Visiting Artist Lecture Series
The School of Art+Design Visiting Artist Lecture Series brings to campus noted artists, curators, critics and historians who share their perspectives and expertise on their own work and provide insight into current issues facing the contemporary artist and designer.
WHAT: School of Art+Design Visiting Artist Lecture Series
WHEN: Wednesdays at 6:30PM (See specific dates below)
WHERE: Visual Arts Bldg | Rm 1016 | Directions | Park in W-1 Parking lot
WHO: Contact Ebony Brown @ 914.251.6753 for more information
HOW MUCH: Free & Open to the Public
Spring 2008 | Visiting Artist Schedule | Save the dates!
2/13/08 Mika Rottenberg, Installation Artist
2/20/08 Marilyn Minter, Painter
2/27/08 Rainer Ganahl, Installation Artist
3/12/08 Julie Heffernan, Painter
3/26/08 Inge Bruggeman, Book Artist
4/09/08 Olive Ayhens, Painter
4/16/08 Mel Kendrick, Sculptor
4/23/08 Nancy Shaver, Sculptor
4/30/08 Natasha Sweeten, Painter
5/07/08 Douglass Ross, Interdisciplinary Artist
Spring 2008 Visiting Artist Poster designed by Michael Everitt, BFA Senior, Graphic Design Visiting Artist Poster Spr 2008
Spring 2008 Visiting Artist | Bios
January 24th, 2008
Fo Wilson
Artist In Residence
Fo Wilson uses the language of furniture to investigate ideas around identity, culture and the human experience. Her work often crosses boundaries between, art, design, and craft. Trained as a furniture designer and maker, with a background as a graphic designer and art director, Wilson’s work utilizes three-dimensional design and making skills with a two-dimensional media background to bring to the foreground functional aspects of furniture we often take for granted. She combines traditional materials and methods along with emerging media to make commentary on the physical, social and cultural conditioning inherent in furniture forms and social spaces.
February 13th, 2008
Mika Rottenberg
Installation Artist
Mika Rottenberg imagines systems of production whose functions are tied to those of the human body. She has created a number of ambitious video installations, along with photographs and drawings, in which the viewer partially enters the cramped and bizarre factory environments occupied by the women on screen. Rottenberg’s actors perform seemingly futile tasks in the service of products whose use is unclear, as in the recent piece Dough, which depicts an elaborate process ending with shrink-wrapped lengths of dough and evaporated tears. Born in Buenos Aires, Rottenberg studied art and exhibited in New York and Israel before earning her M.F.A. from Columbia University in 2004. She continues to show internationally, and her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, among others.
February 20th, 2008
Marilyn Minter
Painter
Marilyn Minter’s images of glitz bordering on the grotesque are among the icons of contemporary photography and painting, most recently because of her much-reproduced contribution to the 2006 Whitney Biennial. But Minter’s photographs and hyper-realistic paintings in layered enamel comprise a nearly thirty-year exploration of glamour as the surface of deeper social machinations. Since earning her M.F.A. from Syracuse University, she has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her work has been included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among many other institutions. Her first monograph will be published in February of 2007.
February 27th, 2008
Rainer Ganahl
Installation Artist (Performance, video, drawing)
Rainer Ganahl uses the existing structures of contemporary society to address global political issues such as war and institutional oppression. His practice includes, among other things, riding a bicycle, learning languages, attending and documenting lectures, and web-based conversations with international participants. While also engaging in the more recognizable activities of drawing, video, sculpture, and performance, Ganahl scours media, cyberspace, and his physical environment for new forms of art to reveal and question how human beings choose to live and govern themselves. Born in Bludenz, Austria, Rainer Ganahl has exhibited, published, and performed throughout the world. In the past year his work was shown at the Venice Biennale, along with biennials in Moscow and Istanbul, Performa 07 in New York, and a solo exhibition at the Kustmuseum, Stuttgart.
March 12th, 2008
Julie Heffernan
Painter
Using the history of Western painting as a starting point Julie Heffernan creates a personal iconography associated with current notions of gender and feminism. She explores the possibilities of narrative and visual density in painting as both an allusion to past traditions and a contemporary alternative to more recent forms of visual communication. She received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art and Architecture in, and her BFA from the University of California at Santa Cruz in. She shows regularly with PPOW Gallery in New York and the Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, where she will be having a solo exhibition in the coming year, along with solo shows at Megumi Ogita Gallery in Tokyo and Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include “Old School” at Hauser and Wirth, London, and “Transitional Objects: Contemporary Still Life” at the Neuberger Museum at Purchase College. Heffernan is an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University.
March 26th, 2008
Inge Bruggeman
Book Artist
Inge Bruggeman lives and works in Portland, where she teaches Letterpress and Book Arts at the Oregon College of Art & Craft. She also runs Textura, a commission letterpress printing and book arts business. Inge makes a variety of her own text based artwork focusing on the visual nature of text and the subjectivity of reading and defining. She makes artist’s books and publishes limited edition, fine press artist's books under her imprint INK-A! Press. Her work has been shown and collected widely.
April 9th, 2008
Olive Ayhens
Painter
Olive Ayhens' paintings and drawings depict architectural environments that seem to buckle and twist under the weight of their own complexity. Largely based on sweeping views of New York City and other places she has lived, Ayhens' work combines a kind of pseudo-scientific analysis of her sources with an intuitive use of gesture, color, and invention. The result is painting that is simultaneously rigorous and frenetic. More recent work has addressed massive urban interiors. Olive Ayhens lives and works in Brooklyn and has been recognized with a number of grants and awards, including the Gottlieb Grant, the Pollock-Krasner Award, and the 2006 Guggenheim Award.
April 16th, 2008
Mel Kendrick
Sculptor
Mel Kendrick’s abstract sculptures draw in the viewer with their dynamic formal quality and subsequently reveal layers of meaning related to process and material. Typically beginning with raw or processed wood, Kendrick continually refigures his initial compositions; disassembling, adding new materials, often recasting forms in a different substance altogether. The resulting objects refer to their own making, not as a closed dialogue, but as a rich physical history. Mel Kendrick has been awarded several National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and his work can be seen in major institutions and public collections across the country, including the National Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis
April 23rd, 2008
Nancy Shaver
The materials Nancy Shaver uses to make her sculptures are typically unrefined, unassuming, and often used. Treated as precious beyond their usual associations, combined and modified with surprising sensitivity, boxes, paper, fabric, house paint, and scrap wood, among other things, are reconfigured to invite reverence and wonder. Shaver has had numerous solo exhibitions in New York and Chicago and has been included in group shows throughout the United States and France. She is currently represented by Feature Inc. in New York.
April 30th, 2008
Natasha Sweeten
Painter
Natasha Sweeten makes abstract paintings and works on paper inspired by real objects in her environment. Her richly layered imagery maintains an elusive connection to reality while also fully present in a universe defined solely by shape, color, and surface. Working at a modest scale and employing a lucid visual language, Sweeten derives surprising complexity and nuance from seemingly simple compositions. Natasha Sweeten received her MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College in 1996 and has since shown widely in New York City and nationally. She is currently represented by Edward Thorp Gallery.
May 7th, 2008
Douglass Ross
Through a variety of strategies, including sculpture, video, broadcast, and his own mechanized inventions, Douglas Ross reframes our perception of the everyday. His interventions either inserted into the space of the viewer or applied as conditions to a documented performance by the artist himself, transform passive awareness of reality into a cinematic or otherwise consciously mediated experience. Ross’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe, and he is the recipient of numerous fellowships and residencies from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, and ARCUS Project in Moriya City, Japan, among others. He was a guest professor at the Tokyo National University of Fine Art from 2004 to 2005 and has since been a member of the faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design and Cornell University.
The Visiting Artist Lecture Series is sponsored by the School of Art+Design. To find out how you can support this and other Art+Design programs or to be added to our mailing list, please send an email to ebony.brown@purchase.edu or call 914.251.6753.