Visiting Artist Speaker Series

Public recordings of select Visiting Artist Speaker Series sessions can be found on the Department of Art YouTube here. For additional Speaker Series recordings held in the Department Archive, inquire with the Art Resource Manager. 

Aug. 25 - Faculty Area Presentations

Sept. 1 - No Class / Labor Day

Sept. 8 - Clifford Owens

Sept. 15 - Alex Lukas

Sept. 22 - Yola Monakhov Stockton

Sept. 29 - Joey Fauerso

Oct. 6  - Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez

Oct. 13 - No Class / Fall Break

Oct. 20 - Mark Dion

Oct. 27 - Imin Yeh

Nov. 3 - Cooper Holoweski

Nov. 10 - Karina Aguilera Skvirsky

Nov. 17 - Carolyn J. Hall and Clarinda Mac Low

Nov. 24 - Caitlin Cass

Dec. 1 - Christina L. De León

Dec. 8 - Julia Lillie

Clifford Owens is a visual artist. His solo museum exhibitions include Anthology at MoMA PS1 (2011) Better the Rebel You Know at the former Cornerhouse in Manchester, England (2014), and Perspectives 173: Clifford Owens at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2011). His performance-based projects have been featured at the Museum of Modern Art (2017), Baltimore Museum of Art (2019), Brooklyn Academy of Music (2014). Owens’ art is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, and Studio Museum in Harlem. He is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Owens was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1971, and he lives and works between New York City and Jersey City. 

Alex Lukas was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in nearby Cambridge. With a wide range of influences, Lukas’ practice focuses on the intersections of place and human activity, narrative, and history. His fieldwork, research, and production reframe the incidental and the monumental through intricate publication series, sculptures, drawings, prints, audio collages, and experimental curatorial platforms. Lukas’ work has been exhibited widely and is included in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Kadist Foundation, the MIT List Student Lending Art Collection, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, amongst other institutions. He has been awarded residencies at The Bemis Center for the Arts, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, and the Kohler Arts/Industry program and was recently named one of the University of California Regents’ Humanities Faculty Fellows in support of his most recent curatorial project, Public Texts: A Californian Visual Language, a multi-faceted exhibition and public art initiative presented at the AD&A Museum in the spring of 2025. Lukas graduated with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and received his MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. He is an Associate Professor of Print and Publication in the Department of Art at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Yola Monakhov Stockton is a Soviet-born, Hawai‘i-based artist who grew up around New York City. Through inquisitive  and collaborative approaches to photography, film, & the documentary form, her work addresses lived experience, ecology, and resilience.

Monakhov Stockton’s work is in the permanent collections of the George Eastman Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Smith College Museum of Art, JP Morgan Chase, and Fidelity Investments. She is author of The Nature of Imitation (Schilt, 2015), a photographic monograph created with scientists who study bird behavior and migration. She has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, including at Alice Austen Museum, East Hawai‘i Cultural Center, Garden Gallery LA, George Eastman Museum, Last Projects, Light Field Festival, Rick Wester Fine Art, Sasha Wolf Gallery, Schilt Gallery, and Tianshui Photography Festival. She has also worked in photojournalism, covering Central Asia, the Middle East, and former Soviet Union, and New York City, with her work appearing in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s, Marie Claire, Der Stern, Vostok, and other publications. She is currently Assistant Professor and Photo Area Chair at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. 

Joey Fauerso is an artist and 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in the Fine Arts. Her work consists mostly of painting, video, installation and performance addressing issues of gender, humor and family. Recently her work has been exhibited at the Blanton Museum of Art, Ruby City Museum, the Galveston Art Center, Western Exhibitions Gallery, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Drawing Center in New York. Fauerso has been the recipient of multiple grants and residencies, including a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Joan Mitchell Grant for Painters and Sculptors, a 2021 Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, the RAIR artist in residence grant, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Fauerso is a Professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University, and lives with her family in San Antonio, Texas.

Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez is a Colombo-American artist with an interdisciplinary practice. Her work investigates the complex intersections of identity, gender, cultural memory, and the effects of colonization. She is creating an intersectional feminist visual novel that is a multifaceted project comprised of paintings, sculptures, objects, and mixed media that together—and in different voices—weave a synchronicity of narratives about hybridity and cultural ownership. She has exhibited at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Halsey Institute for Contemporary Art, Nerman Museum of Art, Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Blue Star Contemporary, Columbus Museum of Art, Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, La Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador, the Sheldon Museum of Art, the Joslyn Art Museum, Museo de Arte Moderno, the Portland Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Schneider Museum of Art, Frost Museum, Queens Museum of Art, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Friedemann-Sánchez was awarded the Doctorow Prize in Painting, a Smithsonian Artist Fellowship, a Puffin grant, a Pollock-Krasner grant, and a NALAC grant. She was a resident at Art OMI, Fountainhead, Tamarind Institute, Yaddo, Gasworks, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Her work is collected by the Sheldon Museum, El Museo del Barrio, and the Cleveland Museum. 

The visual artist Mark Dion was born in 1961 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. By locating the roots of environmental politics and public policy in the construction of knowledge about nature, Mark Dion questions the authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society, tracking how pseudo-science, social agendas and ideology creep into the public science discourse and institutional knowledge production. Dion has received numerous awards, including The Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2007) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Lucida Art Award (2008) and was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient in 2019. He has had major exhibitions at the Miami Art Museum (2006); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2004); Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2003); Tate Gallery, London (1999), and the British Museum of Natural History in London (2007). “Neukom Vivarium” (2006), a permanent outdoor installation and learning lab for the Olympic Sculpture Park, was commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum. Dion has also produced large scale permanent commissions for Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, the Montevideo Biennale in Uruguay, The Rose Art Museum, Johns Hopkins University, the city of Stavoren, Holland and the Port of Los Angeles.

Imin Yeh is a project-based artist working with sculpture, installation, artist publications, and participatory projects expanding the role paper and print played in the recording, copying, and spreading of the human story for more than a millennia. She has recently exhibited at Catharine Clark Gallery (San Francisco), Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia), San Jose Museum of Art (San Jose), Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), and the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco). Recent awards include a creative development award from the Heinz Foundation, a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, and an Individual Artist Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission. She is currently an Associate Professor of Print Media at Carnegie Mellon University School of Art and is based in Pittsburgh, PA.

Cooper Holoweski is an artist working in print, video, and sculpture.   His work explores the intersection of spirituality and consumerism through everyday objects and materials.  Holoweski has an MFA in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design and has held residencies at Taller 99 in Santiago, Chile; Gallery Titanik in Turku, Finland; the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; the Clocktower Gallery and the Lower East Side Printshop in NYC.  His prints have been described as “striking” by Paul Coldwell in Art in Print, and his video work has been praised by Sarah Schmerler of Art in America as “magical” and “infinitely watchable.”  Solo Exhibitions include: Nostalgia and Obsolescence, Small Editions, Brooklyn, NY, Cannibal Universe, Clocktower Gallery at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY, and Basement Cosmos, CCS Center Galleries, Detroit, MI.  In Spring of 2017 he was awarded the Prix de Print by Art in PrintMagazine.  His short film “As Above, So Below” won Best Regional Filmmaker at the 57th annual Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2019.  In the summer of 2023, he was an artist in residence at the Frans Masereel Centrum in Kasterlee, Belgium.

Holoweski is currently the Artist-In-Residence and Head of the Print Media department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice began in photography and grew into video and performance. In 2019, she received a grant from Creative Capital to produce Sacred Geometry, a series of hand-cut photographic collages and How to build a wall and other ruins, a project that includes a multi-channel video installation and live performances. 

National and international exhibitions venues include: Pompidou Centre, Malaga SP (2024); LatinX Project, NY NY (2024), RGR Gallery, CDMX (2024). Museo de la Ciudad, Cuenca, EC (2021), Photoville, The Clemente, NY NY (2021), Museo Amparo, Puebla, MX (2019), Centro de la imagen, CDMX (2018), Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Quito, EC (2018), The Deutsche Bank, NY, NY (2018), Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY (2017), The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA (2016).

Artist Statement:

Like many immigrants in search of a better life, my mother migrated from Ecuador to the US in the 1960s. My Ecuadorean grandmother soon followed and helped raise me. I grew up going back and forth between Guayaquil (EC) and Washington DC (US). My art practice is driven in part by the on-going visits to my mother’s homeland throughout my childhood. I work across disciplines integrating various media that embrace abstraction and materiality. My projects rely on research based practices that include traditional methods (combing archives), oral histories (I interview lots of people) and critical fabulation (I fill in the gaps that history leaves out).

Sunk Shore is a multidisciplinary art action and social engagement created by dancer/marine ecologist Carolyn Hall and multidisciplinary arts/microbiologist Clarinda Mac Low. We love our home shorelines in New York City, and have seen the impact of the climate changing every day. We felt compelled to act. With Sunk Shore we want to create a way to help people feel and relate to climate data so that it becomes personal and visceral. Sunk Shore started out as a physical walking tour into the climate changed future that takes place along specific shorelines. The tours combine speculative fiction based in climate modeling, participatory activities, and somatic practice to make complex climate and ecosystem data personal, experiential, and relatable. Our current goal is to make a template that can be used along any shoreline, empowering local residents to become stakeholders in the future of their waterways through imaginative problem-solving and speculative invention. sunkshore.com

Carolyn Hall (she/her) holds an MS in marine science with a focus on historical marine ecology, is a science communication facilitator and an award-winning professional dancer. She can often be found along shorelines hatching plans for creative public engagement projects around fish, water, and climate change. She truly believes that making data-rich, complex research more relatable and memorable will improve our future. She co-directs science communication programs for the American Fisheries Society, is a co-founder of Exact Communication, was a Creative Programs Coordinator for Genspace from 2022-2024 and remains a consultant for the Artist in Residence program, is on the core team of Works on Water, collaborates with iLAND and Maho Ogawa/Suisoco, and creates the speculative future climate change project Sunk Shore with Clarinda Mac Low. carolynjhall.com

Clarinda Mac Low (they/she) was born and raised in the NYC avant-garde arts scene. She started out working in dance and molecular biology and now works in performance and installation, creating participatory events, including Sunk Shore (with Carolyn Hall). She also creates organization as experiments, including Culture Push, and Works on Water. In addition, she is a professor in design and technology and a former HIV/AIDS researcher and medical journalist. From 2022-2024 she was embedded with Genspace, a community biology laboratory, as part of the Creative Rebuilds New York Artists Employment Program. Mac Low is devoted to her home city, and has been intensively investigating its shorelines for over 15 years.

Caitlin Cass is a comic and installation artist and the author of the Eisner nominated graphic history Suffrage Song: The Haunted History of Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the U.S (Fantagraphics, 2024). Her cartoons have been published in The New Yorker and her work has received support from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts and The Nebraska Arts Council. In 2009, while an MFA student at the University at Buffalo, Caitlin started making a comic periodical called the “Great” Moments in Western Civilization Postal Constituent. She still publishes six new issues of this comic a year. She is currently working on a graphic history about the visual culture of disaster.

Christina L. De León is Acting Deputy Director of Curatorial at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Since joining the museum in 2016, she has focused on researching and collecting U.S. Latinx and Latin American design, as well as developing exhibitions, educational programs, and digital content that focus on design from the Americas. From 2010 to 2016, De León was Associate Curator at Americas Society, where she organized exhibitions and publications on modern and contemporary Latin American art. She has also held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Met Cloisters. De León holds a B.A. from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and an M.A. from New York University, and she is currently a doctoral candidate at the Bard Graduate Center.

Julia Lillie is a historian who studies the print culture and social history of early modern Europe. She specializes in sixteenth-century prints, illustrated books and maps made in Northern Europe, and on the ways these highly mobile objects created and disseminated knowledge in an increasingly connected world. Her work also investigates the formation of social networks in the collaborative environments of printshops, the migrations of Netherlandish artists, and the scholarly ambitions of early modern printmakers. She holds a BA from the University of St. Andrews, and an MA and PhD from the Bard Graduate Center. She has been a recipient of fellowship and research support from the Herzog-Ernst-Stipendium, Gotha Research Library, RSA-Samuel H. Kress Research Fellowship in Renaissance Art, The Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies and Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. She has a professional background in museums and galleries, previously serving as the Collections Manager in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.