Contemporary Perspectives Lecture Series

Dawoud Bey in conversation with Allison Kemmerer

September 24, 2024 • 6:30pm
Howard Thurman Center, Room 104 • 808 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA

BU College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts presents a conversation between artist Dawoud Bey and Allison Kemmerer (GRS’91), Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art. Organized by the MFA Print Media & Photography program as part of the Contemporary Perspectives Lecture Series (CPLS) and the Tim Hamill Visiting Artist Series, this event highlights Bey’s groundbreaking work in examining the Black past and present through photography and film installations.

Dawoud Bey is a MacArthur Fellow whose work has been exhibited across the United States and Europe, including recent solo exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Allison Kemmerer, known for her curatorial focus on photography and contemporary art, has directed numerous impactful exhibitions at the Addison Gallery, where she champions diverse narratives in American art.

Image: Dawoud Bey, Mary Parker and Caela Cowan (from The Birmingham Project), 2012

Hank Willis Thomas

November 3, 2022 • 6:30pm
Alfred L. Morse Auditorium • 602 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA
Recording

BU School of Visual Arts’ ongoing Contemporary Perspective Lecture Series returned in fall 2022, featuring well-known American artist Hank Willis Thomas in conversation with Hank Willis Thomas Studio collaborator Helen Banach.  The pair spoke about Hank Willis Thomas’ work across media and his major new King Boston memorial that honors the social justice work and legacy of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King. The Embrace, designed with MASS Design Group, was unveiled on the Boston Common on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January 2023, and is intended to “spark a new public conversation about how to advance racial and economic justice in Boston today.”

Hank Willis Thomas was the featured artist for Fall 2022’s Tim Hamill Visiting Artist Lecture. This important public lecture series launched in 2004 is named in honor of BU School of Visual Arts alumnus Tim Hamill. Hamill Lectures present to the SVA community leading artists who are known for working across artistic disciplines.

Spring 2020 Contemporary Perspectives Artist

Martha Wilson
In conversation with Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin
Monday, April 6, 2020 • cancelled due to pandemic closures
Hosted in Partnership with Boston University Kilachand Honors College

Martha Wilson is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director. For decades, her innovative conceptual practice has utilized photography and video to explore female subjectivity through performative self-portraiture. Transforming her appearance through costumes, make-up, and role-play, Wilson uses her own image as a stand-in for myriad conceptions of femininity, simultaneously embodying and challenging social projections onto women.

Her recent work has been semi-autobiographical in nature, exploring the social effects of aging on women. Combining tongue in cheek humor and rigorous conceptual language, Wilson looks at the all too often overlooked intersection of sexism and ageism in contemporary image culture.

Wilson is the founder of Franklin Furnace Archive art organization, a non-profit dedicated to preserving the legacy of experimental and ephemeral artworks, including artist books, installation art, video, and performance art. She is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and an Obie Award and a Bessie Award for commitment to artists’ freedom of expression. She is represented by PPOW gallery in New York City.

Judith K. Brodsky is an artist and curator. She is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of the Department of Visual Arts at Rutgers University. Her artwork is in the collections of the Harvard University Museums, the Library of Congress, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Stadtsmuseum, Berlin.

Ferris Olin is a feminist scholar, curator, educator, and librarian, and a Distinguished Professor Emerita at Rutgers University. Dr. Olin founded the Margery Somers Foster Center: A Resource Center and Digital Archive on Women, Scholarship and Leadership at the Mabel Smith Douglass Library. In 2012, the Women’s Caucus for Art awarded Dr. Olin the Art Lifetime Achievement Award.

Brodsky and Olin co-founded and co-directed several initiatives and institutions, including the Institute for Women and Art, the Women Artists Archive National Directory, the Miriam Schapiro Archives on Women Artists, and the Feminist Art Project. They have co-authored two books, The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art, and Society (2012) and Junctures in Women’s Leadership: The Arts (2018).

Fall 2019 Contemporary Perspectives Artist

Adam Pendleton
Wednesday, October 16, 6:30 pm
Jacob Sleeper Auditorium, 871 Commonwealth Ave.

Adam Pendleton is an interdisciplinary artist whose work mines the histories of art and of social movements to create densely layered, conceptual works. Combining painting, silkscreen, collage, video, installation and performance, his broad output is united by a monochrome aesthetic and an engagement with the limits of meaning in both language and images. In his work, historical avant-garde strategies are recontextualized to address the black experience in America. Pendleton’s Black Dada, an ongoing interdisciplinary project in publishing, painting, installation and more, addresses the possibility of a new avant-garde language for African American experience. Pendleton poses urgent yet open-ended questions about the ownership of cultural history and the legacy of Modernism in the present.

Pendleton has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Art Center in Cambridge; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; among many others. He studied at the Artspace Independent Study Program in Peitrasanta, Italy. He is represented by Pace Gallery.

Sedrick Huckaby (CFA’97)
Mernet Larsen
Judith Barry

Martha Rosler
Tom Sachs
Laurie Anderson
Miwa Matreyek

Jack Whitten
Jeffrey Gibson
Sheila Pepe
Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley

Maya Lin
Michael Berryhill
Huma Bhabha
Walton Ford
Aaron James Draplin

Josephine Halvorson
Stefan Sagmeister
Mickalene Thomas & Anna Stothart in conversation
Janet Echelman

Richard Aldrich
Janine Antoni
Carrie Moyer
Jerry Saltz & Roberta Smith in conversation
Miranda July

Vik Muniz
Dona Nelson
Amy Franceschini
Andrea Zittel
Chris Jordan

Phoebe Washburn
Enrique Chagoya
Nicole Eisenman
Laurie Anderson
April Greiman

Alison Saar
Anna Sculeit
Alyson Shotz
Laylah Ali
Kyle Cooper
William Kentridge
Judy Pfaff

Thomas Struth
Fred Wilson
Alyson Shotz
Beverley Semmes
Kerry James Marshall

Jenny Saville
Dana Schutz
Carol Becker
Usula von Rydingsvard in conversation with Debra Bricker Balken
Yvonne Rainer in conversation with Robert Storr

Peter Scheljdahl
Chuck Close
Magdalena Campos Pons
Ledelle Moe
Anna Conway

Matthew Ritchie in conversation with Jerry Saltz
Trenton Doyle Hancock
Hanneline Rogeberg
Willie Cole
Sandy Skoglund

Donald Kuspit
Kiki Smith
Dana Clancy
Chris Chou
Lynne Allen
Richard Yarde

Mark Strand
Haley Hasler
Hilary Harkness
Hilton Kramer
Ken Tyler
Karen Wilkin
Lise Lemeland
Robert Gamblin

Anne Harris
Susanna Coffey
Vincent Desiderio
Robert Taplin
John Moore
Mark Gottsegen
Catherine Murphy
Sedrick Huckaby
Joe Ablow
Nicole D’Agata
Al Held