Spring 2018 Tuesday Night MFA Lecture Series

Hosted by the graduate programs in Painting and Sculpture at Boston University, the Tuesday Night MFA Lecture series brings practicing artists to campus to present their work. All lectures are free and open to the public.

Spring 2018 Lectures

Keltie Ferris
Tuesday, February 6, 7:30 pm
Room 303, 808 Commonwealth Ave.
Keltie Ferris is known for her large-scale canvases covered with layers of spray paint and hand-painted geometric fields. Ferris’s pixilated backgrounds and atmospheric foregrounds create perceptual depth that allows for multidimensional readings of her work.  In her ongoing series of body prints, Ferris uses her own body like a brush, covering it with natural oils and pigments and pressing it against a canvas, to literalize the relationship of the artists’ identity to the work that she produces. Keltie Ferris currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated with a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2006. Her work has been presented in exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Brooklyn Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kitchen in New York, Saatchi Gallery in London, and the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, to name a few. She was recently awarded the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Painting by the Academy of Arts and Letters.

George Nick
Rescheduled: Tuesday, March 20, 7:30 pm
Room 411, 808 Commonwealth Ave.
George Nick is a nationally recognized realist painter based in Boston. Blurring the line between realism and expressionism, Nick has described his painting style as intuitive and inventive. What we see between the frames is not a moment frozen in time, but a collection of moments that unify in our mind’s eye. Nicks paintings are complicated, he is constantly running in circles, following ideas that lead to moments of clarification which, in turn, give birth to a new set of problems and intangible thoughts waiting to be chased down and painted. Nick taught painting at Massachusetts College of Art and Design for twenty-five years. His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Hirschhorn Museum; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., as well as many others.

Caitlin Keogh
Tuesday, March 27, 7:30 pm
Room 303, 808 Commonwealth Ave.
Caitlin Keogh’s work explores questions of gender and representation, articulations of personal style, and the construction of artistic identity. Her vivid, seductive paintings combine the graphic lines of hand-drawn commercial illustration with the bold matte colors of the applied arts to reimagine fragments of female bodies, natural motifs, pattern, and ornamentation. Drawing from clothing design, illustration, and interior decoration as much as art history, Keogh’s large-scale canvases dissect elements of representations of femininity with considerable wit, pointing to the underlying conditions of the production of images of women. Keogh is a graduate of the Milton Avery Graduate School of The Arts at Bard and the Cooper Unioni School of Art in New York. Her work has been exhibited at Mary Boone Gallery, MoMA PS1, the Whitney Museum of America Art, the Queens Museum, and the Renwick Gallery, among others. Her work will be on view in a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston this spring.

Lisa Yuskavage
Thursday, May 3, 7:30 pm
Room 303, 808 Commonwealth Ave.
Since the early 1990s, Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings have interrogated the potential of the female nude, in part sparking the recent re-engagement with the figure in contemporary painting. Her canvases cast painstakingly rendered yet exaggerated female figures—and more recently, men—within atmospheric landscapes charged with color. Her work mines the contradictions that historically define representations of women in painting, producing a complex play between alienation and affection, vulgarity and earnestness, visual pleasure and psychological revulsion. Her work has been the subject of exhibitions at the Rose Art Museum, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, the Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, among many others.