Visiting Artists & Critics Program

Visiting Artists & Critics Program

The Visiting Artists & Critics Program fosters a greater understanding and appreciation of contemporary art through dialogue. Nationally and internationally recognized artists working in all media are invited by the Department of Art to present public lectures and meet with students in seminars and for individual critiques. All are welcome to attend lectures.

Spring 2024 

 

Yellow and red abstract textile artwork
Malaika Temba, Ntozake’s Lady in Yellow, 43 x 55”, 2018

Malaika Temba | Artist Talk | Thursday, March 28, 2024, 4:30 PM Central, InFlux E110

Malaika Temba is a Textile Artist based in Manhattan, NY. Born in Washington D.C. of Tanzanian and American heritage, Temba grew up across Saudi Arabia, Uganda, South Africa, Morocco, and the U.S (MD, RI, NY). Temba’s lens and creative process are global, nourished by these experiences. Temba graduated with a BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018 and is currently an adjunct professor there in the Textiles Department. In addition to her studio and teaching practice, Temba has worked at Pyer Moss, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and for contemporary artists including Jim Drain, Kenya (Robinson), and Anthony McCall. Temba has shown her work at Design Miami, the MET Gala, former Naval Base Fort Adams in Newport, RI, and on the runway at New York Fashion Week. Select exhibitions include those at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, Allouche Gallery in New York, and Galerie Lilia Ben Salah in Paris, France. Her work is part of various public and private collections worldwide, including collections of Jorge M. Pérez at El Espacio 23, and Beth Rudin DeWoody at The Bunker Artspace. Temba is the 2021 recipient of the YoungArts Jorge M. Pérez Award.

"My work embodies the paradox of resilience: soft and ornate but unbreakable. It is a testament to the struggles of Black womanhood, interpersonal relationships, and undigested reflections. It is meant to be a monument to obligations of emotional labor, and also a record of vulnerability, sarcasm, and evidence of bliss – distilled, fragmented and abstracted. Centering textiles as my primary artistic medium illustrates the sense of responsibility, time, attention, and patience expected of women, in their traditional roles as comforters, nurturers, protectors – even as their labor is hard and unceasing. Textiles function as carrier, metaphor, and marker of time through the care and labor of their production, which is often taken for granted and conflated with gendered and feminized notions of the soft and sweet. 

"At the core of my practice is the tension between contemporary, new media techniques (digital media and mass-production, industrial machinery) and historic, tactile ancestral techniques and artisanry. I use paint, stamps, stencils, drawing media, felting, and spray paint layered over and combined with industrial methods of Jacquard weaving, Stoll knitting, digital embroidery, laser cutting, quilting, sublimation and UV printing, and sewing. My use of patterns, high-texture materials, and vibrant colors from Tanzanian imagery and objects reflect my own upbringing and draw on my personal lineage as an abundant resource. At large scale, my work monumentalizes the beauty that is inherent in human labor and production, inviting the viewer into an immersive seeing experience and also convoking larger cultural systems."

 

 

A woman stands in front of a bookcase

Ringo Bunoan | Artist Talk | Wednesday, March 27, 2024, 4:30 PM Central, InFlux E110

Drawing from postmodern and contemporary art and archival theories, this presentation provides an overview of emerging discourses and practices in archiving contemporary art and artists. It traces the various definitions of the artist's archive, its significance to art history, as well as its shifting locations, and the tensions and internal contradictions embedded within it. Positioning the artist's archive not only as a record of an individual artist's life and work but also a model for self-historicization and community building, it provides insights on affective practices, alternative ways of documenting art, particularly conceptual and ephemeral works, and an expanded view of what constitutes as evidence of artistic practice. It also includes practical guidance on how to create an artist's archive and basic record-keeping systems for artists.

Ringo Bunoan is an artist, curator and archivist from Manila, Philippines. She has a BFA in Art History from the University of the Philippines and an MA in Archives and Records Management from University College London. She has co-founded and led independent art organizations in Manila, including Big Sky Mind, King Kong Art Projects Unlimited, and artbooks.ph. She also worked at Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, where she initiated and created the archives of Filipino conceptual artist Roberto Chabet and several artist-run spaces in the Philippines. She is currently living in London and working on archives of diaspora artists in the UK.

This talk is a co-presentation of the Visiting Artists & Critics Program & MFA Professional Practices.

 

 

A blurry photo of Fannie Lou Hamer with the letters of her name floating backwards on top
Bill Gaskins, Blackboard #15: Fannie Lou Hamer

Bill Gaskins | Artist Talk | Thursday, April 4, 2024, 12:00 PM Central, InFlux E110

From a professional base in photography and arts writing, an academic foundation in fine art, the history of photography, American Studies and the perspective of a citizen of the United States, the work of Bill Gaskins explores questions about photography and the portrait in the 21st century. A critical entry point for the viewer is his fascination with the myths of photography and American culture and representations of African American people.
 

 

 

 

 

Blue painting of a domestic interior with houseplant and person
Anna Wehrwein, Inside Garden (Wildness), 2023, 70 x 60 in, Oil on Canvas.

Anna Wehrwein| Artist Talk | Thursday, April 11, 2024, 4:30 PM Central, InFlux E110

Anna Wehrwein is an artist originally from the Boston area. She received her BS in Art and BA in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Tennessee. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, ArtMaze Magazine, Platform, and White Columns Artist Registry. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions at Thierry Goldberg (New York, NY), Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia, PA) Collar Works (Troy, NY), and Troost Gardens (Kansas City, MO). She has been an artist in residence at VCCA, Vermont Studio Center, Anderson Ranch Art Center, and MacDowell, for which she was awarded the 2019 Josephine Mercy Heathcote Fellowship. She currently lives in Columbia, MO where she is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Missouri and the co-founder/director of stop-gap projects

"I make paintings and drawings that reimagine the domestic space and painting tableau as a site of creative action and communal agency. They are dense fields of color and bodies that intertwine painting history, personal narrative, and abstraction, within a framework of a feminist utopia. 

"In my most recent paintings, I have been exploring the idea of garden space.The garden is a site of containment, but also wildness. It is a liminal space between interior and exterior, home and nature. I am interested in the garden as a metaphorical and psychic space, but also as a visual and optical field of textures, colors, and patterns that can feel both abstract and decorative. But most significantly, the paintings consider the garden as a social space in which care and nurturing can take on many forms. 

"In both the drawings and paintings, I am interested in the dynamics of watching and the act of looking as having the potential to be active and reciprocal: to not just look at someone, but with someone.To read over their shoulder—and in turn—let my viewer do the same.And yet, there is always a gap in understanding. Like in the drawings and paintings, the illusion of completeness gives way to material and brushstroke: the colored ground always shows through.Together, these works are about yearning to find intimacies— of view, of people, of mark-making.They are about closeness and touch and finding a shared place for drawing and watching and thinking."
 

 

 

Man laying face down in a pile of gold jewelry
Eyal Assulin, Slave, 2012 (photography: Matan Mittwoch)

Sharon Toval | Curator Talk | Thursday, April 18, 2024, 4:30 PM Central, InFlux E110

Sharon Toval, a curator and researcher of contemporary art, operates in the fields of visual arts Internationally. He curates exhibitions in museums, galleries, biennials, and more. Sharon holds a master's degree (M.A.) in Policy and Theory of the Arts, from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (2014) and specialized in museology studies at the Israel Museum under the guidance of Chief Curator Yigal Zalmona.

Since 2018, Toval has been managing and curating The Lab in Tel Aviv, an experimental art space where he initiates research projects within various cultural and social contexts. Some of his significant exhibitions include: "Don't Go Too Far: works 1980-2022" a retrospective of the painter Haya Graetz Ran at the Mishkan Museum of Art (2023); "LONGING – BE LONGING", the first Israeli group exhibition in the UAE as part of the RAKART22 art biennale (2021); "Hshuma", a group show at MACT Museum of Art in Switzerland (2019); "Hod" (2018), a solo exhibition of Eyal Assulin at the Haifa Museum of Art; "Becoming", a research group show at the Hansen House (2014); "Terra Nova" (2012) at Moby, Bat Yam, and many other exhibitions.

Sharon grew up in Toulouse, France, and immigrated to Israel in the late 1980s to study industrial engineering and management at the Technion. His multicultural background imbues his identity and allows for a broad understanding of collaborative nature across the globe. His curatorial vision manifests in constructing artistic bridges that seek to transcend the socio-political and geographical crises prevalent in the contemporary era.

Lecture title: "Identity Complexities: Artistic Perspectives on Democracy and Cultural Conflict"

Several decades have witnessed the gradual erosion of democratic institutions, revealing economic interests masked behind a democratic façade. Colin Crouch, in his book "Coping with Post-Democracy" (2000), describes a progressive, protracted, and intricate process by which a democratic state transforms into a non-democratic one. The term "post" signifies the democratic past of the state and explains why significant portions of the population, especially those who experienced its establishment as a formal democracy, struggle to comprehend and adapt to the changes. 

In tandem with the crisis of democracy, the concept of identity has found varied expressions through art, attempting to articulate its inherent complexities. Professor Moshe Zuckermann, in his book "The Israel Foundry: Myths and Ideology in a Conflictual Society (2001), explores the problematic nature of identity, composed of both individual and collective civic identities, often conflicting and creating societal-cultural conflicts. 

The lecture will delve into this complexity through the artworks of artists who chose to inquire about their identity's complexity, showcased in iconic exhibitions from the past decade, curated by Sharon Toval. It will raise questions such as: Where do the connections between these two hunters of the concept of identity exist? Where do conflicts arise? Is there still room for individual identity? How can the identities of two peoples coexist? 

Moreover, the lecture will serve as a self-reflection for the audience, offering additional perspectives on understanding contemporary global conflicts. It will also discuss the importance of art and culture as tools for analytical thinking, capable of aiding personal and collective crisis management.

 

 

Multiple rows of red and white ceramic pomegranates on the floor, the center row crushed into shards

The Middle East Feminist Studies Symposium 

Monday, May 6, 2024, 5:30 – 7:00 PM | Katayoun Amjadi (BFA '13 & MFA '19) Performance & Reception
Tuesday, May 7, 2024, 2:30 – 4:45 PM | Film screening with Mizna

The Middle East Feminist Studies symposium is titled “Violence and the Shifting Politics of Knowledge Production in the Middle East" and will meet at various locations at the University of Minnesota. Cosponsors include Institute for Global Studies; Immigration History Research Center; Classical and Near Eastern Religions and Cultures; Asian and Middle East Studies; American Studies, Sociology; Anthropology; History; Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies;  Center on Women, Gender, and Public Policy; and the Department of Art.

 

Fall 2023

A woman in a pink satin dress stands in a lush green forest

Diana Markosian | Artist Talk | Thursday, October 5, 2023, 4:30 PM Central, InFlux E110

Documenting the Personal: A personal journey through the work of artist Diana Markosian. Her path as a photographer has been her own. From her first trip to Chechnya at 20, to her deportation from Azerbaijan, and eventually to her homeland of Armenia, where she began to piece together the soap opera of her life. From finding her father to reconstructing her mother’s journey to America, this talk will lay out Markosian’s unconventional path to becoming a storyteller. Diana Markosian is at the forefront of a new generation of photographers, pushing the boundaries of documentary storytelling. By encapsulating different styles and mediums, Markosian has created a unique approach to image making. Her first monograph, Santa Barbara was published by Aperture and selected by Time Magazine and MoMa as the top photo book of the year. She is a regular contributor to Vogue, National Geographic Magazine, and Time Magazine. Markosian holds a masters degree from Columbia University in New York. Her work is represented by Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire in Paris and Rose Gallery in Los Angeles. 

This event was in-person only and was not recorded.

 

 

Person sits inside an acrylic polyhedron in a garden, drawing on the inside with a pen
Pia Linz sitting in an acrylic glass box in the backyard of Schillerpromenade working on the preparatory drawing for the box engraving, 2009. Photographer: Wolfgang Schnell

Pia Linz | Artist Talk | Thursday, October 25, 2023, 4:30 PM Central, InFlux E110

The Department of Art and the Center for German and European Studies are pleased to welcome visiting artist Pia Linz for a public artist talk. “The phenomenon of individual world perception and its transformation into picture reality is the main theme of my work. Thereby, two basically different pictorial concepts of space crystallize, which has both the tendency to be coevally analytic and subjective, and to merge the outer with the inner world.” Linz creates works from specific points of view — drawing a map of Central Park based on observations as a pedestrian, for instance, or capturing all the details of a given space from a fixed standpoint inside an acrylic box.

Pia Linz (born 1964) received her MFA in painting and graphic arts at Städelschule in Frankfurt. Her works have been displayed internationally, among others at Kunsthalle Emden (Germany) in 2021, Berlinische Galerie-Museum for Modern Art (Germany) in 2020, Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi (New Zealand) and Württembergischer Kunstverein (Germany) in 2016, at Arter (Turkey) and at the German museums, Sprengel Museum, Marta Herford and Museum Wolfsburg in 2015, at Art Gallery of Alberta (Canada) in 2014, at Museo Nacional de Arte in La Paz (Bolivia) in 2013, at Museum Folkwang (Germany) in 2012, at Museo Nacional De Artes Visuales in Montevideo (Uruguay) in 2011 and at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 2010. One year artist residences include Rome (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, 1989/90), London (Hessische Kulturstiftung, 2005/06) and New York (Berliner Senatskanzlei-Kulturelle Angelegenheiten, 2010/2011). In 2015 she received the 17th HAP-Grieshaber-Preis. Since 2016 she has been professor of painting at Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin.

 

This event was in-person only and was not recorded.

 

Drawn portraits on toned paper

Phong Bui | Artist Talk | Thursday, November 9, 2023, 4:30 PM Central, InFlux E110

Phong H. Bui is a multifaceted citizen of the New York art world. Roberta Smith, in her review of Come Together: Surviving Sandy in the New York Times likened him to, “[In] Jane Jacobs’s words, ‘people with ideas of their own,’ who help keep a city alive and moving forward on countless fronts in art and in life.” He was named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture” by Brooklyn Magazine in 2014 and a “ringmaster” of the “Kings County art world” by The New York Observer in 2015. In addition to being an artist, writer, independent curator, and former Curatorial Advisor at MoMA PS1 (2007-2010), he is also the Co-Founder, Publisher, and Artistic Director of the free monthly journal the Brooklyn Rail, the River Rail, the publishing press Rail Editions, Rail Curatorial Projects, and the Host/Producer of “Off the Rail” on Art International Radio.

This event was in-person only and was not recorded.

 

Spring 2023

 

A still video image of a young black woman dressed as a millenial executive in a blue spandex turtleneck, white blazer, bright blue and black wig, and a flower crown. She stands in front of a projected stage screen that says "Spotlight on Residential" and a digital image of a wine picnic floats in front of her.
Lex Brown, COMMUNICATION (video still), 2021, 30 minutes. Image courtesy the artist.

Lex Brown | Online Artist Talk | Thursday, January 26, 2023, 6:30 PM Central, Zoom

Lex Brown will share the personal and practical evolution of her multimedia practice. Looking at earlier work and recent projects, she will detail the collaborations, logistical challenges, bureaucratic steps, creative tools, and lessons that are as much a part of the work as the work itself. This talk will focus on the Why, How, and What of bringing the imagination into physical reality.

Video of Lex Brown's talk available here.

 

 

Light-skinned, female-presenting person dressed in a men's dress shirt and necktie raises finger and looks at it with a smile in from of projected background showing electrical corona discharge and a black and white photograph of another light-skinned, female presenting figure from the 1930s.

Sarah Kanouse | In-Person Performance | Thursday, February 2, 2023, 12 – 1:15 PM Central, InFlux E110

Part storytelling, part lecture, and part live documentary film, Sarah Kanouse’s solo performance “My Electric Genealogy” explores the shifting cultures and politics of energy in Los Angeles and the West through the lens of her own family.

Combining storytelling with moving images, movement, and an original score, the 75-minute performance examines the “infrastructures of feeling” supported by the electric grid, including assumptions of perpetual growth and closely held beliefs about nature, gender, race, and progress. Sarah Kanouse weaves together signal moments in Los Angeles history, episodes of her grandfather’s life, anxious fantasies about a climate-challenged future, and stories of resistance and reinvention in the face of extraction. “My Electric Genealogy” is an essayistic working-through of energy as a personal and collective inheritance at a moment of eco-political reckoning.

This event was in-person only and was not recorded.

 

Young Indigenous person with traditional chin tattoos standing against a cream wall

Kablusiak | Artist Talk | Thursday, February 9, 2023, 6 - 7:30 PM Central, InFlux E110

This artist talk will introduce us to the practice of multidisciplinary Inuvialuk artist Kablusiak while welcoming exchange throughout. Using humor and Inuk ingenuity to invite empathy and solidarity, Kablusiak explores diasporic cultural displacement, family and community ties, and impacts of colonization on Inuit gender and sexuality expressions, health and wellbeing, and the everyday. Engaging materials such as lingerie, Sharpies, bed sheets, felt, soapstone, acrylic paint, and words, they seek to demystify Inuit art and create space for diverse Inuit-led representation.

Video of Kablusiak's artist talk available here.

 

Painting of a Black person in glasses and a t-shirt laying on a bed with a book and stuffed animals, mostly in shades of turqoise, brown, and green

Leslie Barlow | PPFP Artist Talk | Wednesday, February 15, 2023, 12 – 1 PM Central, InFlux E110

Leslie Barlow is an artist living and working on occupied Očeti Šakówin and Wahpekute land now known as Minneapolis, MN. Barlow is interested in reimagining our relationship to our racial identities through healing our collective understanding of belonging and what it means to be family. Her life-size oil paintings serve as both monuments to community members and explorations into how race entangles the intimate sphere of love, family, and friendship. Her work is colorful, tender and nuanced, and inspired by community dialogue and personal experience. Barlow believes art and art making is both healing and liberatory through the power of representation, witnessing and storytelling.

In Fall of 2022, Barlow joined the Department of Art for a two-year research and teaching fellowship through the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP).

 

This event was in-person only and was not recorded.

 

Three people stand talking in front of a giant black and white painting filled with organic circular shapes and marks

Professor Emeritus Clarence Morgan | Gallery Walkthrough | Wednesday, February 22, 2023, 12 - 1:30pm, RSVP required

Join us for a gallery tour of the Nash Gallery’s stunning retrospective exhibition of Professor Morgan’s and his late wife Arlene’s artwork, with light refreshments in the Regis Center for Art lobby starting at 11:30am.

Arlene Burke-Morgan (1950-2017) and Morgan (b. 1950) (née Clarence Morgan) epitomized the artist-couple: in love with each other and devoted not only to their art but also to their family and faith, and to the wider community of students and artists. Originally from Philadelphia, they moved to Minneapolis in 1992 when Morgan joined the faculty in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota. Arlene Burke-Morgan also taught as a lecturer in the Department of Art from 1992 to 1996. Morgan retired his position as Professor of Art at the end of 2021. A Tender Spirit, A Vital Form: Arlene Burke-Morgan & Clarence Morgan brings together 100 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and related ephemera by these two artists that spans over four decades of making.

Video of Morgan's walk-through available on our YouTube.

 

Headshot of a smiling Black man in puffy black vest

Massa Lemu | Boss Visiting Artist Talk | Thursday, April 13, 2023, 4:30pm

Massa Lemu is a visual artist and writer whose multi-disciplinary artistic practice takes the form of text, performance, and multimedia installations that are concerned with the contradictions of migration, and the psychological effects of an immaterial, flexible, and mobile capitalism on the post-colonial subject. Lemu makes interventions into objects and spaces, using aesthetics of politics to comment on the politics of aesthetics. As a writer, Lemu’s scholarly interests lie in what he calls a biopolitical collectivism in contemporary African art which he defines as an immaterial, subject- centered and collectivist art practice situated in everyday life. Lemu has exhibited at 1708 Gallery, Oakwood Arts, Lawndale Arts Center, and Rice University. Lemu is a member of the Malawian collective Ozhopé, with whom he has exhibited on Lake Malawi, in the streets of Lilongwe, at Zomba Market, at University of Malawi, with the Boda Boda Lounge Panafrican video festival, at ABC art space in Cape Town, and at 1927 art space in Athens. His writing has been published by The Burlington Contemporary, Wits University Press, Third Text, Stedelijk Studies Journal, and Contemporaryand. Lemu was a Core Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston from 2010 until 2012. He recently completed a residency with Ozhopé at La Becque in Switzerland. Lemu is also an assistant professor in the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Video of Massa Lemu's Artist Talk available on our YouTube.

 

 

 

2021-2022

Tuesday, November 16, 2021 at 6:30 PM Central
Visiting Artist Talk with Erick Alejandro Hernández 

Thursday, December 2nd, 2021 at 6:30 PM Central
Boss Visiting Artist Talk with Caroline Kent (MFA '08)

Thursday, March 3rd, 2022 at 12:00 PM Central
Visiting Artist Talk with Bobby Rogers

Thursday, March 17th, 2022 at 6:30 PR Central
Visiting Artist Talk with Alison O’Daniel

Thursday, April 7th, 2022 at 6:30 PM Central
Visiting Artist Talk with Alexandra Peck

Thursday, April 14th, 2022 at 6:30 PM Central
Boss Visiting Artist Talk with Joyce Scott 

Spring 2021

THURS  |  APR 1  |  6:30 PM CDT  | VIRTUAL TALK 

Christine Tien Wang

 

Painting of three dinosaurs watching a meteor fall. Speech bubble from one saying, "Oh Shit! The economy!"
Christine Tien Wang, Asteroid, 2020, Acrylic on Canvas,72 x 96 inches

Christine Tien Wang (b. 1985 Washington D.C) received her BFA from The Cooper Union and her MFA in painting from UCLA. Wang completed residencies at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, VCUQatar, Chashama North, and Skowhegan. Wang's solo exhibition Coronavirus Memes is currently on view at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne. Selected group exhibition venues include Frans Hals Museum, Rachel Uffner, Magenta Plains, and The Prince Street Gallery. Wang is in the collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Groeninghe Art Collection in Belgium. Wang is represented by Night Gallery in Los Angeles and Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne and Berlin. Wang is currently Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at California College of Art and lives and works in San Francisco.

Artist Statement:
Memes are increasingly part of my reality. Every morning I doom-scroll on Instagram and look at memes—my meme paintings are modern-day still-life paintings in this way. I see them as a form of documentation of the history we’re currently living through. Memes reveal the failing nature of capitalism and our society at large, and voice personal experiences and perspectives. This combination creates a familiar and relatable experience for the viewer. I am interested in painting memes because they are a growing form of reality, especially as we are going through the coronavirus pandemic and asked to stay in our homes every day. Our worlds become increasingly less physical and more digital—pre-pandemic included, but now more than ever. View more on Christine Tien Wang's website.

WED | MAR 17 | 8:30 PM Central | VIRTUAL TALK
SUN | MAR 28 | 9:00 AM Central | VIRTUAL KNITTING CIRCLE

Dr Mala Srikanth

 

A circle of women knitting in a forest sitting on a brightly colored cloth groundcover
Women engaged in the art of perfect hand-knitting. Photo courtesy of Dr Mala Srikanth

Dr Mala Srikanth has been a medico for a major part of her life. After practising clinical medicine in the Defence services and in private practice, after working in public health projects with the WHO and the Catholic Church, she decided to make major changes in her life and career when she got a second chance to live, following a miraculous recovery from a serious road accident.

Ten years ago, she moved to a small town in the Himalayan mountains and restarted a long forgotten love affair with knitting. With the desire to be a perfect knitter, Dr Mala taught herself the finer points of knitting from books, blogs, online classes and magazines. Keen to spread the magic and joy of good crafting, a small group of hill women were invited to join her in knitting exquisite and perfectly knitted garments. The group of women has grown into a vibrant community of knitters who take immense pride in their craft, who completely believe in their “zero tolerance to mistakes” policy, and who have brought the same vibrancy and perfection into other areas of their lives..confident and forthcoming, the knitters have become community leaders and icons for change. Financial security and the opportunity to constantly learn and grow, has turned them into women who can appreciate beauty and art in every perfect knitted stitch, in every flawless garment made, in every pattern which they master. Dr Mala continues to push boundaries of caste and creed, of superstition and ignorance, of inertia and routine. Her relentless quest for perfection has given the knitters a motto for life. Her consistently caring interactions have helped the knitters to become confident women who enjoy their work and the supportive network they have created for themselves.

Artist statement:
I use the basic scientific principles of clinical medicine and research in every aspect of my life, including craft and art and everything else in-between. When working with these women, these scientific principles are my tools to bring a change in their outlook, to improve their skills and aptitude to a level which puts them at ease with their inherent artistry, and to encourage them to bring quality and perfection into every project in their life. By constantly observing and documenting every aspect of knitting, and with in-depth conversations and support, I now have the honour of working with 18 knitters who are experts in their craft, who have learnt to bring finesse and sublime art into their projects, and who are ready to instruct and inspire others who are trying to emerge from the shadows of the mediocre and the mundane. When artistry and perfection radiates out to the larger community, one is gratified to be the conduit for this incredible effect. It spurs me on to push boundaries of social norms and bring art and joy into the lives of more and more women in these high mountains. View more on Dr. Mala Srikanth's website. 

THURS  |  FEB 11  |  6:30 PM CST  |  VIRTUAL TALK

Chloë Bass 

 

Photograph of a site-specific sculpture in the form of a small yard sign installed in a public park.
Chloë Bass, Wayfinding, 2019, Site-specific sculpture
Photo courtesy of the Studio Museum in Harlem
Image credit: SaVonne Anderson

Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. Chloë has held numerous fellowships and residencies, most recently from the CUNY Center for the Humanities, Lucas Artist Fellows, Art Matters, Denniston Hill, the Recess Analog Artist-in-Residence, and a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent exhibits at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, Knockdown Center, The Kitchen, the Brooklyn Museum, CUE Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the James Gallery, and elsewhere. Reviews, mentions of, and interviews about her work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Temporary Art Review, and Artnews among others. Her monograph was published by The Operating System in 2018; her chapbook, #sky #nofilter, was published by DoubleCross Press in 2020. Her short-form writing has been published on Hyperallergic, Arts.Black, and the Walker Reader. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at Queens College, CUNY, where she co-runs Social Practice Queens with Gregory Sholette.

Artist Statement:
I am a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. My work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. I began my work with a focus on the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 – 2013), recently concluded a study of pairs (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015 – 2018), and am currently in-process with a project observing immediate families (Obligation To Others Holds Me In My Place, 2018 – 2022). I will continue to scale up gradually until I’m working at the scale of the metropolis.

My work investigates the potential of the everyday as a catalyst for intimacy. I’m captivated by the common denominators of the human experience: the things that people do always. I highlight the seemingly normal as a means of questioning its stability. Originally trained as a theater director, I still embrace aspects of Brecht’s idea of alienation: the discomfort that arises from calling attention to structure through naming or pointing. That disconnect appears most clearly for me as a rupture between ourselves, and what we do without thinking. These usually unnoticed acts serve as my primary method of production and inquiry. My work evokes the particular state of attention produced by being alone in public: the sudden sense of everything as fascinating, the strange anxiety between feeling invisible and suddenly becoming aware that you are seen. I study the depth of what is already at hand. My work is not seeking to invent, but to reveal. I believe in performance as participation, and installation as scrutiny. If I succeed, I will become the world’s most invisible performance artist: always present, but unseen. Without you, my work is nothing. See more on Chloe Bass' website.

Fall 2020

THURS  |  OCT 8  |  6:30 PM CST  | VIRTUAL TALK

Caroline Woolard

 

Artwork by Caroline Woolard
Countermeasures: Level, 2018, glass, mineral oil, turned cherry wood (not pictured here), 18 x 8 x 14 inches; by Caroline Woolard

Caroline Woolard employs sculpture, immersive installation, and online networks to imagine and enact systems of collaboration and mutual aid. Her work has been commissioned by and exhibited in major national and international museums, including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and Creative Time. Recent scholarly writing on her work has been published in The Brooklyn Rail (2018); Artforum (2016); Art in America (2016); The New York Times (2016); and South Atlantic Quarterly (2015). Woolard’s work has been featured twice on New York Close Up (2014, 2016), a digital film series produced by Art21 and broadcast on PBS. She is the 2018–20 inaugural Walentas Fellow at Moore College of Art and Design and the inaugural 2019–20 Artist in Residence for INDEX, a new initiative at the Rose Museum. 

Artist Statement:
My life’s work is to imagine and enact models of cooperation in the arts by co-creating online platforms, installations, and events that celebrate the collective power that emerges as people work together. Though I am often cited as a socially engaged or conceptual artist, I consider myself to be a cultural producer whose interdisciplinary work facilitates social imagination at the intersection of art, technology, design, and political economy. I make artworks and designed objects as well as contexts for the circulation of these objects. For example, I create printed matter for barter exchanges and also co-create international barter networks. I design speculative she-wolf tables and also convene investment platforms for community land trusts. I create card games for the commons as I also direct a study center for group work. Together, objects and contexts allow for reflection, circulation, and social transformation. See more on Caroline Woolard's Website.
 

 

Christina Seely
Dissonance, (still), by Christina Seely

THURS  |  NOV 12 |  6:30 PM CST  |  VIRTUAL TALK

Christina Seely

Christina Seely is an interdisciplinary artist who has a broad national and international exhibition record and is featured in many public and private collections. She has been an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in California, and Lightwork in Syracuse, NY, a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, a participant on the Arctic Circle Program, as well as a recipient of a yearlong Public Arts Commission from the city of San Francisco. She received a 2014 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, her first monograph Lux, was co-published in 2015 by Radius Books and the Museum of Contemporary Photography and she was a 2017 recipient of the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship. Her exhibition Next of Kin: Seeing Extinction Through An Artist’s Lens opened at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in 2017. She recently received a 2020 Environmental Humanities Fellowship at University of Edinburgh in Scotland and her solo exhibition entitled Dissonance opened in the Jaffe Friede + Strauss Galleries at Dartmouth College where she is an assistant professor in the Studio Art Department. She received an MFA from RISD and is currently represented by Euqinom Gallery in San Francisco, CA.

Artist Statement:
I create projects that investigate and translate the complexities of both built and natural global systems in order to help a public register and face the realities of our tenuous relationship to the planet. An experiential examination of our understandings of time and the natural world make up the root of her expedition-based practice. Whether culminating as photographic, textual, collaborative or multi-media installation, the work is guided by both the potentials of the photographic medium as an artistic tool and its deconstruction as a dominating cultural syntax. 

Inherently in dialogue with the Anthropocene, the work is designed not to use media to document or convince, but instead to use its inherent veracity to help the viewer comprehend their place within complex planetary systems. The work, as a set of portals, suggests new ways of sensing the self inside the realities of our contemporary relationship to the planet, portals that serve as incremental but tangible ways to acknowledge and accept the facts of the climate crisis we are all facing. See more on Christina Seely's website. 

Spring 2020

 

Ingrid Pollard
DOM, By Dr. Ingrid Pollard

THURS  |  MAR 5  |  7 PM

Dr. Ingrid Pollard

Ingrid Pollard uses digital, analogue and alternative photographic processes, also incorporating printmaking, image-text and artist books, installation, video and audio. Pollard studied Film and Video at the London College of Printing and MA in Photographic Studies, University of Derby and holds a PhD from the University of Westminster. She was one of twenty founding members of Autograph (the Association of Black Photographers), and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. In 2018, Pollard was the inaugural Stuart Hall Research Fellow in the same year. She has worked as an artist-in-residence at a number of organisations, including Project Row Houses, Houston Texas, US, 2004; Croydon College of Art, 2011; and Glasgow Women’s Library, 2019. Her work has been exhibited widely, including Tate Britain, Victoria & Albert Museum & Photographers Gallery, London; NGBK, Berlin; the Caribbean Cultural Centre, New York; the National Art Gallery of Barbados; and Camerawork, San Francisco. In 2019, she received the BALTIC Artist Award and was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award. 

Artist Statement:
While investigating race, ethnicity and public spaces I have developed bodies of photo-based works juxtaposing landscape and portraiture which provide a context for issues of migration, family and home. Photo-work project that shape seek to shape ideas of English landscape, history and how Belonging is expressed through from the micro to the transformation of landscape. I am concerned with issues of observation, the rendering and manipulation of light. Elements which are at the root of Photography. See more on Ingrid Pollard's website.

 

 

Folayemi (Fo) Wilson
Tongues - Installation, By Folayemi (Fo) Wilson

THURS  |  MAR 26  |  7 PM

Folayemi (Fo) Wilson

Folayemi (Fo) Wilson works as a visual artist, designer, educator, curator and writer. She earned a MFA in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design with a concentration in Art History, Theory & Criticism. She has been a grant recipient of the Graham Foundation for the Fine Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Propeller Fund. Her writing has appeared in "NKA, Journal of Contemporary African Art," among other publications. Wilson has been awarded residencies or fellowships at ACRE, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Djerassi, Kohler Arts/Industry program, Haystack, MacDowell Colony, and Purchase College/SUNY Purchase New York. She is an Associate professor at Columbia College Chicago. Wilson’s design work is included in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt National Museum of Design and she is on the board of the American Craft Council. She was honored as a 3Arts awardee in 2015. 

Artist Statement:
I am an object and image maker whose work celebrates the Black Imagination as a technology of resistance and self-determination. My work explores the Black Atlantic experience though sculptural and multimedia installations presenting speculative fictions that reference history, integrating inspiration from American vernacular architecture, literature and science fiction, using original sculpture, found objects, archival media, sound and video. My process utilizes training in art history and critical theory employing the archive and other research methodologies to mine history for use as material in my creative practice. See more on Fo Wilson's website. 

Virtual Visit

 

 

THURS  |  APR 2 |  7 PM  - POSTPONED

Caroline Woolard

Caroline Woolard

Caroline Woolard
Capitoline Wolves, by Caroline Woolard

 employs sculpture, immersive installation, and online networks to imagine and enact systems of collaboration and mutual aid. Her work has been commissioned by and exhibited in major national and international museums, including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and Creative Time. Recent scholarly writing on her work has been published in The Brooklyn Rail (2018); Artforum (2016); Art in America (2016); The New York Times (2016); and South Atlantic Quarterly (2015). Woolard’s work has been featured twice on New York Close Up (2014, 2016), a digital film series produced by Art21 and broadcast on PBS. She is the 2018–20 inaugural Walentas Fellow at Moore College of Art and Design and the inaugural 2019–20 Artist in Residence for INDEX, a new initiative at the Rose Museum. 

Artist Statement:
My life’s work is to imagine and enact models of cooperation in the arts by co-creating online platforms, installations, and events that celebrate the collective power that emerges as people work together. Though I am often cited as a socially engaged or conceptual artist, I consider myself to be a cultural producer whose interdisciplinary work facilitates social imagination at the intersection of art, technology, design, and political economy. I make artworks and designed objects as well as contexts for the circulation of these objects. For example, I create printed matter for barter exchanges and also co-create international barter networks. I design speculative she-wolf tables and also convene investment platforms for community land trusts. I create card games for the commons as I also direct a study center for group work. Together, objects and contexts allow for reflection, circulation, and social transformation. See more on Caroline Woolard's website.
 

 

Rachel Gugelberger
(after)care Exhibit Curated by Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger

THURS  |  APR 16 |  7 PM

Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger

Rachel Gugelberger is a NY-based curator with a focus on place-based practices around social, cultural, and civic issues. Projects include (after)care, a site-specific exhibition in a former emergency waiting room at Kings County Hospital in East Flatbush, Brooklyn; the inaugural Southeast Queens Biennial; and Jameco Exchange, a site-responsive exhibition and socially engaged education platform in a vacant storefront in Jamaica, Queens. Projects at the intersection of information, data and art, include, Once Upon a Time There was the End, The Center for Book Arts, New York, NY; Data Deluge, Ballroom Marfa, TX; and Library Science, Artspace, New Haven, CT. 

Rachel is currently Curator of Programs at Residency Unlimited. She is the former curator at No Longer Empty, a non-profit that curates site-responsive and community-centered exhibitions, education, and programs in unique spaces, and was also director of the NLE Curatorial Lab. Rachel has served as co-director of Sara Meltzer Gallery and curator at Exit Art. See more on Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger's website. 

Virtual Visit

 

 

 

Christina Seely
Dissonance, (still), by Christina Seely

THURS  |  APR 23 |  7 PM - POSTPONED 

Christina Seely

Christina Seely is an interdisciplinary artist who has a broad national and international exhibition record and is featured in many public and private collections. She has been an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in California, and Lightwork in Syracuse, NY, a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, a participant on the Arctic Circle Program, as well as a recipient of a yearlong Public Arts Commission from the city of San Francisco. She received a 2014 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, her first monograph Lux, was co-published in 2015 by Radius Books and the Museum of Contemporary Photography and she was a 2017 recipient of the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship. Her exhibition Next of Kin: Seeing Extinction Through An Artist’s Lens opened at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in 2017. She recently received a 2020 Environmental Humanities Fellowship at University of Edinburgh in Scotland and her solo exhibition entitled Dissonance opened in the Jaffe Friede + Strauss Galleries at Dartmouth College where she is an assistant professor in the Studio Art Department. She received an MFA from RISD and is currently represented by Euqinom Gallery in San Francisco, CA.

Artist Statement:
I create projects that investigate and translate the complexities of both built and natural global systems in order to help a public register and face the realities of our tenuous relationship to the planet. An experiential examination of our understandings of time and the natural world make up the root of her expedition-based practice. Whether culminating as photographic, textual, collaborative or multi-media installation, the work is guided by both the potentials of the photographic medium as an artistic tool and its deconstruction as a dominating cultural syntax. 

Inherently in dialogue with the Anthropocene, the work is designed not to use media to document or convince, but instead to use its inherent veracity to help the viewer comprehend their place within complex planetary systems. The work, as a set of portals, suggests new ways of sensing the self inside the realities of our contemporary relationship to the planet, portals that serve as incremental but tangible ways to acknowledge and accept the facts of the climate crisis we are all facing. See more on Christina Seely's website. 

Many thanks to the generous donors and faculty members who make this series possible.

Fall 2019

THURS  |  OCT 3  |  7 PM

 

By Deborah Aschheim
Threshold, 2013
Deborah Aschheim
Deborah Aschheim

Deborah Aschheim makes installations, sculptures and drawings about memory and place. She has collaborated with musicians and scientists, archivists and architects.  Her solo exhibitions include the  Barrick Museum at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Suyama Space in Seattle; San Diego State University; the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh; Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach. CA. Aschheim has created temporary and permanent public artworks for across California for site including airports, hospitals, libraries, public safety facilities and public transit. From 2009-2011, she was the inaugural Hellman Visiting Artist at the  Memory and Aging Center in the Neurology Department at the University of California, San Francisco. For 2019-202, Aschheim is the Artist-in-Residence/Creative Strategist for Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, helping the department that oversees all elections in LA County with voter outreach and voter education. She lives in Pasadena, CA.

THURS  |  OCT 10  |  12:15 PM

 

By Fidencio Fifield-Perez
Barn Quilt
By Fidencio Fifield-Perez

Fidencio Fifield-Perez

Fidencio Fifield-Perez' work examines the debate over borders, edges, and the people who must traverse them. In his work, Fifield-Perez manipulates paper surfaces and maps to refer to the crafts and customs used to celebrate festivals and mourn the dead. For Fifield-Perez, these techniques are a way to reconnect with a time and place no longer present. Fidencio Fifield-Perez is an Assistant Professor and Head of Painting at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

 

THURS  |  OCT 17  -- THIS TALK HAS BEEN POSTPONED

Lin Tianmiao

Lin Tianmiao is one of the first contemporary Chinese artists to achieve international recognition. She is known for her practice of thread winding in which she binds the material – usually silk, hair, cotton, or felt – tightly around found and manufactured objects.  Initially tasked by her mother to spool cotton as a young girl, Lin later reclaimed the act. Lin’s work studies her own social role and the relationship between identity and social context, questioning the identity of woman and the conventional idea of the social role of woman as mother. Best known for her large-scale installations, Lin also works in sculpture, photography, video, and a variety of other media. 

TUES  |  OCT 22  |  4 PM

Panel Discussion with Ping Chong

As part of the Ping Chong Artist Residency in the University of Minnesota Theatre Arts and Dance Department, artists will gather to discuss their work and scholarship in relation to the regional premiere of Collidescope 4.0: Adventures in Pre and Post Racial America, in collaboration with the University of Minnesota Department of Art. Staging History/Framing Race will bring together theatre and visual artists to discuss the complexities of exploring history and race in their work. Further event details available here

THURS  |  NOV 7  |  7 PM

Brad Kahlhamer
 
By Brad Kahlhamer

Based in New York, New York, Brad Kahlhamer works with a range of media from sculpture, drawing and painting to performance and music to explore what he refers to as the “third place”—a meeting point of two opposing personal histories. Some influences include Abstract Expressionism, street art, nineteenth-century Plains ledger drawings, and pop art. His work has been collected by institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Denver Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, among others.

 

 

 

 

 

THURS  |  NOV 14  |  7 PM

Leila W. Kinney

 

Visiting Artists & Critics Program

Leila Kinney is visiting the UMN at the invitation of ArTeS (Art + Technology + Science). ArTeS is the Institute for Advanced Study supported creative research collaborative that is proposing to center the arts in an intercollegiate art, technology, and science initiative at the University of Minnesota. This public talk will provide a catalyst for conversations about how students, faculty, staff, and community imagine the potential of ArTeS and how this initiative might expand our conception of who participates in the collaborative process of generating an inclusive ecology of art.

 

THURS  |  NOV 21  |  7 PM

Ulrike Mohr

Ulrike’s artistic approach utilizes material transformation processes that are influenced by complex research, and also by chance occurrences. Among many things, she makes large “spatial drawings” that are characterized by an attention to detail and surface. Ulrike is coming from Weissensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin and will be in residence in the Art Department from November 17 - December 10.

 

Spring 2019

 

Sandra Teitge - Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis

Sandra Teitge, Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis
Thursday, March 7
Artist Talk 4:45pm | INFLUX Auditorium

Goethe in the Skyways is a year-long-program of artistic actions, interventions, and manifestations in public, semi-public, and private space in the frame of the “Year of German-American Friendship” initiative in 2018/19 in the US. For 12 months, the Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis occupies a space in the city’s futuristic skyway system, an 18-kilometer-long indoor artificial gangway and pedestrian bridge network constructed in the 1960s that is still the longest of its kind in the world today. Sandra Teitge, director of the Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis, invites artists to develop and present works specifically conceived for the Goethe in the Skyways space that challenge and question, (inter-)rupt and disturb the site and context-specific conditions of the skyway system, the city of Minneapolis, and the state of Minnesota, always in relation to national and international issues and debates.

 

Alexandra Engelfriet - Fortiter et Suaviter
Alexandra Engelfriet, Still from "Fortiter et Suaviter," 2018, film by Jérémie Basset.

Alexandra Engelfriet
Friday, March 29th
Artist Talk 7pm | INFLUX Auditorium

"The essence of my work still is movement, moving matter, structures and rich textures emerging out of the process of kneading and molding clay with the body. New possibilities emerge. In a world that becomes more and more virtual, to be able to feel and experience the touch and sensuality of the body through the art of clay, is what I aim for."

Alexandra Engelfriet was born in the Netherlands in 1959 and has received her training at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She takes a special place in the ceramic field, as she has also been into fashion design, sculpture and land-art. It is only in recent years that she has become an artist working with clay, with a strong fascination and reference to nature.

Generously Supported by the Boss Foundation.

 

Tia-Simone Gardner

Tia-Simone Gardner
Thursday, April 4
Artist Talk 7pm | INFLUX Auditorium

Tia-Simone Gardner is an artist, educator, and Black feminist scholar. Her creative and scholarly practice involves interdisciplinary strategies that engage ideas of ritual, iconoclasm, and geography. Gardner received her BA in Art and Art History from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. In 2009 she received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Time-Based Media from the University of Pennsylvania, and she recently received her Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the Department Gender Women's and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is currently working on a project on Blackness and the Mississippi River, as well as expanding her dissertation, titled 'Sensing Place: House-Scale, Black Geographies, and a Humanly Workable City,' into an artist book and a series of site-specific installations.

 

David Bowen

David Bowen
Thursday, April 18
Artist Talk 7pm | INFLUX Auditorium

David Bowen is a studio artist and educator whose work has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. Bowen’s work is concerned with aesthetics that result from interactive, reactive and generative processes as they relate to intersections between natural and mechanical systems. He is currently an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Physical Computing at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

 

iron50.jpg

Michal Staszczak, Rian Kerrane, James Hayes
Thursday, May 2
Artist Talk 7pm | INFLUX Auditorium

James L. Hayes, Rian Kerrane and Michał Staszczak will give talks in conjunction with their residency during IRON50, the 50th Annual University of Minnesota Iron Pour and related programs. April 18 – May 5, 2019.

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

Robert Cozzolino began at Mia on February 29, 2016—a leap day. He has been called the “curator of the dispossessed” for championing underrepresented artists and uncommon perspectives on well-known artists. He has collaborated with many contemporary artists, and in 2014 organized the largest American museum exhibition of David Lynch’s visual art. A native of Chicago, he studied at the University of Illinois at Chicago before receiving his MA and PhD (2006) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In his work on American art he has emphasized regional diversity, integrating artists of Illinois, Wisconsin, California, and other areas into installations, thematic exhibitions, and his scholarship. Before joining Mia he was the senior curator and Evelyn and Will Kaplan Curator of Modern Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia, where he oversaw more than 30 exhibitions, including retrospectives of George Tooker, Peter Blume, and Elizabeth Osborne. He acquired more than 2,000 objects for PAFA, mostly gifts, including the Linda Lee Alter Collection of Art by Women and major collections of work by Sue Coe, Ellen Lanyon, and Miriam Schapiro.
 

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:

 

Chloe Lum & Yannick Desranleau

January 25, 2016

Chloe Lum & Yannick Desranleau are multidisciplinary visual artists based in Montreal. Their work focuses on the lifespan of material, and how material stresses cause reactions that can be said to animate the materials. The duo is equally interested in collaboration; with each other, other artists, and their materials, as both subject matter and research interest. These interests in collaboration and materiality inform their practice in installation, sculpture, photography, dance, print and video wherein objects perform via their decay; to be reused and redeployed wearing the traces of past use. They have exhibited widely, recently at The Confederation Center for The Arts Gallery in Charlottetown, and The Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College in Chicago. Find more information about their presentation here.

 

 

 

 

 

Tonja Torgerson

February 25, 2016

Tonja Torgerson creates printmaking based installation work that embraces and questions the current direction of the medium and use of the multiple. Torgeson employs traditional printmaking methods, wheat paste and installation to broach the subjects of human impermanence and decay. Torgerson holds a BFA from the University of Minnesota and an MFA from Syracuse University. She is currently a Print Studio Fellow at the Lawrence Arts Center in Lawrence, Kansas.

This talk is in conjunction with Free Radicals: Remixing History Through the Power of Print.

 

 

 

 

 

Scott Nedrelow

February 29, 2016

Scott Nedrelow is a multidisciplinary artist working across platforms including photography, video, and sculpture.

In 2011 Nedrelow presented Movie, a six-channel video installation, as a Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Movie was acquired and installed in the exhibition 75 Gifts for 75 Years at the Walker Art Center in 2015. Earthrise/earthset, a two-channel video, was shown in The Nature of Nature at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 2014. A work from his 2014 solo exhibition Afterlight at David Petersen Gallery is included in Ordinary Pictures, a survey of conceptual image-based practices at the Walker Art Center in 2016. Nedrelow is a 2015/16 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow and has received a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

 

Trenton Doyle Hancock

April 7, 2016

Trenton Doyle Hancock earned his BFA from Texas A&M University, Commerce, and his MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia. Hancock’s prints, drawings, and collaged-felt paintings work together to tell the story of the Mounds—a group of mythical creatures that are the tragic protagonists of the artist’s unfolding narrative. Each new work by Hancock is a contribution to the saga of the Mounds, portraying the birth, life, death, afterlife, and even dream states of these half-animal, half-plant creatures. Influenced by the history of painting, especially Abstract Expressionism, Hancock transforms traditionally formal decisions—such as the use of color, language, and pattern—into opportunities to create new characters, develop sub-plots, and convey symbolic meaning. Hancock’s paintings often rework Biblical stories that the artist learned as a child from his family and local church community. Balancing moral dilemmas with wit and a musical sense of language and color, Hancock’s works create a painterly space of psychological dimensions. He is represented in New York by James Cohan Gallery and was featured in PBS' Art:21.

 

Coral Penelope Lambert

April 14, 2016

Coral Penelope Lambert is internationally recognized for large scale cast metal sculpture. Born and raised in London, UK she studied sculpture with Sir Anthony Caro and other leading figures in the field since living in America. She was an international research fellow at the University of Minnesota from 1995-98 and continues to utilize foundry practice to harness metals rich history in myth and mining. She is currently Associate Professor of Sculpture at Alfred University in Upstate New York where she directs the National Casting Centre Foundry. Her work can be seen in many sculpture parks, prestigious exhibitions and collections around the world.

This talk in conjunction with the 47th Annual Iron Pour: Iron Disco.

 

Amir H. Fallah

April 28, 2015

Amir H. Fallah received his BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2001 and his MFA from University of California Los Angeles in 2005. His artistic oeuvre encompasses painting, drawing and sculpture/installation, with collage and complex patterning forming a large part of the visual vocabulary. The works are decidedly ornate but present a critical observation of the deconstruction and appropriation of portraiture in all its various forms. In his more recent body of work, aside from unravelling a different perspective to art historical portraiture traditions and the dynamics of modern day art collection and art making, he also reflects upon concerns of identity and representation that are central to his practice. 

Amir has exhibited widely across the United States and internationally. Amir is a 2015 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. His works are part of several private and public collections, including the Nerman Museum Of Contemporary Art and the Salsali Private Museum Collection. Amir lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

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.