2023 Visiting Artist Speaker Series

• Frederick Wright Jones was born in Boyertown, Pennsylvania. He received his MFA in Sculpture and Emerging Practices at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Inspired by myth, pop culture, and the utilitarian, his tactile objects work to materialize forces we neither see nor measure, and to dissect the contradictions of narrative. An Associate Professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Frederick is currently working with the mapping of history and memory. Slightly peripheral, he travels between his families in Pennsylvania, Hamburg-Germany, memory, and rememory.

Instagram: @frederickwrightjones

• Lili Chin is an artist based in New York City. Combining installation, video and sculpture, her practice focuses on nature and architecture to explore rituals in time, bridging contemporary and ancient ideas that investigate themes of memory, duration and spirituality. Selected international exhibition venues include The Drawing Center, NY, Island83, NY, Below Grand, NY, Bronx River Art Center, NY,  Island 83 Gallery, NY, STPI Gallery in Singapore, as well as several other art organizations in the US, Scotland, Latin America, Europe, Japan and China. Her films have screened at Anthology Film Archives, 601 Art Space, Microscope Gallery, Edinburgh Film Festival and the Pacific Film Archive. She has created commissioned installations for the He Xiangning Museum in Shenzhen and the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, CT and her work is part of the White Columns Artist Registry. As a recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, the Visual Studies Workshop, the Akiyoshidai International Art Village, and Buffalo Arts Studio, she has also attended residencies at Mass MoCA, the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Cove Park, BRIC, and the Galveston Artist Residency. She is a recipient of the LMCC Creative Engagement grant and additionally curates projects and screenings. She received an MFA from the University of California San Diego, a BFA from Pratt Institute, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

A recording of Lili Chen's lecture was created, for internal use only in the Department of Art. If you are a current student, faculty, or staff in the Department, you may reach out to the Art Resource Manager to request access.

• FUTURA (b. Leonard Hilton McGurr, 1955, New York, NY) is an artist whose practice first developed within the genre of graffiti in New York City during the 1970s. He was among the earliest artists to introduce abstraction into the art form and among the first to break barriers and show in contemporary art galleries in the early 1980s. Exhibitions of his early work include presentations at Patti Astor's Fun Gallery and Tony Shafrazi Gallery. MoMA PS1’s landmark 1981 New York/ New Wave exhibition presented Futura alongside colleagues and friends Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rammellzee, and Kenny Scharf. The show also included Marcia Resnick, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Nan Goldin and was curated by Diego Cortez.
  • FUTURA is regarded as one of the world's most-dynamic collaborators and has built a rich oeuvre of intersectional work with artists—across multiple genres. In the 1980s, FUTURA first collaborated with the punk band The Clash, designing album packaging and painting on large-scale canvases as they performed live in concert. In the 1990s and 2000s, he was a foundational artistic force for the brands Supreme and A Bathing Ape by Nigo and one of the first three non-athletes ever to have a Nike sneaker. In recent years, he has created collaborative art editions with Takashi Murakami and has exhibited at Kaikai KiKi Gallery in Tokyo. In 2018 and 2019, he worked with Virgil Abloh on collections for Off-White, site-specific installations for Louis Vuitton, and stage performance visuals for Coachella. In 2020, he co-designed a runway collection with Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons SHIRT, and has been a long-time collaborator of the iconic French fashion designer Agnès b. 
  • Exhibitions of FUTURA's work include The New Museum, New York; MOCA, Los Angeles; the Groninger Museum, the Netherlands; Yvon Lambert, Galerie De Noirmont; the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. In 2020, the Isamu Noguchi Museum presented Futura Akari, an installation of Akari light sculptures customized by FUTURA'; the artist created a large site-specific installation at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and was included in the exhibition Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip Hop Generation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 
  • In 2020, Rizzoli New York published FUTURA: The Artist's Monograph, The most in- depth and comprehensive survey of the life and career of the artist to date. Futura was honored, and a scholarship was established, in his name, for his dedication to underserved youths by the non-profit arts organization Free Arts NYC in 2022. FUTURA is represented by Eric Firestone Gallery in New York City. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 
• Carlos Mare (Carlos M. Rodriguez - aka Mare139)- b.1965 NYC-Puerto Rican American Sculptor/Painter/Scholar with a lengthy professional interdisciplinary practice in the arts. He was born and raised between NYC's Upper West Side and South Bronx through its most tumultuous period of decay and earliest days of an emerging culture to be named Hip Hop in the early 80s. Mare gained early acclaim as a child for painting subway trains and his appearance in the famed documentary Style Wars in 1983. Over the years he would go on to pioneer Modern Graffiti Sculpture and painting, contemporary Academia about Hip Hop culture, and venture into technology with Digital Graffiti, notably launching Hip Hop online during the earliest years of the internet and subsequently earning the prestigious Webby Award for producing the Style Wars website in 2006. 
  • Among his most known projects is the designing of the Annual BET Awards sculpture (Black Entertainment Award) in 2001. Award winners include Stevie Wonder, Prince, Beyonce, JayZ, Kanye West, Kobe Bryant, and Halle Berry among others. 
  • Throughout the years' Mare has always committed himself to all disciplines of creativity especially fine art, technology, and education, often lecturing at Universities and Museums globally and touring as a US State Department Cultural Ambassador for Urban Art. In 2019 he became a founding member and curator of the Museum of Graffiti in Miami and in 2021 he launched M139 Design Studio for his multifaceted artistic practices.
  • Mare currently runs his art studio and practice out of Southern Florida and continues to lecture and exhibit his sculptures, paintings, and drawings. His work is now in the Museum of Modern Art collection, and Pera Art Museum. 
  • Most recently he lectured in Saudi Arabia at Ithra- The King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture. Forthcoming in 2022 is an exhibition of his B-boy Abstract sculptures for Beyond the Streets- Shanghai, China, Next Wave: New Contemporaries of the Abstract Moment- at the Ft. Wayne Museum of Art, Carrie Furnace- Pittsburgh- Grit and Graffiti residency at Rivers of Steel, Breaking Paris- 2024 Olympics 
  • @carlosmare @mare139 @b_boyabstracts 
    

• Kenny Schachter has been curating contemporary art shows in museums and galleries while teaching art history and economics for more than thirty years between Switzerland and the United States. Schachter has a column on Artnet.com and contributes to various international publications, including the New York Magazine and The Times Magazine (UK). He has been featured in newspapers, magazines and books internationally including the cover of The NY Times Magazine (September 1996) and the book Boom by Michael Schnayerson (2019). Schachter co-authored an NFT book with Noah Charney of Cambridge published by Rowman & Littlefield November, 2023.
• After making digital art for decades, Schachter has spearheaded the traditional art world’s adaptation of Non Fungible Tokens in 2020-1 by lecturing at Yale and the Hirschhorn Museum and has written more than a dozen feature articles on the subject. In 2021, he curated wide-ranging NFTism exhibitions (a term he trademarked) at Nagel Draxler in Cologne, Institut in London. His latest NFT projects are Pop Principle: The Game with the UK’s Daata and Open Book with Async.
• Schachter had a retrospective of his art at Joel Mesler’s Rental Gallery in New York in the summer of 2018, curated a show at Simon Lee Gallery in London (Fall 2018) and a solo show at Kantor Gallery in LA (Feb. 2019). He recently had a show with Eva Beresin at Galerie Charim in Vienna (May 2021) and participated in Art Basel 2021 (Basel and Miami) with Nagel Draxler Gallery. In addition, Schachter inaugurated the first one-person exhibit in Nagel Draxler’s Crypto Kiosk Gallery in Berlin between January - March 2022. For 2023 Schachter has one person exhibits at the NFT Gallery in NYC and London (May and October) and a mid-career museum survey at the Francisco Carolinum, Austria, in September. 

• Born January 29^th, 1985 - Washington D.C.
• Aaron is a multi-disciplinary artist, Associate Professor and Kenneth E. Tyler Endowed Chair at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis. He received his MFA from Northern Illinois University in 2013. Aaron has participated in international residencies and exhibitions and has received numerous awards for his work in printmaking, sculpture and installation including 2021 Black Box Press Foundation’s Art as Activism Grant. He is a 2022 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship semi-finalist and the recipient of the 2023 New Voices Fellowship from the International Print Center New York. His work can be found in the collections of The Janet Turner Print Museum, the Ino-cho Paper Museum in Kochi, Japan, The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, The Yekaterinburg Museum of Art in Yekaterinburg, Russia, the National Library of France, and the Artist Printmaker and Photographer Research Archive in the Museum of Texas Tech University among many other public and private collections.
• Aaron was a co-founder of the Sienna Collective for Students of Color in the Arts at the University of Arizona and in 2021 received the Provost Award for Innovations in Teaching as well as the College of Fine Arts Undergraduate Mentorship Award.
• Aaron’s hobbies change from year to year but currently include the cultivation of rare, terrestrial, African orchids. He is a husband, dog lover and workaholic.

• Tania Duvergne is the Director of Public Art for Public Schools at the NYC School Construction Authority. Public Art for Public Schools is the only program dedicated specifically to schools in the country. Ms. Duvergne has installed nearly 200 new permanent artworks in city schools and oversees the care and maintenance of the existing collection of over 2000 art objects. Prior to her work at Public Art for Public Schools, she worked extensively as a curator, writer, editor and public art administrator for non-profit art organizations across the country, including the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, inSITE, San Diego/Tijuana, the San Diego Museum of Art, Visual Aids, NY and Artists Space, NY. She holds a bachelor’s degree in fine art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a master’s degree in art history from the Université de Paris, Panthéon-Sorbonne.

• Daisy Patton is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Los Angeles, CA to a white mother from the American South and an Iranian father she never met. Influenced by collective and political histories, Patton explores storytelling, in-between spaces and identities and what shapes living memory. 
• Patton has exhibited nationally, including solos at the CU Art Museum at the University of Colorado and the Chautauqua Institution, as well as group shows with MCA Denver, Spring/Break NYC, Tampa Museum of Art, Katonah Museum of Art, The Delaware Contemporary, among others. She has paintings in collections including the Denver Art Museum, the Tampa Museum of Art, Seattle University, Fidelity Investments, and Delta Airlines. Patton’s work has appeared in Hyperallergic, Transition Magazine, The Denver Post, and more. Minerva Projects Press published Broken Time Machines: Daisy Patton, a book on Patton’s practice in 2021. 
• Patton completed artist residencies at Anderson Ranch, the Studios at MASS MoCA, RedLine Denver, and Eastside International in Los Angeles. She received grants from Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and Assets for Artists. Patton earned her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University and a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Oklahoma. 

Instagram: @Daisy_Patton

• Shelley Niro was born in Niagara Falls New York.  Shelley is a member of the Turtle Clan, Bay of Quinte Mohawk Six Nations Grand River Reserve. 
• Niro is a practising artist, concentrating on painting, photography and film.  In 2017 Niro was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Governor General Award in Visual Art, the Reveal Award from the Hnatyshyn Foundation, Dreamcatcher’s Visual Award and the Scotiabank Photography Award. She  became an honorary elder in the Indigenous Curatorial Collective. Niro received an honorary doctorate from the Ontario College of Art and Design University.  In 2020 Niro was presented with the Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award from the Ontario Arts Foundation.
• Niro likes to confront serious issues in Canada with direct truthfulness in regards to colonial perspectives directed to Indigenous lives.  Sometimes this direction finds a humorous route hoping to make that journey easier to see and understand.

• For nearly twenty-five years, Amy Cutler has made enigmatic, narrative works of art in which internalized emotions, societal observations, and complex ideas are transformed into visual metaphors. She is best known for very detailed drawings and paintings on paper depicting anthropomorphized objects, animals, and female characters engaged in impossible tasks and unlikely situations. 
• While the majority of her work is gouache on paper and graphic drawings. Her first major sculptural work, Alterations, was commissioned, exhibited, and acquired by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid in 2007. In 2014, she was among a small group of artists invited by SITE Santa Fe to create new works to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the institution. The resulting work, a multimedia sculptural installation entitled Fossa, was exhibited at SITE Santa Fe in 2015 and the following year in New York at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects and soon to be re-installed at Ruby City in San Antonio Texas in April 2023. She received her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 1997, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1999, and the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany from 1994 to 1995.

• Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits are artists and researchers working in intersection of art, science and emerging technologies since the mid-90s. They are key founders of RIXC Center for New Media Culture in Riga, curators of RIXC Gallery, organisers of RIXC Art and Science festival, and chief editors of Acoustic Space, peer-reviewed journal & book series. 
• Rasa Smite holds PhD; she is Professor in New Media Art programme in Liepaja University and Senior Researcher at Art Research Lab (MPLab.lv). Raitis Smits also holds doctoral degree (2015); he is Associate Professor in the Art Academy of Latvia (2015). 
• In 2017 Raitis Smits was Fulbright researcher in Graduate Center CUNY in New York (hosted by Lev Manovich). Since 2017 Rasa also works as artist-researcher in Ecodata project by University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Switzerland). 
• Their artworks are shown in Ars Electronica Center, HeK (Switzerland), Van Abbe Museum (The Netherlands), KUMU museum in Tallinn (Estonia), Stockholm Science and Technology Museum (Sweden), RAM Gallery (Oslo), kim? Contemporary Art Center, Arsenals National Arts Museum (Latvia), and many other places. 
• They have received Prix Ars Electronica (1998), National Award of Excellence in Culture (2016).

http://smitesmits.com/index.html

Julian Montague  (b. 1973) is a Buffalo-based artist, graphic designer, and photographer. Since the late 1990s, Montague has been making art with a multidisciplinary approach and an undercurrent of existential humor. His work takes many different forms, from multi-year conceptual investigations, to making ephemera for a fictional 1970s art institution, to hard-edged abstract paintings. Montague’s work is largely concerned with exploring and reframing the systems of order that we have come to rely on to make sense of the natural and human-made worlds. The tools and visual language of graphic design play a large role in his artwork, his two practices often influence one another. 

His work has received attention from Bloomberg Citylab, Dwell, Frieze, It’s Nice That, and many others. In 2021 The New York Times recommended his Instagram account as one of the top art accounts to follow. Montague has work in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Martin Z. Margulies, the Norton Museum of Art, Progressive Insurance, and numerous private collections. His mid-career retrospective exhibition “Julian Montague: Projects” at the Burchfield Penney Art Center closes on October 29. His book The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, Revised Edition will be published by the University of Chicago Press in October. 

http://www.montagueprojects.com/bio

Instagram: @montagueprojects

• Burak Arikan is a New York-based artist who explores emerging political economies of data, decentralized infrastructures, and blockchain technology. He investigates societal issues and develops his findings into abstract machinery, which generates network maps and algorithmic interfaces, results in performances, and procreates predictions to render inherent power relationships visible and discussable. Arikan’s software, prints, installations, and performances have been featured in numerous exhibitions internationally; he is also the founder of Graph Commons, a collaborative platform for mapping, analyzing, and publishing data networks.

• b. 1986, Columbia, SC
  Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
• Jacolby Satterwhite is celebrated for a conceptual practice addressing crucial themes of labor, consumption, carnality and fantasy through immersive installation, virtual reality and digital media. He uses a range of software to produce intricately detailed animations and live action film of real and imagined worlds populated by the avatars of artists and friends. These animations serve as the stage on which the artist synthesizes the multiple disciplines that encompass his practice, namely illustration, performance, painting, sculpture, photography and writing. Satterwhite draws from an extensive set of real and fantastical references, guided by mythology, modernism, contemporary visual culture and video game language to challenge conventions of Western art through a personal and political lens. An equally significant influence is that of his late mother, Patricia Satterwhite, whose ethereal vocals and diagrams for visionary household products serve as the source material within a decidedly complex structure of memory and myology. 

JACOLBY SATTERWHITE, Still from We Are In Hell When We Hurt Each Other, 2020, HD color video and 3D animation with sound, RT: 24:22 min.  © Jacolby Satterwhite

Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York