Visiting Artist Speaker Series

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Mondays at 6:30pm online

More details on online participation to come.

The Department of Art regularly invites artists, critics, historians and designers to participate in the Department of Art Speaker Series, classroom lectures and critiques. The lecture series happens every fall semester and is free to the public.

Fall 2020

  • 9/14 Erin Genia
    • (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice follows various strands, merging cultural imperatives, pure expression, and exploration of materiality, with a response to past, present, and future matters. Erin is concerned with creating a powerful presence of Indigeneity in the arts and sciences to invoke an evolution of thought and practice in societal instruments that are aligned with the cycles of the natural world and the potential of humanity. She is a 2017 First Peoples Fund fellow. More information on Eri Genia: https://www.eringenia.studio/about.html
  • 9/21 Matt Saunders
    • Grounded in a practice of painting, Matt Saunders works in a variety of media, most notably large format photographs produced without a camera, as well as complex installations of hand-painted animated videos, which are projected across canvases and other “screens.” Look at Saunders’ work here: https://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/61-matt-saunders/
  • 9/28 Victoria Udondian
    • Victoria Udondian lives and work in Lagos and New York -Udondian creates work that questions notions of cultural identity and post-colonial positions in relation to her experiences growing up in Nigeria, a country flooded with cast off from the West. Her work is driven by her interest in textiles and the potential for clothing to shape identity, informed by the histories and tacit meanings embedded in everyday materials. She engages with repurposed material to investigate how fundamental changes in fabric can affect one’s perception of identity. Additional Information here: http://victoriaudondian.com Victoria Udondian is part of the Distinguished Visiting Scholars Program Center for Diversity Innovation
  • 10/5 Sara Greenberger Rafferty
    • Sara Greenberger Rafferty has exhibited widely since 2001, including solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Eli Marsh Gallery at Amherst College, Massachusetts; Fine Arts Center Gallery at University of Arkansas; and a commissioned sculpture for the Public Art Fund. Gloves Off, the first traveling survey of her work with accompanying fully illustrated catalogue published by SUNY Press, completed a threevenue tour at the end of 2017. Additional Information here: https://sgrstudio.info
  • 10/12 Michael Ashkin
    • Michael Ashkin's work spans various media, including sculpture, installation, photography, video, poetry, and text. His work addresses issues of landscape and urbanism, specifically the intersection of subjectivity with the social, economic, and political production of space. Ashkin's work has been exhibited at Documenta 11 (2002), the Whitney Biennial (1997), the Vienna Secession (2009), among others in the U.S. and abroad. He has recently published three photobooks, were it not for (2019), Horizont (2018), and Long Branch (2014). Additional Information here: http://www.michaelashkin.com
  • 10/19 Catherine D’Ignazio (aka kanarinka)
    • Catherine D’Ignazio (aka kanarinka) is an artist and educator. She is Co-Director of the experimental curatorial group iKatun and a founding member of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things. After spending eight years in educational technology as a java programmer & technical project manager, she now teaches at RISD’s Digital Media Graduate Program. She has also taught at MIT, Emerson College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Additional Information here: http://www.kanarinka.com
  • 10/26 Adam Brown
    • Adam Brown is an internationally recognized conceptual artist whose work incorporates art and science hybrids including living and biological systems, robotics, molecular chemistry and emerging technologies that take the form of installation, interactive objects, video, performance and photography. Brown’s creative research is informed by a background in Intermedia, a philosophy that provides a framework for breaking down and combining different models of thought and bringing together disparate disciplines, leading to the establishment of new forms of research and creative activity. Additional Information here: http://adamwbrown.net
  • 11/2 Dawit L. Petros / Karyn Olivier
    • Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist, researcher and educator. His work is informed by studies of global modernisms, theories of diaspora, and postcolonial studies. Throughout the past decade, he has focused on a critical re-reading of the entanglements between colonialism and modernity. His works aim for an introspective and textured analysis of the historical factors that produced these migratory conditions. Petros installs photographs, moving images, sculptural objects, and sound work according to performative, painterly, or site responsive logics. Additional Information here: http://www.dawitlpetros.com
    • Karyn Olivier, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, creates sculptures, installations and public art. Her work often intersects and collapses multiple histories and memories with present-day narratives. She has exhibited at the Gwangju and Busan Biennials; World Festival of Black Arts and Culture, (Dakar, Senegal); The Studio Museum in Harlem; The Whitney Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art’s P.S.1; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Contemporary Art Museum Houston; The Mattress Factory; SculptureCenter; Laumeier Sculpture Park; Drexel University; Ulrich Museum of Art and the University of Delaware Museum, among others. Additional Information here: https://karynolivier.com
  • 11/9 Stephanie Syjuco 
    • Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Using critical wit and collaborative co-creation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies and empire. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship. Additional Information here: https://www.stephaniesyjuco.com
  • 11/16 Kamau Patton
    • Kamau Patton is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work examines history and culture through engagement with archives, documents, stories, and sites. Patton’s projects are dialogic and take form as expanded field conversations. Patton received his MFA from Stanford University in 2007 and received a degree in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. His work was shown in 2012 as part of Pacific Standard Time and in 2013 as part of the Machine Project Field guide to LA Architecture. Patton has completed projects in soundscape studies through support provided by the State University of New York at Buffalo, the Mellon Elemental Arts Initiative, and the Tang Teaching Museum. Additional Information here: http://kamaupatton.com
  • 11/23 Rick Griffith
    • Rick Griffith is a graphic designer and master letterpress printer. His work is an erudite exploration of language, history, politics, science, music, and ethics—typographically-focused and relevant. He is known as apassionate advocate for design. Rick was born and raised in Southeast London and immigrated to the U.S. in the late ‘80s. It was his early jobs at Washington D.C. record stores and the Punk scene that turned him on to graphic design. It was a (short) freelance career on Madison Avenue which funded his first practice, RGD (Rick Griffith Design), and it is his love of design (and his partner Debra Johnson) which sustains the design practice MATTER, which, over the last two decades, has grown into an ambidextrous design consultancy, print shop, workshop, and retail bookstore. He recently founded the consultancy Design Complex. Additional Information here: https://morematter.com
  • 11/30 Sarah Sandman
    • Sarah Sandman is a Brooklyn-based artist, designer and activist creating experiences that amplify messages of social change. She is the founder and co-director of Brick x Brick, an art performance project that builds human walls against Trump and misogyny. Sandman is a 2017 Senior TED Fellow and holds an MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. Additional Information here: http://www.sarahsandman.com