting artist who works in different media, including printmaking, drawing, and digital arts. His lithographs and colored pencil drawings have been described as existing someplace where naivety meets genius.

Jerry Saltz
Jerry Saltz is an American art critic. Since 2006, he has been a columnist for New York magazine. Formerly the senior art critic for The Village Voice, Saltz has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism three times. In 2000 he was the sole advisor for the 1995 Whitney Biennial. He is currently teaching at Columbia University; The School of Visual Arts in New York; and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives in New York City.

Steve Dietz
Steve Dietz is an artist and curator based in Minneapolis. He is the Artistic Director of ZER01, which produces the biennial arts festival “ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge.” Steve is also the founder of the New Media Initiatives and Gallery 9 at the Walker Art Center, and serves as the executive director of Northern Lights, an interactive media-oriented arts agency in the Twin Cities.

Dana Shutz
Schutz’s pictures are vividly colored, highly painterly and present an imaginary world in which mutation is the norm. The precise tone of her pictures has intrigued and perplexed spectators. Her characters are as humorous as they are grotesque. Schutz is an artist of enormous intelligence and awareness, fascinated by the possibilities of her medium.

Scott Stulen
Scott Stulen received his MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2004 is the Project Director for mnartists.org at the Walker Art Center, The Director of the McKnight Artist Fellowships for Photographers, an independent curator and mixed media artist. Scott's work explores personal and collective memory, pop culture, failure, loss and obsession through painting, sculpture, installation and video.