School of Art+Design

Brendan Fernandes

Wednesday, September 19, 5 pm
Visual Arts Building 1016/Perception Lab

Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is a internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, Brendan’s projects address issues of race, queer cultural, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, Brendan’s projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance hall, part political protest…always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity. Brendan is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is currently the recipient of a 2017 Canada Council New Chapter grant. His projects have shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); The Getty Museum (Los Angeles); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); MAC (Montreal); among a great many others. He is currently artist-in-residency and faculty at Northwestern University and represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago.

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Samantha Gorman

Tuesday, October 2, 5 pm
Visual Arts Building 1016/Perception Lab

Samantha Gorman is a writer, artist, curator and educator. Her work combines text, cinema, games, virtual reality and scholarship about digital media. With Danny Cannizzaro she founded the studio Tender Claws. Cannizzaro and Gorman’s first release as Tender Claws was the hybrid film/game/novel app PRY. PRY was selected by Apple as one of the 25 best apps of 2015 and was a Future of Storytelling Prize finalist, IGF finalist for “Excellence in Narrative” and has been showcased at film festivals, game festivals and book review sites. Tender Claws’ next project “Virtual, Virtual Reality” (VVR) draws on her seven years of experience in developing literary arts projects for Virtual Reality at Brown University’s CAVE VR studio. VVR recently won the 2017 Google Play Award for Best VR Experience. Upcoming Projects include an AR Pet Fish that uses computer vision to feed on people’s emotions and the world around it and a large scale VR immersive theater installation. Samantha holds a MFA from Brown University in Writing for Digital Media and has taught at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. In addition to running Tender Claws, Samantha is a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Practice specializing in critical practice-based research on Immersive Media and Creative Writing at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.

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Res

Wednesday, October 3, 5 pm
Visual Arts Building 1016/Perception Lab

Res (b. 1985 in Paterson, NJ) is an artist and curator. They received their BA in Sociology and Studio Art from Smith College in 2008 and their MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art in 2017.  

Res’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States including at Danziger Gallery, New York; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; and Casemore Kirkeby, San Francisco. Their work has been featured in publications including Girls Like Us, Cultured Magazine, Vice Magazine, W Magazine, The Paris Review and Matte Magazine.

In 2017 Res was a winner of the Baxter Street Camera Club of New York Annual Juried Competition, a recipient of the FLAGS (Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies) Award from Yale University and shortlisted for the Lucie Foundation Scholarship.

Res currently lives and works between Stockholm and New York where they teach Photography at the International Center of Photography and Borough of Manhattan Community College.

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Lisa Sigal

Wednesday, October 24, 5 pm
Visual Arts Building 1016/Perception Lab

Lisa Sigal is an artist based in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at The Whitney Museum Biennial 2008, The New Museum, MoMa/PS1 Museum, The Sculpture Center, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Albright Knox , the Brooklyn Museum, Prospect .3 Biennial in New Orleans, the DeCordova Museum in Boston, the Essl Museum in Vienna, LAXART space in Los Angeles, Samson Projects in Boston, The Mattress Factory and the Anyang Public Art Project, Korea among other venues. Sigal is a 2015 Anonymous Was A Woman, grantee, 2012 Art Matters Foundation grantee and Creative Capital grantee and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship awardee. Sigal has been an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center, the Skowhegan School of Art, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program. She received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art in 1985 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1989. 

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Hank Willis Thomas

Wednesday, October 31, 1 pm
Visual Arts Building 1016/Perception Lab

HANK WILLIS THOMAS is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), and For Freedoms, the first artist-run initiative for art and civic engagement. In 2017, For Freedoms was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. Thomas is also a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), the Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a member of the New York City Public Design Commission.

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R. H. Quaytman

Wednesday, November 7, 5 pm
Visual Arts Building 1016/Perception Lab

R. H. Quaytman was born in Boston in 1961 and went on to receive a BA in painting from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (1983), before attending the postgraduate program in painting at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin (1984), and the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques, Paris (1989). Since 2001, Quaytman’s paintings have been in many ways governed by a strict set of rules. Works are organized into focused groups referred to as “chapters,” which are sequentially numbered and uniquely titled. The paintings are executed on plywood panels that conform to a consistent set of geometrically interrelated dimensions. Screenprinted photographic imagery appears in each chapter, as do abstract compositions. Despite these rigorously held consistencies, Quaytman’s work is not reducible to a systematically applied set of rules. Instead, the artist uses these parameters to explore an array of subjects, while maintaining an overarching, ongoing investigation of the factors that enable a painting to generate meaning, whether they be its content, its mode of production, or the context in which it is encountered.

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Samuel Ekwurtzel

Wednesday, November 14, 5 pm
Visual Arts Building 1016/Perception Lab

Sam Ekwurtzel is a sculptor based in Brooklyn NY. Ekwurtzel regularly exhibits in New York and abroad, with recent exhibitions at Litse, Basel and Simone Subal Gallery, New York. He has been a fellow at Wellesley College and in the Sculpture Department at VCU and often teaches at colleges throughout New England. While in residence at Purchase, he will be experimenting with ceramic shell reverse casts and heavy timber frame construction. 

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Kris Graves

Wednesday, November 28, 3 pm
Visual Arts Building 1016/Perception Lab

Kris Graves (b. 1982 New York, NY) is a photographer and publisher based in New York and London. He received his BFA in Visual Arts from S.U.N.Y. Purchase College and has been published and exhibited globally, including the National Portrait Gallery in London, England; Aperture Gallery, New York; University of Arizona, Tucson; Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon; and Brooklyn Museum, New York; among others. Permanent collections include the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Wedge Collection, Toronto; and Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania.

Kris Graves creates artwork that deals with what he views wrong with American society and aims to use art as a means to inform people about social issues. He also works to elevate the representation of people of color in the fine art canon; and to create opportunities for conversation about race, representation, and urban life. Graves creates photographs of landscapes and people to preserve memory.

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Mark Thomas Gibson

Wednesday, November 28, 5 pm
Visual Arts Building 1016/Perception Lab

Mark Thomas Gibson is an artist and Assistant Professor at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union and his MFA from Yale School of Art in Painting and Printmaking. He works primarily in painting, pen-and-ink drawing, and, more recently, in printmaking, using the aesthetics of comic books to present satirical perspectives on American culture. He co-curated Black Pulp!, which examined perspectives of Black identity through contemporary works and rare historical printed media. Mark Thomas Gibson lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. He is represented by Fredericks & Freiser, New York and Loyal Gallery, Stockholm.

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L.J. Roberts

Wednesday, December 5, 5 pm
Visual Arts Building 1016/Perception Lab

LJ Roberts is a visual artist who creates large-scale textile installations, incredibly detailed embroideries, screen prints, artist books, and collages. Their work investigates overlaps of queer and trans politics, activism, protest, and craft. LJ’s work has been shown in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, and Australia at such venues as The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, The 8th Floor, Museum of Arts and Design, Vox Populi, The Orange County Museum of Art, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, The Powerhouse Museum, The Oakland Museum of California, The DePaul Art Museum, The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at The University of Southern California, The Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art where their work is in the permanent collection.