Tuesday Night Lecture Series | College of Fine Arts

Hosted by the MFA programs at Boston University School of Visual Arts, the Tuesday Night Lecture Series brings practicing artists and designers to Boston University to present their work. The series is an integral component of the five MFA programs, which provide two years of intensive studio practice and artistic community in the heart of Boston University’s urban campus. In addition to a public lecture on their work, visiting artists meet with students for individual and group critiques as well as hands-on workshops.

Fall 2024 Lectures

PALOMA IZQUIERDO

AZZA EL SIDDIQUE

ANOUSHE SHOJAE-CHAGHORVAND

SADIE LASKA

DR. CHERYL MILLER

MELEKO MOKGOSI

BEVERLY ACHA

DEENA MOHAMED

WARDELL MILAN

Past Lectures

2023-2024 Lectures

Spring 2024 Lectures

NICOLA LOPEZ

Apparition III 2019; Collograph on archival inkjet print on paper; 21.5″ x 31.25″; Published by LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies

Tuesday, January 23, 2024 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Nicola López’s work in drawing, printmaking, site-specific installation, sculpture, and video examines and reconfigures our contemporary landscape. It points to connections and rifts between our human-constructed world and the systems and cycles of nature. She engages architecture and urban structure as ever-accumulating evidence of human aspirations and failures, often contrasting and intertwining them with geological and organic formations. Her work draws on anthropology, architecture, urban planning and historical and fictional explorations of utopia/dystopia. It also leans heavily into material process, intentionally bringing joy, improvisation, and care into the work as it reflects on human patterns of extraction and construction.

López has received grants and fellowships, including a NYFA Fellowship in Drawing / Printmaking / Book Arts, a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and a Sovern/Columbia Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. She has also participated in residencies including at the Headlands Center for the Arts and La Curtiduría in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her work is held in numerous prominent institutional collections and has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, the Denver Art Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Albuquerque Museum and the Inside-Out Museum in Beijing.

Her work is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, OR and Arróniz Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. Originally from Santa Fe, NM, she lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

www.nicolalopez.com

Lecture organized by MFA Print Media & Photography

LISA CORINNE DAVIS

Plausible Ploy, 70 x 55 inches, oil on canvas, 2023

Tuesday, January 30, 2024 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Lisa Corinne Davis is an abstract painter exploring themes of racial, social and psychological identity. Born in Baltimore, MD, currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY, Davis received her BFA from Pratt Institute, and her MFA from Hunter College. Her paintings have been exhibited across the United States and in Europe, including one person shows at June Kelly Gallery (New York), Gerald Peters Gallery (New York), and The Mayor Gallery (London). She is currently represented by Jenkins Johnson Gallery (San Francisco, Los Angeles & New York), Miles McEnery (New York), and The Mayor Gallery (London). Her work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Davis is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, three Artist Fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. In 2017, she was inducted as a National Academician at the National Academy Museum & School. Her essays on art and culture have been published in the Brooklyn Rail and Art Critical. Davis has previously taught painting at Yale University and is currently Professor and the Co-Director of the MFA program at Hunter College in New York.

Lecture organized by MFA Painting

LUCIA HIERRO

Tuesday, February 13, 2024 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Lucia Hierro (b. 1987) is a Dominican American conceptual artist born and raised in New York City, Washington Heights/Inwood, and currently based in the South Bronx. Lucia’s practice, which includes sculpture, digital media and installation, confronts twenty-first century capitalism through an intersectional lens. She received a BFA from SUNY Purchase (2010) and an MFA from Yale School of Art (2013). Hierro’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (Los Angeles), Elizabeth Dee Gallery (New York), Primary Projects (Miami), Sean Horton Presents (Dallas), Fabienne Levy Gallery (Lausanne, Switzerland) and Casa Quien in the Dominican Republic. Her works reside in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), El Museo del Barrio in New York City, the Perez Art Museum Miami, the JP Morgan & Chase Collection, among others. In 2021, Lucia’s work was exhibited in ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21, El Museo del Barrio’s (NY) first national large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art featuring more than 40 artists from the US and Puerto Rico, and she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT titled Marginal Costs. Lucia will have a solo show titled “Corotos y Ajuares” at the Esker Foundation (Calgary, Canada) January 20th – April 28th 2024.

Lecture organized by MFA Painting

JUSTINE KURLAND

Tuesday, February 27, 2024 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Justine Kurland is an artist known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and the fringe communities, both real and imagined, that inhabit them. Her early work comprises photographs, taken during many cross-country road trips, that counter the masculinist mythology of the American landscape, offering a radical female imaginary in its place. Her recent series of collages, SCUMB Manifesto, continues to make space for women by transforming books by canonized male photographers into a new feminist form.

Kurland’s work has been exhibited at museums and galleries in the United States and abroad. Her work is included in permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum, Pennsylvania; Getty Museum, California; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, among others.

Lecture organized by MFA Painting and MFA Print Media & Photography

DANA LOK

“Conditional Tissue,” 2021. Oil on canvas, 62 x 70 in.

Tuesday, March 5, 2024 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Dana Lok (b. Berwyn, PA) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her paintings and drawings explore the visual possibilities of metaphors we use to understand concepts like knowledge, representation, language and time. Her works imbue these abstract ideas and their relations with light, color, weight and texture. In the development of these pictorial objects and spaces, she keeps an eye towards the contradictions that can surface in a close examination of visual forms that structure thought.

Lok has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. Her recent solo exhibitions include “Closer to the Metal” at Clima Gallery, Milan (2023), “Part and Parse” at Miguel Abreu, New York (2022), “One Second Per Second” at Page, New York (2020), and “Words Without Skin” at Clima, Milan (2019). Lok recently participated in the group exhibitions “Darling, Your Head’s Not Right” at Francois Ghebaly, “Le Biscuit à Soupe”, at High Art, Arles, France, “Gravity, a proposal” at Sikkema Jenkins, New York, “15 Painters” at Andrew Kreps, New York. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Frieze, and Cura Magazine. Lok received her MFA from Columbia University and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2018, she was awarded the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. She currently teaches at Columbia University.

Lecture organized by MFA Painting

ASHLEY JAMES (MULTIPLE FORMATS)

Thursday, March 21, 2024 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Ashley James, Ph.D., is Associate Curator, Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She is the curator of Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility (2023-24) and Off the Record (2021); and co-curator of The Hugo Boss Prize: Deana Lawson, Centropy (2021). Prior to joining the Guggenheim, James served as Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she was the lead curator for the museum’s presentation of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2018–19), organized Eric N. Mack: Lemme walk across the room (2019), and co-curated John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance (2020-21). James holds a Ph.D. from Yale University in English literature and African American studies.

Lecture organized by MFA Graphic Design as part of Multiple Formats Contemporary Symposium and Art Book Fair.

ANNE WU

A Patterned Universe, 2021. Stainless steel, rigid insulation foam, tinted joint compound, PVC roof panel, tarp, plastic packing rope, cast and found objects. 10 x 20 x 12 feet. Commissioned by The Shed. Photo: Ronald Amstutz.

Tuesday, April 2, 2024 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Anne Wu (b. 1991, New York, NY) makes sculptures and installations that draw from the material culture and architectural vernacular of Chinese immigrant neighborhoods. Referencing familiar structures, such as doors, windows, stairs, and railings, her works riff on existing built environments through fragmentation, abstraction, and rearticulation.

Recent solo exhibitions include There Is No Far and No Near at Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY) and A Dream Walking at Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT). Wu’s work has been shown in group exhibitions at YveYANG Gallery (New York, NY), island gallery (New York, NY), Asia Art Archive in America (Brooklyn, NY), M23 (New York, NY), The Shed (New York, NY), The Mattatuck Museum (Waterbury, CT), and Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon (New Lebanon, NY), among others. She was an artist-in-residence at the Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program from 2021 to 2022 and the NARS Satellite Residency on Governors Island in 2020. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Art in America, Hyperallergic, and Curbed. In 2022, she was awarded a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant.

Originally from Flushing, New York, Wu currently lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. She received an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2020 and a BFA from Cornell University in 2013.

Lecture organized by MFA Sculpture

MARTIN KERSELS

Tuesday, April 9, 2024 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Martin Kersels was born in Los Angeles, California. After graduating with an undergraduate degree in art from UCLA in 1984, he became a founding member of the collaborative performance group SHRIMPS. This group worked together on movement-based performances until 1993. Back at UCLA for his MFA from 1992 to 1995, he began to create both intimate and large sculptures, photographs that documented performative moments, and videos that presented his body as an object within a world deteriorating around him.

His interest in machines, entropy, sound, and cultural debris has produced work that examines the dynamic tension between failure and success, the individual and the group, and the thin line between humor and misfortune. Since 1995, Kersels’ objects and projects have been exhibited at museums both nationally and internationally, including the 1997 and 2010 Whitney Biennials, the Pompidou Center, MOCA Los Angeles, the Pompidou Brussels, the L.A. County Museum of Art, the Tinguely Museum, Kunsthalle Bern, MAMCO in Geneva, and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Art.

His work is in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Pompidou Center, and many other public collections. He is represented by the galleries Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York and Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois in Paris.

For the last 11 years, he has been a professor at the Yale School of Art.

Lecture organized by MFA Sculpture

HONG HONG

Image of a completed, environmental pour in Leland, Michigan. Date: 2023. Photo courtesy of Artist.

Tuesday, April 16, 2024 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Each summer and fall, Hong Hong travels to faraway and distinct locations to make paper under the sky. Hong’s environmental, site-specific investigations map interstitial relationships between landscape, time, and the body through cartographic, symbolic, and material languages. During the winter and spring, she forms paintings directly on the floor of her studio. These schematics combine story-telling, text, and image-making to document states of interiority and subjectivity. Hong Hong (b. 1989, Hefei, Anhui, China) is the recipient of a Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2024 – 2026), a United States Artists Fellowship in Craft (2023), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in Painting (2023), a Carnegie Foundation Fellowship at MacDowell (2020), a Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center (2019), an Artistic Excellence Fellowship from the Connecticut Office of Arts (2019), and a Creation of New Work Grant from the Edward C. And Ann T. Roberts Foundation (2018 – 2019). She also participated in residencies at McColl Center for Art + Innovation (2022), Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2020 – 2021), Yaddo (2019), and I-Park (2018).

Hong has presented her work in exhibitions at Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Fitchburg Art Museum (Fitchburg, MA), Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, ME), Ortega Y Gasset Projects (New York, NY), Georgia Museum of Art (Athens, GA), NXTHVN (New Haven, CT), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles, CA), Akron Art Museum (Akron, OH), Texas Asia Society (Houston, TX), and University of Texas at Dallas (Dallas, TX), among others. Her practice received press in publications such as Art21, Art New England, Southwest Contemporary, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, and Glasstire.

Lecture organized by MFA Sculpture

CHRISTIAN ROMAN

Tuesday, April 30, 2024 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Christian Roman (CFA’91) grew up loving to draw in a small town south of Boston. Receiving a Trustee Scholarship from Boston University, he graduated from BU CFA in 1991 with a BFA in Painting. From there he moved to Los Angeles and utilized the strong artistic foundational skills he had learned at BU to break into animation. In 1994 his first professional job was on The Simpsons as a Character Layout artist, then Storyboard Artist, and eventually became the Storyboard Supervisor for the show. Roman went on to help develop and direct two animated TV series for The Disney Channel – Disney’s Fillmore! and Jake Long: American Dragon, and was nominated for an Emmy and an Annie for his work on Fillmore!. Throughout the course of his career, Roman has done storyboarding on various television shows, including Lilo & Stitch, King of the Hill, Mission Hill and The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat. His last job in Los Angeles was as a storyboard artist for The Simpsons Movie.

In 2007 he moved to San Francisco to begin his career as a Story Artist at Pixar Animation Studios on the Oscar winning Toy Story 3. He has worked and contributed to several productions at Pixar, including all the Toy Story shorts and many Cars shorts, Cars 3, Toy Story 4, Onward, Luca, and most recently Elemental. He is very passionate about the power of visual storytelling, and has lectured and taught storytelling at Ancestry.com, The Epsilon Agency, The Walt Disney Family Museum, O’Reilly Design, Laguna College of Art and Design, Xperiential and The Graduate Business School at Stanford. He co-authored the Pixar in a Box presentation “The Art of Storytelling ” for the Khan Academy.

Lecture organized by MFA Visual Narrative

Fall 2023 Lectures

ODETTE ENGLAND

*I just want to be old, like a normal person*, 2023. From the series To Be Developed, To Be Continued

Tuesday, September 12, 2023 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Odette England is a visual artist and writer who often uses damaged cameras and expired photo materials to document themes of homesickness, gender-social control, reproductive labor, estrangements, and rituals. She has exhibited her work in over 110 museums and galleries worldwide. It is held in collections including the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, George Eastman Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Museum of Modern Art New York, and New Mexico Museum of Art.

England is a 2022 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. Other honors include a Rhode Island Council Arts Fellowship and grants from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Puffin Foundation, Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund, and Anonymous Was a Woman.

In 2023, England is a PhotoAccess Artist Fellow in Canberra, Australia, an EKARD artist-in-residence at Bucknell University, an artist-in-residence at Marble House Project, Vermont, and a visiting critic for the Long-Term Photobook Program at the Penumbra Foundation. She was named a finalist for the Foam Paul Huf Award and, most recently, winner of the Tall Poppy Press Award and a recipient of a Polycopies Publishing Grant.

She has published three award-winning books, including Dairy Character, recipient of the 2021 Light Work Book Award, and shortlisted for Australian Photobook of the Year. Her fourth book, Woman Wearing Ring Shields Face from Flash, was shortlisted for the 2023 Images Vevey Photobook Award and will be published by Skinnerboox in October.

England received her MFA with Honors from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is a visiting lecturer at Brown University and Amherst College.

MATTIE LUBCHANSKY

Friday, September 29, 2023 • 6:00 PM

Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Avenue

Mattie Lubchansky is a cartoonist and illustrator living in beautiful Queens, New York. They are the Associate Editor and contributor to the Eisner- and Ignatz-winning publication The Nib. Their work has also appeared in New York Magazine, VICE, Eater, Mad Magazine, Gothamist, The Toast, The Hairpin, Brooklyn Magazine, Defector, and their long-running webcomic Please Listen to Me. They are the co-author of Dad Magazine (Quirk Books), author of the Antifa Supersoldier Cookbook (Silver Sprocket.), and contributor to the anthology Flash Forward (Abrams). Their debut full-length graphic novel Boys Weekend is out now from Pantheon.

ANNA CONWAY

*Revolve* (detail), 2023, oil on panel. 12 x 12 inches.

Monday, October 2, 2023 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Anna Conway is a painter who was born in Durango, Colorado, raised in Foxboro, Massachusetts, and lives and works in New York. Conway received a BFA from Cooper Union School of Art and a MFA from Columbia University and has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, two Pollock-Krasner Awards, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and a Colene Brown Art Prize. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at MOMA PS1, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, University Art Museum at Albany, Fralin Museum of Art, and Collezione Maramotti Museum in Italy. Conway’s work has been reviewed and featured in Artforum, Art in America, Art Review, Flash Art, Frieze, Hyperallergic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, New American Paintings, among others.

Conway is known for detailed, enigmatic paintings that often depict uneasy, absurdist moments descending on isolated, ordinary individuals. In Artforum, Rachel Churner described the abundance of detail in Conway’s paintings as being somehow recognizable in our current world “when the barrage of details makes it impossible to determine one’s position in the world”. Conway has said of her work that many of her paintings depict fragments from unfolding narratives in which ordinary people are suddenly confronted by forces much greater than themselves, either due to circumstances beyond their control or because of an unexpected momentary suspension of disbelief. The paintings are windows onto brief moments of radical experience that take place wherever we least expect them. The ambiguity the viewer senses in these narratives derives from the inability to know the internal nature of the subjects’ epiphanies. Conway has said, “much of the suspense in my work is a kind of anticipation…I like to make paintings that seem to be holding their breath, waiting for what may be next.”

THOMAS CASTRO

Tuesday, October 17, 2023 • 7:00 PM

Howard Thurman Center, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Thomas Castro is a graphic designer, educator, and curator. He co-founded LUST in 1996 as a multi-disciplinary design studio at the intersection of graphic design, digital arts, and technology. In 2017 LUST was awarded the highest recognition for design in the Netherlands, the BNO Piet Zwart Award for their 20-year oeuvre. Thomas taught at the graphic design department of the ArtEZ University of the Arts Arnhem from 2002, and was the head of department from 2012–2019. In 2019, Thomas was appointed the Curator of Graphic Design at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

“I see my practice as a trilogy, from maker to educator to curator. In my current role as curator I want to focus on the heritage of graphic design. How can we recalibrate and broaden the current design canon with new attitudes, knowledge, and developments within the contemporary socio-cultural landscape? And how can we embrace and support more diverse forms of graphic design which at times only have a street life of one day.”

Thomas Castro is also the Fall 2023 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 presents to the SVA community leading artists who are known for working across artistic disciplines.

NYEEMA MORGAN

Thursday, October 26, 2023 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Nyeema Morgan (b. Philadelphia, PA) is an interdisciplinary artist. Select solo and two-person exhibitions include The Philadelphia Art Alliance at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO; Marlborough Gallery Viewing Room, New York, NY; Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Portland, ME and PATRON, Chicago, IL. Group exhibitions include the Drawing Center, NYC, NY; Worcester Museum of Art, Worcester, MA; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, New Brunswick, ME and Galerie Jeanroch Dard, Paris, FR. Her awards and residencies include the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, NYC, NY; Shandaken Project Residency at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY; a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors grant and Art Matters Grant. Morgan’s work is included in the public collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME and the Worcester Museum of Art, Worcester, MA. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and earned an MFA from College of the Arts and a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art. She currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.

MARIO MOORE

*Thornton and Lucy Blackburn in Canaan* (detail), 2022. Oil on linen, 63 x 90 inches. Portrait (detail) by Danielle Eliska Lyle.

Tuesday, November 7, 2023 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Mario Moore’s paintings focus on the personal, social, and political implications of our segregated society. Presenting stories of his own life and those of friends and family, Moore weaves in multiple references to history, art, politics, and literature to complete his narrative. Recently, he was artist-in-residence at Duke University. He has also been awarded the prestigious Princeton Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University and has participated as an artist-in-residence at Knox College, Fountainhead, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

Moore’s work has been exhibited widely, including at the Charles H. Wright Museum, Detroit, MI; The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, NJ; the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, IL; David Klein Gallery, Detroit, MI; The Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI; Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, New York and is currently in the Smithsonian Sites Exhibition (traveling), Men of Change. His solo exhibition, Enshrined: Presence & Preservation, opened at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit in June 2021 and at the California African American Museum (CAAM) in March 2022.

Mario Moore, a Detroit native, received a BFA from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit, MI, and an MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT. Moore lives and works in Detroit.

TAMMY NGUYEN

*Chúa Kitô Vua*, 2023 (Detail), Watercolor, vinyl paint, pastel, and metal leaf on paper stretched over panel. 100 x 60 x 2 inches. Portrait: Photograph of the artist (detail), 2022, by Annie Ling. Both images are courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London.

Tuesday, November 14, 2023 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Tammy Nguyen (b. 1984, San Francisco, CA, lives and works in Easton, CT) creates paintings, drawings, artist books, prints, and zines that explore the intersections between geopolitics, ecology, and lesser-known histories. A story teller, Nguyen’s multidisciplinary practice takes two forms—her more traditional fine arts practice, which encompasses her lush, dense paintings, as well as her prints, drawings, and unique artist books, and her publishing practice, embodied through her imprint, Passenger Pigeon Press, which creates and distributes Martha’s Quarterly, a subscription of artist books and interdisciplinary collaborations. Across both domains Nguyen’s work aims to unsettle, and the tension between the artist’s elegant forms and harmonious aesthetics often belies the nature of her content. The confusion this dissonance creates becomes generative, opening space for reevaluation, radical thinking, and the dislodging of complacency.

Many of Nguyen’s paintings expand from her unique artist books, often through engagement with similar themes, questions, or investigations. Throughout her work, she has explored a range of topics and ideas, including the Bandung conference, the first large-scale Afro-Asian conference which was attended by world leaders from 29 non-aligned countries during the Cold War, Forest City, a sprawling off-shore development project in Malaysia, and the red-shanked douc langur, an endangered species of monkey native to Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. A recent artist book series, Four Ways Through a Cave (2021), relates Nguyen’s travels through the Phong Nha-Ke Bang karst in Vietnam, significant for its numerous underground caverns and passageways and its history in the Vietnam War as a crucial area of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The book simultaneously invokes Plato’s allegory of the cave—the recognition of truth through the loss of illusion—and conveys the sense of physically moving through a cave, with circular-shaped cutouts that shift from page to page, tunneling through the book and transforming the reader into a momentary spelunker.

In 2008, Nguyen received a Fulbright fellowship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam. Her recent paintings reflect influences of this traditional technique in their remarkable flatness, colored grounds, use of gold and silver leaf, and her rich, intricately layered compositions. In Nguyen’s newest paintings she re-envisions the Stations of the Cross, filling the picture plane with references ranging from the biblical, to the historical, to the contemporary. Fighter jets fill the sky of one station, in which Jesus’ face has been transformed into a commedia mask, while in another the outline of a Pan American airliner can be identified. Commercial ships emblazoned with names like Enterprise, Constitution, and Truth sail across the 14 panels, implying the deep interconnection between commerce, colonialism, religion, and global politics.

At its core, Nguyen’s, collaborative, research-based practice is propositional, exploring ideas and conjectures for ways of looking at the past, examining the present, and imagining possible futures. Across her work, Nguyen addresses the question of how one reads, both visually and linguistically, and she considers the idea of multiple narratives being told simultaneously, held together by the edges of her compositions or spines of her books.

VICTORIA ROTH

Tuesday, November 28, 2023 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Victoria Roth is a visual artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her biomorphic abstract paintings sit on the edge of recognition— a chunky form that feels like a muscle, a furry shape that’s like a creature from a dream. Through her imagined and high keyed compositions, she explores ideas of queer abstraction and queer desire as embedded in bodily forms that appear to be in constant becoming. While her paintings are loud and visceral, their resonance is psychological, and their read is slow.

Victoria has exhibited her paintings and drawings internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Velvet Nerve, Broadway Gallery, New York, NY (2022); Victoria Roth, Brennan & GrifMin, New York, NY (2019); Insides, fAN Kunstverein, Vienna, AT (2017); Off the Banks, Brennan & GrifMin, New York, NY (2017).

Selected group exhibitions include Deep! Down! Inside!, Hales Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Pizza, Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Postcard from New York – Part III, Galleria Anna Marra, Rome, IT (2022); Intertwined, 1969 Gallery, New York, NY (2021); Isolation is the Mother of Invention, Institute of Arab & Islamic Art, New York, NY (2021); Eddysroom @ Left Field Gallery, Left Field Gallery, Los Osos, CA (2021); City Prince/sses, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR (2019); Body/Object, George Adams Gallery, New York, NY (2019); The Pit Presents / Step Sister, The Pit, Los Angeles, CA (2018); Furies, Helena Anrather, New York, NY (2018); The Clear and the Obscure, Lulu, Mexico City, MX (2016) and more. She is in the public collection of Le Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Monaco.

Victoria Roth grew up in France and received an MFA from Columbia University in 2014 and a BA in History of Art & Architecture and Visual Arts from Brown University in 2008. In addition to her studio practice, Victoria is an arts educator in New York City.

JONATHAN MILDENBERG

Tuesday, December 12, 2023 • 7:00 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

With a practice that spans sculpture, installation, sound, and writing, Jonathan Mildenberg’s work investigates the intricate (and often hidden) systems of signs, symbols, and suggestions that are embedded within architecture, objects, and design. Through his uncanny replications, surreal juxtapositions, and absurd contextual re-imaginings, his work finds points of incoherence and breakdown within the internal logic of built space as it relates to our own personal and/or shared cultural experiences within our current contemporary moment.

Jonathan Mildenberg (b. 1981) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works between Chatham and Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art in 2003 and his MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 2015, for which he was the nominee in Sculpture for the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship. The following year in 2016, he was awarded a fellowship for Architecture and Environmental Design from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

In 2017, he began working with the New York-based downtown gallery, M23 and became represented by them in 2021. Recent exhibitions include his last solo show, “The Drowning Dog,” in 2022, 100 Sculptures at Anonymous Gallery in New York City, and Distant Sounds at Olio Projects in Philadelphia, PA, amongst others.

He has been a visiting lecturer and critic at multiple institutions, including Columbia University, Massachusetts College of Art, SUNY College at Old Westbury, and the University of Minnesota. He has been teaching Sound and Video Art and New Media studies at Caldwell University since 2019.

2022-2023 Lectures

Field Visions Exhibition Panel

Matt Hufford Filet, 2018 15 × 11 in. Oil on gessoed coconut fiber

Tuesday, September 13, 2022 • 7:30 pm

Stone Gallery, 855 Commonwealth Avenue

BU College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts presents a lecture with artist Field Visions, currently on view in the BU Art Galleries Stone Gallery, explores the possibilities of landscape – specifically, how abstraction, metaphor, and materiality are leveraged to open up these possibilities, and in doing so, render nature into an abstraction that becomes landscape. While each artist propels their unique poetic visions through an established genre, they also push material and the fiction outward, tree-like, proving that the field of landscape painting is not only pliable but expansive, and imagination is constantly unfolding and inventing new spaces.

Join us in the Stone Gallery on September 13 at 7:30 for a panel discussion from three Field Visions artists, Matt Hufford, Matt Murphy, Stephanie Pierce, and moderator Josephine Halvorson. This panel is hosted by the BU Art Galleries and the School of Visual Arts.

Josephine Halvorson makes paintings that foreground firsthand experience by observing and describing the world around her. Originally from Cape Cod, she studied at The Cooper Union (BFA) and Columbia University (MFA). She lived, taught, and exhibited her work throughout the United States and Europe before returning to Massachusetts in 2016 to serve as Professor of Art and Chair of MFA Painting here at Boston University. In 2021, Halvorson was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2022 had a solo exhibition at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Matt Hufford, originally from Sacramento, CA, now lives and works in Boston, MA. He has shown work from San Diego to New York, and received his MFA in painting from Boston University in 2019. Matt creates paintings that explore the connection between the surface of a painting and its subject through the use of material, composition, and display.

Matthew Murphy is a painter living and working in Boston, MA. He has shown at Mass Art, Western CT State University, University of Arkansas and New Bedford Museum of Art. He has a BFA from Mass College of Art in Boston and an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle. He has been artist in residence at Siena Art Institute in Italy and a forthcoming residency at the Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation in Ireland. He is also the Arts Editor for Grid Books.

Stephanie Pierce’s paintings explore relationships between light, time, and perception as it is reconsidered over time. Stephanie has exhibited her work at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, NY; Alpha Gallery, Boston; The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and The Staten Island Museum, NY. She has been a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant and a Peter S. Reid Foundation Grant. Her work has been published in the New Yorker Magazine and Harper’s Magazine. Stephanie is an Assistant Professor of Painting at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Jennie Jieun Lee

Hell on Earth 65 × 40 × 5 in. (165.1 × 101.6 × 12.7 cm) Glazed porcelain, flashé, oil, wood, resin

Tuesday, September 20, 2022 • 7:30pm

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

For over a decade, Jennie Jieun Lee has challenged conventions of ceramic sculpture, embracing the inherent vulnerability of a medium that has long been tamed by its practitioners. Across busts, vessels, and painting, Lee’s works accumulate indices both deliberate and accidental, grafts that both decorate and distort. Firing works in various states of uprightness and collapse, Lee also imparts ceramic’s requisite hollowness in another reflexive maneuver. References to gestural painting abound in Lee’s work: the artist covers her busts and vessels in liberal pours of glaze, in addition to working in two dimensions. Transferring the immediacy and authenticity conferred upon gestural painting to sculpture, Lee disrupts a medium typically associated with the domestic.

Jennie Jieun Lee (b. Seoul, Korea) lives and works in Sullivan County, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada (2021); Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton (2020, 2018); and Martos Gallery, New York (2019, 2015). She is the recipient of several grants including Art Matters (2019), The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2017), and the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2016) and Artadia (2015). She has a forthcoming solo exhibition with Martos Gallery this September and teaches ceramics at SMFA in Boston, MA.

Doron Langberg

Oren and Bennet, 2022 80 × 96 in. Oil on linen

Tuesday, October 11, 2022 • 7:30 pm

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Born in 1985 in Yokneam Moshava, Israel, Doron Langberg currently lives and works in New York City. He received his MFA from Yale University School of Art, holds a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania, a Certificate from PAFA, and attended the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk. Langberg has attended the EFA Studio Program, Sharpe Walentas Studio Program, Yaddo artist residency, and the Queer Art Mentorship Program. He is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters award for painting, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, and the Yale Schoelkopf Travel Prize. His work was shown at the Frick Collection, The Baltimore Museum, the High Museum, Boston ICA, Miami ICA, RISD Museum, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PAFA Museum. Langberg’s work was featured in the New Yorker, Artforum, Art in America, T Magazine, Frieze Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, HaAretz, W Magazine, and The Art Newspaper, and it is in the collection of the Baltimore Museum, the High Museum, the Boston ICA, the Miami ICA, PAFA Museum, the RISD Museum, and the Rubell Museum.

Elizabeth Englander

Tuesday, October 18, 2022 • 7:30 pm

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Elizabeth Englander (b. 1988, Boston, MA) lives and works in New York, NY. She received her BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 and her MFA from Hunter College in 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include: Eminem Buddhism, Theta, New York (2022); HEADMASTER, Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2021); Toteboat, From the Desk of Lucy Bull, Los Angeles (2019); Headless, Entrance, New York (2017); and Pieces of Jennifer Melfi, M.D., Kimberly Klark, Queens (2017). Group exhibitions include: Under the Volcano II, Lomex, New York (2022); What Pipeline, Detroit (2022); Deathbound and Sexed, Theta, New York (2021); Quickening, Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2021); Delusionarium 5 (Adaptation), Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Bone Meal, Motel, Brooklyn (2019); An eye that tried so hard to see one particular thing that it forgot everything else, Safe Gallery, Brooklyn (2019); and Fool’s Prophecy, Muzeum Ikon, Warsaw, PL (2018).

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung

Darkness is to Space as Silence is to Sound, 2021 63 × 96 in. Charcoal, dye and latex paint on sewn canvas and polyester

Tuesday, October 25, 2022 • 7:30 pm

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung is a painter, writer and teacher who grew up in Olympia, Washington and participated in Riot Grrrl in her formative years. She was a full time senior critic at Yale School of Art until 2021. She has shown at The Blaffer Museum in Houston, TX, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The 2014 Whitney Biennial, The Program at ReMap in Athens, Greece, Kadel Willborn in Karlsruhe, Germany and many others. In 2013 she received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. She is a frequent guest lecturer at many schools across the country, including, in the past few years, Princeton University, The University of Texas at Austin, Cranbrook, University of Alabama, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Low Residency Program, and Columbia University. She has a mid-career survey exhibition at the Blaffer Museum in Houston this Fall. She is represented by Corbett vs Dempsey in Chicago and Rachel Uffner Gallery in NYC.

She attended the Evergreen State College in the 1990s. This introduced her to holistic structural ideas about aesthetics and politics. She worked in used bookstores and bars until her thirties, when she moved to Chicago and attended the School of the Art Institute for graduate school, and now she is working and grocery shopping and taking walks in Norfolk, Connecticut with her wife, Fox Hysen, and dog, Moses. She is opening her attention to Buckthorn root balls, depth psychology, difference, climate change, ecosystems, permaculture, New England furniture and textiles, John Coltrane, the effects of soul lag on humans, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, the color of the light in the bare woods, and the emotional landscapes of students, friends, colleagues and strangers alongside whom she lives. She quit her position as Senior Critic at Yale University this summer and she is freelance teaching from home. In 2021 she opened a mid-career survey show at the Blaffer in Houston, Texas, called Comic Relief and accompanied by a monograph.

Kate Gilbert

Artwork by Nick Cave. Image credit: Faith Ninivaggi

Thursday, October 27, 2022 • 7:30 pm

Boston Society for Architecture,290 Congress St. Suite 200

Organized in partnership with the Boston Society for Architecture on occasion of the exhibition Now What?! Advocacy, Activism & Alliances in American Architecture Since 1968. A tour of the exhibition will take place at 8:30pm following the lecture.

Kate Gilbert cultivates the critical role the arts and artists play in transforming our cities, our relationships, and ourselves. These investigations manifest in artwork, a curatorial practice, and dedication to expanding the field of public art.

As an artist and cultural worker, Gilbert strives to facilitate joy and spontaneity and to drive public appreciation of contemporary art practices. Gilbert, the product of generations of creatives who didn’t dare call themselves artists, cites her over-active childhood imagination and early exposure to large-scale sculpture as critical factors in her creative investigations. As a natural collaborator and problem solver, her studio practice morphed into a curatorial consulting practice for public art initiatives and in 2015, the founding of the Boston public art non-profit Now and There where she has developed a Public Art Accelerator.

Gilbert is a graduate of Connecticut College and earned her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She is the 2020 recipient of NEFA’s Newell Flather Award for Leadership in Public Art, for curation and her artwork is in the Fidelity Corporate Art Collection as well as many Boston households thanks to her participatory workshops. Gilbert lives and works in Boston, MA with her husband and escapes to a small studio in East Boston to keep her artistic practice alive. Even if only on Sundays.

Kenny Rivero

Liro Tie, 2019 10 × 14 in. Oil on canvas

Tuesday, November 8, 2022 • 7:30 pm

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Kenny Rivero (b. 1981, New York; works in New York. MFA Yale 2012, BFA SVA 2006.) Rivero’s work, which spans paintings, collage, drawings, and sculpture, explores the complexity of identity through narrative images, language, and symbolism. His aim is to deconstruct the histories and identities he has been raised to understand as absolute and to re-engineer them into new wholes, with new functions. His creative process allows him to explore what he perceives as the broken narrative of Dominican American identity, socio-geographic solidarity, familial expectations, race, and gender roles. Rivero cites the hybrid qualities of salsa, hip-hop, house music, jazz, and merengue—as well as Vodun and Santeria, which were present in his daily life growing up—as core influences on his decision-making in the studio. Kenny Rivero’s work is represented in notable public collections including The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Collection of Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida, The Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas; and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham North Carolina.

Mo Kong

Lounge Of A Prophet, 2022 13 × 12 × 7 ft Black MDF, Plexiglass, Dehydrated Fruits, Thermochromic Surface, Pickle jars, Oil-based scent defuser, “Chinese Smell”, Distillation system, Herbs, Books, Ball Python, Audio (Fictional Writing), Hand below glass sculptures, Heating system, IPU fans.

Tuesday, November 15, 2022 • 7:30 pm

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Mo Kong is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher currently residing in Queens, NY. They received their MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. They have been the subject of solo exhibitions at Queens Museum (New York), CUE Art Foundation (New York), Cuchifritos Gallery(New York), Artericambi Gallery(Verona), Gertrude Gallery (Stockbridge), Chashama (New York). Their work has been included in exhibitions at the RISD Museum, SFMOMA, Minnesota Street Project, Mana Contemporary, the Noguchi Museum, Spring Break, ARTISSIMA, Make Room Gallery, Hesse Flatow Gallery, and Rubber Factory Gallery. They also received fellowships and participated in residencies from the Macdowell Colony, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Triangle Art Association, The Drawing Center, Mass MoCA Studio, the Vermont Studio Center, Lighthouse Works, and the Artists Alliance LES Studio Program. Their work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Artforum, Art in America, Cultured magazine, Artnet, Bomb magazine, Artpaper, CoBo Social, Wall Street International, SFMoMA Public Knowledge, and other publications.

Arghavan Khosravi

The Garden, 2022 59 × 71 × 6 in. (149.9 × 180.3 × 15.2 cm) Acrylic on canvas mounted on shaped wood panels, wood cutout, elastic cord

Tuesday, November 29, 2022 • 7:30 pm

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Arghavan Khosravi (b. 1984, Shahr-e-kord, Iran) is a 2019 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Painters & Sculptors Grant and a 2017-18 recipient of the Walter Feldman Fellowship. Her recent solo exhibitions include Arghavan Khosravi at The Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH, on view through September 5, 2022, and Arghavan Khosravi: The Witness at Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA. Recent group exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Yinchuan, China; Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL; Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI; and Provincetown Art Association and Museum, MA; among others. Her recent residencies include The Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH; the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; the Studios at MassMoCA, North Adams, MA; Monson Arts, Monson, ME; and Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn, NY. Khosravi earned an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design after completing the studio art program at Brandeis University. Khosravi previously earned a BFA in Graphic Design from Tehran Azad University and an MFA in Illustration from the University of Tehran. Khosravi’s work is in the collections of the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum; Philadelphia, PA; Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH; Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI; and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI, among others. Khosravi lives and works in Stamford, Connecticut.

Emily Arther

Sage and Gnatcatchers (with ledger page). Screen print on glazed Rives paper and chine collé. 30 × 22 in.

Tuesday, February 21, 2023 • 7:30 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Emily Arthur (Eastern Band Cherokee and European descent) received a BFA from the University of Georgia and an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she served as a research fellow at the Barnes Foundation. She is currently serving as a 2022 – 2023 Harvard University, Eleanor M. Garvey Visiting Fellow in Printing & Graphic Arts.

Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Chazen Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, and Crocker Art Museum. Arthur works with historians, scientists, and poets to elucidate the craft and knowledge-based disciplines of art and science. Forthcoming exhibitions include the National Gallery of Art and the Zimmerli Art Museum.

Catherine Czudej

*Young Man With Flowers*, 2022. Aluminum.

Tuesday, February 28, 2023 • 7:30 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Catharine Czudej (b.1985, Johannesburg) grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and currently lives and works in New York City. She studied at UCLA, Los Angeles and NYU, New York. Previous solo exhibitions include. Come to Daddy, Von Ammon Co, Washington DC, USA (2022) Hippie Puke, Egan Rosen, New York, USA (2021) Home Owner, Von Ammon co, Washington DC, USA (2020) Imagine All The People, Michael Benevento, Los Angeles, USA (2019) Not Books, Ginerva Gambino, Cologne, Germany (2018); Ball Polisher, Jeffrey Stark, New York, USA (2017); SHHHHHH, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2016); Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Office Baroque, Brussels, Belgium (2016); Belly-Up Dead, Chewday’s, London, UK (2015); No Soap Radio, Peep-Hole, Milan, Italy (2015); A-OK, Ramiken Crucible, New York, USA (2014) Bite into that soft ass, Ramiken Crucible, New York, USA (2013). Recent group exhibitions include: Frieze Projects, Frieze Art Fair, Los Angeles, curated by Ali Subotnick; (2019); Smile, Halsey McKay, New York, USA (2019), The Party, Anton Kern Gallery, New York, USA (2018); Pine Barrens, Tanya Bonakdar, New York, USA (2018); The Commodification of Love, (curated by Chloe Peron) Kamel Mennour, Paris, France (2017); A Spaghetti Dress for World Peace, Park View, Los Angeles, USA (2017); Dead Horse, JTT, New York, USA (2017); Concrete Island, Venus Over Manhattan, Los Angeles, USA (2017) Dolores (organized by Todd von Ammon), Team Gallery, New York, USA (2016); The Discovery of a Leak in the Roof of Marcel Breuer’s Wellfleet Summer Cottage on the Morning of September 16, 1984, Off Vendome, New York, USA (2016); Inside Out (curated by Alexandra Economou), Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich, Switzerland (2016); Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (organised by Ed Atkins and James Richards), Eden Eden, Berlin, Germany (2015).

Padma Rajendran

RESCHEDULED: Tuesday, March 14, 2023 • 7:30 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Padma Rajendran was born in Klang, Malaysia in 1985 and migrated between the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and lastly within the United States. She currently lives and works in Catskill, NY. She received her BA from Bryn Mawr College in 2007 and received her MFA in Printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design in 2015. She currently lives and works in Catskill, NY and teaches drawing at Vassar College. She has taught printmaking classes and workshops at SUNY Purchase, Parsons School of Design, Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and for New York City Crit Club.

She has exhibited at the International Print Center New York, Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn), Beers London (London), Field Projects (New York), September Gallery (Hudson NY), BRIC Arts Media (Brooklyn), Aicon Gallery (NYC), Taymour Grahne Gallery (London), and most recently at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (New Paltz NY). She has completed residencies at Ortega y Gasset Projects, the Studios at Mass MoCA, Women’s Studio Workshop, Ox-Bow, and Lower East Side Printshop. Her work has been featured in Chronogram Magazine, New American Paintings, Art Maze Magazine, and Maake Magazine.

Padma’s works on fabric come from an interior place of living two cultural lives and manifests from digging through the past of personal monuments and archived histories. Gathering personal symbols authenticates the forgotten and resurrects it to be experienced again. It is a path to observe an alternate unfolding of events and offers a new ontology. Her imagery on paper, textile, and ceramic all talk to the ritualistic narratives specific to the house and home, such as preparing food and the textile fragments that make up her shell and shelter. Recollecting these souvenirs and artifacts, she embraces the idea of the woven to create images that instigate psychological elasticity yet are still bound by opposing threads.

Nontsikelelo Mutiti

Detail from the installation *Everything is Where it is Expected* presented at Printed Matter in New York, NY, 2019. Photo credit: Natasha Hatendi.

Multiple Formats Contemporary Art Book Symposium and Book Fair
Keynote Speaker

Thursday, March 16, 2023 • 7:30 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Nontsikelelo Mutiti is a Zimbabwean-born visual artist and educator. She is invested in elevating the work and practices of Black peoples past, present, and future through a conceptual approach to design, publishing, archiving practices, and institution building. Mutiti holds a diploma in Multimedia from the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts (ZIVA) and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, with a concentration in Graphic Design. Mutiti is the Director of Graduate Studies for Graphic Design at Yale School of Art. She has held academic positions at Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts (ZIVA), SUNY Purchase College and VCUart at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Detail from the installation Everything is Where it is Expected presented at Printed Matter in New York, NY, 2019. Photo credit: Natasha Hatendi.

Arnold Kemp

*Talking To The Sun But Backwards*, 2022. Permanent ink, aluminum foil and etching ink on canvas. 69 × 69 in (175.26 × 175.26 cm).

Tuesday, March 21, 2023 • 7:30 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Arnold J. Kemp (b. 1968 in Boston) lives and works in Chicago. Recent exhibitions of the artist’s work include FALSE HYDRAS (2021) at JOAN in Los Angeles and I COULD SURVIVE, I WOULD SURVIVE, I SHOULD SURVIVE (2021) at Manetti Shrem Art Museum at the University of California at Davis, and LESS LIKE AND OBJECT AND MORE LIKE THE WEATHER at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Research, University of Chicago. Over the past decade, Kemp received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Kemp’s works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Portland Art Museum, the Schneider Museum of Art, and the Tacoma Art Museum. Kemp received a BA/BFA degree in Studio Art and English Literature from Tufts University in 1991 and an MFA degree in 2005 from Stanford University.

Caroline Kent

Tuesday, March 28, 2023 • 7:30 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Caroline Kent received a B.S. from Illinois State University (1998) and an M.F.A. from The University of Minnesota (2008). Kent’s work has been exhibited in institutions such as The Guggenheim Museum, NY; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Walker Art Center, MN; The DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; The California African American Museum, LA; The Flag Art Foundation, NY; The Suburban, Oak Park, IL; and the University Galleries of Illinois State University. Kent has received grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, and The Jerome Foundation, and was selected as a 2020 awardee of the Artadia Foundation Chicago. Kent’s work is a part of numerous public collections including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA, the Walker Art Center, MN, The Art Institute of Chicago, IL, the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA, the Dallas Museum of Art, TX, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN, among others. Kent is an Assistant Professor of Painting at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. She lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Mary Lum

*Garden*, 2022. Acrylic, photographs, found paper collage on paper. 11 × 14 in.

Tuesday, April 4, 2023 • 7:30 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Mary Lum is a visual artist whose intricate collages, paintings, and photographs explore the margins of city life, geometric abstraction, and the use of text as image. Her work has been exhibited in numerous institutions and publications internationally, including Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA; The Drawing Center, NY; Modern Artifacts (Esopus and MoMA, NY); deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum; and Oxford University, UK. Lum has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), the Radcliffe Fellowship for Advanced Study (2004-2005, 2022), and a MacDowell Fellowship (2018), among others.

Judy Pfaff

*Ar.chae.ol.o.gy* at the Carriage House at Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, NY, 2022. Photo credit: Peter Aaron / OTTO.

Thursday, April 13, 2023 • 7:30 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Boston University School of Visual Arts is pleased to welcome Judy Pfaff as the featured artist for this year’s Tim Hamill Visiting Artist Lecture. This ongoing lecture series was launched in 2004 and is named in honor of BU School of Visual Arts alumnus Tim Hamill. The bi-annual Hamill Lecture presents artists who are leaders in the field known for working across artistic disciplines.

Often cited as a pioneer of installation-art and contributor to the Pattern and Decoration Movement (P&D), Judy Pfaff has created work that spans disciplines from painting to printmaking and sculpture to installation. Born in London in 1946, Pfaff received a BFA from Washington University Saint Louis (1971) and an MFA from Yale University (1973) where she studied with Al Held. She exhibited work in the Whitney Biennials of 1975, 1981, and 1987, and represented the United States in the 1998 Sao Paulo Bienal. Her pieces reside in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum of Art, Tate Gallery, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Detroit Institute of Arts, among others. She is currently represented by the Miles McEnery and Accola Griefen galleries in New York and has been previously represented by Holly Solomon, Carl Solway and Susanne Hilberry. She is the recipient of many awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center (2014), the MacArthur Foundation Award (2004), and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1983). Pfaff lives and works in Tivoli, New York.

Ronny Quevedo

*b-side echo*, 2021. Wax and screen print on muslin. 36 × 48 1/8 × 1 5/8 in (91.4 × 122.2 × 4.1 cm). 37 1/4 × 49 1/4 × 2 3/8 in framed (94.6 × 125.1 x 6 cm framed). Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York © 2022 Ronny Quevedo.

Tuesday, April 18, 2023 • 7:30 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Ronny Quevedo (b.1981) was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador and lives and works in the Bronx, NY. Quevedo’s practice spans installation, drawings, and prints, incorporating and subverting aspects of abstraction, painting, collage, cartography, and sports imagery. Deeply engaged with notions of identity and the intersection of mainstream and historically marginalized cultures, Quevedo reenvisions pre- and post-colonial iconographies, offering nuanced examinations of personal and social histories. This recuperation of indigenous languages of abstraction, the revalorization of their associated labor, and the centering of a living connection between contemporary and centuries-old cultural markers remain key to Quevedo’s ongoing practice.

Ronny Quevedo was commissioned by Delta Air Lines in partnership with the Queens Museum to create a large-scale permanent installation at LaGuardia Airport, Queens, NY, for the newly-renovated Terminal C, which opened to the public in 2022. Quevedo’s work has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions, including Ronny Quevedo: offside at the University Art Museum, University of Albany, NY (2022); Ronny Quevedo: at the line, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado College, CO (2021); Space of Play, Play of Space, Martin Art Gallery, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA (2019); no hay medio tiempo / there is no halftime, Queens Museum, NY (2017), traveled to Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Philadelphia, PA (2019); and Home Field Advantage, Casita Maria Center for Arts & Education, the Bronx, NY (2015). Quevedo has also been included in a number of group exhibitions, including A New Way to Travel: Delta Air Lines x Queens Museum at LaGuardia Airport, Queens Museum, NY (2022); Lux et Veritas, NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, FL (2022); ReVisión, Denver Art Museum, CO (2021); Comunidades Visibles: The Materiality of Migration, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2021); Ace: Art on Sports, Promise, and Selfhood, University Art Museum, University of Albany, NY (2019); Pacha, Llacta, Wasichay; Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); and The World’s Game: Fútbol and Contemporary Art, Perez Art Museum, Miami (2018)

Cole Lu

*Temple of Sleep*, 2022. Photo courtesy the artist and Chapter NY.

Tuesday, April 25, 2023 • 7:30 PM

Room 410, 808 Commonwealth Avenue

Combining literary and historical references with autobiographical experiences, Cole Lu’s practice builds new mythologies that carry echoes of trauma, transformation, and regeneration. Lu questions the theistic concept of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothingness), proposing a more complicated interspersal of time and human existence.

Incorporating classical approaches and often surprising usages of distinctive materials, Lu creates portraiture with engraving and pyrography techniques; he writes with fire, scorching the portrait into a mural of historical fiction (mythical retelling) and historical facts (historical artifact). His writing/ burning is a portal of material and linguistic transition. His further use of poetry is visual as well as formal. Lu (re)invents, (re)names, and (re)writes his subjects, composing each work with an elaborate fragmented title—a literary device that further subverts conventional linear narratives and amplifies his poetic vision.

Presented as a compilation of gestures or a collection of brief anecdotes, Lu’s work unfolds serially, following invented characters through a parallel world of his creation. Each exhibition or body of work reveals another element, broadening his narrative to incorporate new sites and characters. Each work is a continuation of a belief system generating the renderings of an inner transformation through invoking mythologies that are both alien and familiar.

Cole Lu (b. Taipei, Taiwan) lives and works in New York, NY. His work has been exhibited at Chapter NY; New York; Company Gallery; New York; The Drawing Center, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, among others. His writing has appeared in Coffee House Press, Minneapolis; WONDER, New York; and The Seventh Wave, New York. His publication Smells Like Content (Endless Editions, 2015) is in the artists’ book collection of the Museum of Modern Art Library, New York.

2021-2022 Lectures

Meena Hasan

Monday, September 20, 2021

From Tipu’s Tent, spiral top, 2020. Acrylic, Tyvek and Flashe on Okawara paper, 67 x 77 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Meena Hasan (born 1987, NYC) received her B.A. in Studio Art from Oberlin College in 2009 and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2013, where she won the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for Painting. In 2010, she was awarded the Terna Prize Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. She has participated in a number of group exhibitions including ‘Sheherezade’s Gift’ at the Center for Book Arts, NYC, ‘Premio Terna 02’ at the MAXXI Museum, Rome, IT, the ‘Bosch Young Talent Show’ at The Stedelijk Museum, Den Bosch, The Netherlands, ‘No Longer, Not Yet’, curated by Sean McCarthy, at Essex Flowers, NYC and ‘Good Pictures’, curated by Austin Lee, at Deitch Projects, NYC. Recent two-person and solo exhibitions include ‘Other Echoes Inhabit the Garden’ at LAUNCH F18, NYC and ‘Covering as much of the sky’ at RISD’s Memorial Hall Painting Dept. Gallery, Providence, RI. Meena has been a Part-Time Lecturer in Painting at Rutgers University – Newark, Visiting Assistant Professor in Painting at Pratt Institute’s Painting MFA program, Lecturer in Painting at the School of Visual Arts at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts and Teaching Artist with Studio in a School, NYC. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in Painting at RISD, Providence. Meena Hasan is represented by LAUNCH F18 in Tribeca, NYC and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Dona Nelson

Thursday, October 7, 2021

And the Sun Went Down, 2021. Acrylic, canvas, wood and steel, 83 x 78 in.

Recording

Boston University School of Visual Arts is pleased to welcome Dona Nelson as the featured artist for this year’s Tim Hamill Visiting Artist Lecture. This ongoing lecture series was launched in 2004 and is named in honor of BU School of Visual Arts alumnus Tim Hamill. The bi-annual Hamill Lecture presents artists who are leaders in the field known for working across artistic disciplines.

Dona Nelson is a painter who often works both sides of a stretched canvas, staining and washing it with acrylic paint and water, using a spatula to mark the canvas with the first image, an image of the stretcher bars. Sometimes she glues strips of fabric on to the canvas, allowing them to be a constructed element or ripping them off to establish a drawn line through the paint. Nelson prefers to exhibit her two sided paintings on steel stands or wooden constructions, out on the gallery floor rather than parallel to the wall. For fifty years, Nelson has made series of different kinds of paintings, distinguished by a variety of approaches to both image and material.

Nelson was born in Grand Island, Nebraska in 1947. She received a B.F.A. from Ohio State University (1968), and studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (1967). She is a Professor of Painting and Drawing at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, where she has worked since 1991. In the summer of 2018, she had an extensive survey of her work, curated by Ian Berry, at the Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York. There was an earlier survey of her work in 2000 at the Weatherspoon Museum of Fine Art in Greensboro, North Carolina. She currently exhibits her work at the Thomas Erben Gallery in New York City and at the Michael Benevento Gallery in Los Angeles. Two of her double-sided paintings were featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Other solo exhibitions have been presented at Cheim and Read in New York City and the Morris Gallery at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. In 1994, Nelson received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. In 2011, she was a recipient of a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2013, she received an Artist Legacy Foundation Grant and in 2015, an Anonymous was a Woman Grant.

William Downs

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

a soft place to lay, 2019. Ink wash on drywall (framed and unframed drawings on paper), 12 × 100 ft. Eva Chimento Gallery LA. Photo by Karley Sullivan.

Recording

William Downs, born in Greenville, South Carolina, creates and resides in Atlanta, GA. He earned his multidisciplinary MFA from the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his BFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Atlanta College of Art and Design. Downs has shown in a sundry of group and solo exhibitions at venues across the United States and abroad including: Eva Chimento Gallery, LA, Contemporary Art Museum, MS, and the Century Gallery in London. In 2018, he received the Artadia Award, Working Art Program at MOCA GA and the Kennedy Family Artist in Residence program at USF School of Art and Art History, Spring of 22. Downs’ work featured in the Art AIDS America exhibition which toured nationally for a year headed by Rock Hushka and Johnathan Katz. Following, his work was a part of the prolific Black Pulp! exhibition piloted by the International Print Center New York. This exhibit also showed at The Contemporary Art Museum at the University of South Florida and the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Downs is currently showing at Derek Eller Gallery in New York, “Pieces of a Man” solo exhibition of large scale drawings.

Catalina Ouyang

Tuesday, October 26, 2021

reliquary corpus, 2021. Wood, soapstone, hair, gray wolf skull, plaster, paper pulp, epoxy clay, color pigment, resin, beeswax, chiffon, polymer clay, light, book, 93 ¼ × 12 ½ × 8 ⅛ in.

Catalina Ouyang engages object-making, interdisciplinary environments, time-based projects, and relational works to examine themes of desire, subjugation, and dissidence. Ouyang’s practice searches through myth, literature, and histories both oral and visual, to indicate counternarratives around representation and self-definition.

Ouyang’s second solo exhibition with Lyles & King will open in September. Additional solo exhibitions include Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), Knockdown Center (Queens, NY), Make Room (Los Angeles, CA), and Rubber Factory (New York, NY); with solo exhibitions forthcoming at No Place Gallery (Columbus, Ohio) and Night Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). Ouyang’s work has been included in group exhibitions at SculptureCenter, Queens, US; Nicodim, Los Angeles, US; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, US; BRIC, Brooklyn, US, and many more. Ouyang received an MFA from Yale University in 2019 and is represented by Lyles & King, New York, and Make Room, Los Angeles.

Dell M. Hamilton

Tuesday, November 9, 2021

Blues/Blank/Black, 2016. Performance view, “Intermittent Rivers,” 13th Havana Biennial, Matanzas, Cuba, 2019.

Recording

Dell Marie Hamilton is a multimedia artist, writer and curator whose artist talks, solo performances, and collaborative projects have been presented to a wide variety of audiences in the New England area including at Boston University, the Museum of Fine Arts/Boston, and at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum. She was also a participating artist for the Intermittent Rivers exhibition, organized for the 2019 Havana Biennial, by Afro-Cuban artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons.

Working across a variety of mediums, she uses the body to investigate the social and geopolitical constructions of personal memory, gender, history, culture, and citizenship. With roots in Belize, Honduras and the Caribbean she also frequently draws upon the folkloric traditions of the region.

Dell is also one of the three recipients of the ICA/Boston’s 2021 Foster Prize, and her 2018 curatorial project, Nine Moments for Now, organized for Harvard’s Cooper Gallery for African and African American Art, was ranked by Hyperallergic.com as one of 2018’s top 20 exhibitions in the U.S. To explore Dell’s work, follow her on Twitter and Instagram: @dellmhamilton.

Graham Anderson

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

untitled, 2019. Oil and Acrylic on canvas, 26 × 19 in.

Recording

Graham Anderson (b. 1981, Teaneck, NJ) is an artist living and working in New York City. His practice across painting and sculpture is grounded in labor and craft, but also in contrasts between knowing and uncertainty, clarity and mystery. Most recently his paintings have been still lifes of oranges, drawing on traditions from Baroque Spanish and Dutch painting, Seurat’s Pointillism, and Belgian Surrealism. Formally the works are composed of hard lines, clear shapes and colors, and transparent methods. But this directness works to mask ambiguity in the depiction and representation of its subjects. Seeming certainty is played against fuzziness of understanding to highlight the difficulty of locating and grasping the objects around us and in turn of knowing the self.

Anderson’s work has been exhibited in the U.S. and Europe at institutions such as The ICA Boston, Artspace New Haven, and White Columns in New York, and galleries including Klaus von Nichtssagend, Ashes/Ashes, James Cohan, Downstairs Projects, 179 Canal, Melas Papadopoulos, and Robert Miller.

Anthony Romero

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Anthony Romero is a Boston-based artist, writer, and organizer committed to documenting and supporting artists and communities of color. Recent projects and performances have been featured at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha), the Blue Star Contemporary (San Antonio), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston) and the Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Biennial (Calgary, Canada). Publications include The Social Practice That Is Race, coauthored with Dan S. Wang, and the exhibition catalogue Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements, of which he was the editor. Most recently he has co-authored the book, Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in The Age of Pandemics, with Dan S. Wang and Daniel Tucker, forthcoming from Soberscove Press Spring 2022.

Laura Anderson Barbata

Tuesday, February 1, 2022

Indigo Queen, 2015, 78 x 38 x 38 in, Indigo dyed hand-woven cotton and brocade textiles by Habibou Coulibaly (Burkina Faso) courtesy of L´Aviva Home, Beaded leather, with shells and seeds by Hammer Community (Ethiopia). Printed cotton, sequins, raw silk, dyed corn leaf flowers (Mexico), paper, fiberglass rods, cotton thread. Photo: Rene Cervantes.

Born in Mexico City, Laura Anderson Barbata is a transdisciplinary artist currently based in New York and Mexico City. Since 1992 she initiated long-term projects and collaborations in the Venezuelan Amazon, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Norway, and the United States that address social justice and the environment. Her work often combines performance, procession, dance, music, spoken word, textile arts, costuming, papermaking, zines and protest.

Her work is in various private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; el Museo de Arte Moderno, México D.F.; and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary TBA21-Academy. Recipient of Anonymous Was a Woman Award, grants from FONCA (Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes) Mexico and Honorary Fellow of the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies LACIS, UW Madison. 2021.

Melissa Levin

Tuesday, February 8, 2022

Melissa Levin is a values-driven arts administrator, artist-centered curator, and steadfast advocate for just and equitable practices in the arts. For more than 12 years, Melissa worked at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) where she was the Vice President of Cultural Programs. Her role encompassed wide-ranging institutional and artistic leadership, overseeing LMCC’s major artist-centered and public-facing initiatives including the River To River Festival, the Arts Center at Governors Island, and LMCC’s exhibitions and artist residency programs. Recently, Melissa led the newly formed Artists, Estates, and Foundations division at Art Agency, Partners in its inaugural three years. Starting in 2016, with collaborator Alex Fialho, Melissa has stewarded the legacy of, and curated critically acclaimed exhibitions dedicated to the late artist Michael Richards, including Michael Richards: Winged (LMCC, 2016; Stanford University, 2019); and Richards’ first museum retrospective, Michael Richards: Are You Down? (MOCA North Miami, 2021) which was highlighted by Frieze magazine as one of the “Top 10 Shows in the United States of 2021.”

Melissa additionally serves on the boards of the Artist Communities Alliance and Danspace Project. She holds a B.A. with honors in Visual Art and Art History from Barnard College.

Aaron Gilbert

Tuesday, February 15, 2022

Recording

Aaron Gilbert is a painter whose work depicts symbolic and psychological narratives. He is a 2015 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award recipient, and has been awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters as the 2010 ”Young American Painter of Distinction.” Gilbert has exhibited paintings at PPOW Gallery, Lyles and King, Lulu, Chris Sharp Gallery, Deitch Projects, and the Brooklyn Museum. He has an upcoming solo project at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis in Rome, Italy. His work is currently in the permanent collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others. Residencies include an upcoming fellowship at Civitella Ranieri (Italy), 2013 Fountainhead Residency, 2012 Yaddo, 2008 LMCC Workspace Residency as well as a 2008 Affiliate Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Gilbert holds an MFA in painting from Yale, and a BFA in painting from RISD.

Sonel Breslav

Thursday, February 24, 2022

Sonel Breslav is the Director of Fairs & Editions at Printed Matter, Inc., a leading non-profit organization dedicated to the distribution, understanding, and appreciation of artists’ books and related publications. Sonel leads the development and production of the annual NY and LA Art Book Fairs, and produced the 2021 Virtual Art Book Fair along with the platform’s free and accessible online archive. Previously, she was the National Chapters and Programs Manager at ArtTable, the foremost professional organization dedicated to advancing the leadership of women in the visual arts. From 2013–17, Sonel was the Director of Murray Guy, New York, where she curated exhibitions of work by gallery artists such as Matthew Buckingham, Alejandro Cesarco, Leidy Churchman, Moyra Davey, An-My Lê, and Zoe Leonard, among others. In 2012, Sonel founded Blonde Art Books, an independent organization and publisher dedicated to promoting small-press and self-published art books through exhibitions, talks, online exposure, and book fairs.

Leeza Meksin

Tuesday, March 1, 2022

Column Squeeze, Installation View at CLEARSKY, Brooklyn, NY, 2021.

Leeza Meksin is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working in painting, installation, public art and multiples. Born in the former Soviet Union, she immigrated to the United States with her family in 1989. Her work investigates parallels between conventions of painting, architecture and our bodies.

Meksin has created site-specific installations for The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA (2019-20), CLEARSKY, NYC (2021), The Brooklyn Academy of Music (2018-19), National Academy of Design, NYC (2018), The Uptown Triennial at The Lenfest Center for the Arts (2017), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (2016), The Kitchen, NYC (2015), BRIC Media Arts, Brooklyn (2015), Regina Rex, Brooklyn (2014, 2010), Brandeis University (2014), the former Donnell branch of the New York Public Library (2011), and in a National Endowment for the Arts funded project in New Haven, CT for Artspace (2012). In 2015 Meksin received the emerging artist grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and in 2021 she was awarded the NYSCA/NYFA artist fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work. In 2019 Meksin was the artist-in-residence at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Her work has been featured in Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Chicago Tribune, and The Village Voice, among other publications. In 2013 Meksin co-founded Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery and curatorial collective in Brooklyn that she continues to co-direct.

Meksin received a MFA from The Yale School of Art, a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA/MA in Comparative Literature from The University of Chicago. From 2015-2021 Meksin taught in the Visual Arts program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where for three years she was the Director of the Graduate program as well as the head of the New Genres concentration. In 2021 she joined the faculty at Cornell University in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP).

Dakota Mace

Tuesday, April 5, 2022

Keyah II, 2018, Glass Beads, Cotton, 14” x 16”.

Dakota Mace is a Diné (Navajo) photographer and textile artist who focuses on translating the language of Diné weaving history and beliefs through alternative photography methods, weaving, beadwork, and papermaking. She has also worked with numerous institutions and programs to develop dialogue and workshops on the importance of cultural appropriation concerning Indigenous design work.

“Diné (Navajo) weaving is more than technique and craftsmanship; it is a connection to the Diné concept of Hozhó (balance) within nature. My work focuses on reinterpreting the symbolic abstractions of our creation stories, cosmologies, and social structures, using a combination of traditional and nontraditional materials. Na’ashjéii Asdzáá (Spider Woman), who taught the ways of weaving, is one of the most important deities to the Diné and is the most prevalent motif used in my work. She was the first to weave her web of the universe while spreading Hózhó Náhásdlíí’ (Beauty Way) teachings of balance within the mind, body, & soul. This narrative formulates an understanding of certain aspects of Diné Bahané (creation story) as well as bringing Na’ashjéii Asdzáá into the art world and providing my audience a window into the world of the Diné.”

Mace received her MA and MFA degrees in Photography and Textile Design at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her BFA in Photography from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is currently a lecturer in photography at UW–Madison and a photographer for the Center of Design and Material Culture.

Her work as an artist and scholar has been exhibited nationally and internationally at various conferences and galleries. She has received numerous awards, including the 2020 Fellowship.Art Recipient, 2019 Wisconsin Triennial Recipient, Madison Magazine M List 2018 Awardee, and the Alice Brown Memorial Scholarship.

Harry Gould Harvey IV and Brittni Ann Harvey

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Entrance to the Fall River MoCA, a project initiated and run by Harry Gould Harvey and Brittni Ann Harvey.

Harry Gould Harvey IV lives and works in Fall River, Massachusetts. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions of his work include “The Confusion of Tongues!,” Bureau, New York, NY (2021); “Faith Wilding & Harry Gould Harvey IV,” David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI (2020); and “Harry Gould Harvey IV with Species,” Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA (2018). Harvey’s work has been shown in group exhibitions at the New Museum, New York, NY (2021); Centre d’Art Contemporain Brétigny, Brétigny-sur-Orge, France (2020); LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University, New York, NY (2020); Hotel Art Pavilion, Brooklyn, NY (2019); and Kunsthalle Wichita, Wichita, Kansas (2019). Harvey is a founder of the curatorial project Pretty Days and co-director of the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art.

Brittni Ann Harvey is a multimedia artist living and working in Fall River, MA. Harvey received her BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017. Harvey is the co-founder of The Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, Fall River’s first contemporary art museum. Harvey has two solo exhibitions forthcoming this fall at Anthony Greaney Gallery, Sommerville, MA and at Someday, New York, NY. She was recently in a three-person exhibition at Nir Altman, Munich, Germany, in February 2021 and has been featured in group exhibitions at Motel, Brooklyn, NY; Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, Fall River, MA; Kunsthalle Wichita, Wichita, KS; Alyssa Davis Gallery, NY, Kristen Lorello Gallery, New York, NY and Safe Gallery, East Hampton, NY.

Grisha Coleman

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

As an artist and scholar, Grisha Coleman works in areas of movement, digital media, and performance that engage creative forms in choreography, music composition, and human-centered computer interaction. Her research explores relationships among physiological, technological, and ecological systems and human movement, our machines, and the places we inhabit. She is an associate professor of movement, computation, and digital media in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University, with affiliations in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre, the Design School, and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society. Her work has been supported by Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, MacDowell, the MAP Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Pioneer Works, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Stanford University’s Mohr Visiting Artist program, and the Surdna Foundation. Coleman is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

2020-2021 Lectures

John C. Welchman

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Tala Madani. Shit Mother I (detail), 2019. Oil on linen. 80 × 80 × 1 in. Photography: Jeff McLane. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Organized in partnership with the department of the History of Art and Architecture, with support from the BU Arts Initiative.

Please join us for “Dirty Apparitions”: Tala Madani’s Shit Mom, a lecture by John C. Welchman. The lecture offers a detailed discussion of the provocative recent work of the Iranian-born, LA-based painter and media artist Tala Madani—centered on a series of paintings and video projections organized around her conception (and experience) of motherhood presented in an exhibition at the Vienna Secession, 2019–2020.

John C. Welchman is Professor of art history at the University of California, San Diego. His books include Modernism Relocated (Allen & Unwin, 1995), Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles (Yale UP, 1997), Art After Appropriation (Routledge, 2001), Catching Mayhem by its Tale [vol. II of Paul McCarthy: Caribbean Pirates] (2019); and the first two volumes of his collected writings: Past Realization: Essays on Contemporary European Art (2016) and After the Wagnerian Bouillabaisse (2019). He is editor of Rethinking Borders (1996), Institutional Critique and After (2006), The Aesthetics of Risk (2008), Black Sphinx: On the Comedic in Modern Art (2010) and writings by Mike Kelley: Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism (2003); Minor Histories (2004); Mike Kelley: Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-Chat, 1988-2004 (2005). His recent and forthcoming publications are the edited anthology On the Last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies and the work of Joyce Campbell (2019); a monograph on the LA-based artist Richard Jackson (2020); a revisionist history of early Conceptual Art and its relation to media focused through Joseph Kosuth’s The Second Investigation (1969–72); and a critical history of the Royal Book Lodge.

Andy Robert

Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Andy Robert (b. 1984, Les Caye, Haiti) has developed a practice that negotiates abstraction with recognizable imagery, and experimentation. He enjoys the tinkering that comes with painting pictures. Robert’s paintings draw from a breadth of historical and personal references. Through experimentation he has invented a signature, deconstructive approach to figurative painting that relies on the premise that images are to be bent and folded, taken apart and put back together again; a belief that art is a philosophical means to look at and examine things—to question, test ideas, and engage the world. And that in painting a picture something is being taken apart to put back together; there is an inherent risk in breaking it. And as a Haitian-American immigrant and painter, Robert views the world critically as a contradiction of mass-communication and increased voicelessness.

Robert lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Significant group shows and solo exhibitions include Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles (2017); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago (2020); Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles (2019); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas (2018); and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2016).

Recent grants, awards, and residencies include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Artist Grant, New York (2020); MacDowell Colony Fellowship, Peterborough, New Hampshire (2020); Foundation for Contemporary Arts Roy Lichtenstein Award, New York (2019); The Studio Museum Harlem Artist-in-Residence, New York (2016–2017); Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Residency, Skowhegan, Maine (2016); and the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York (2015).

His work is included in the permanent collection of the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin, Texas; Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles; The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago.

Tom Holmes

Tuesday, October 6, 2020

Holmes mounted their first solo museum show Temporary Monument in 2013 at the Kunsthalle Bern. Their work has been included in exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Contemporary Art Biennial, Sélestat, France; Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden and the Whitney Museum at Altria, New York. Work resides in the public collections of Albright-Knox, FRAC Bourgogne, Stiftung Kunsthalle Bern, and The Frances Young Tang Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.

Working within the “problems of abstraction” the artist often takes up a class-conscious cultural criticism through the genre of the funerary as well as processes derived from psychic automatism. Utilizing abstract compositional constructions and modest sculptural materials, such as concrete blocks, folding chairs, and cereal boxes, the works bear witness to the condition of the inevitable. Anne Doran writes, Holmes’s work is “redolent of institutional limbos and marginal lives, with shrill bottom notes of failure and fear.”

Gordon Hall

Friday, October 9, 2020

Recording

Organized in partnership with the departments of English and History of Art & Architecture, as well as the Women and Gender Studies Program, with support from the BU Arts Initiative.

Hall was born in Boston and lives and works in New York. The artist has performed and exhibited at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; the Wysing Arts Centre, London; Temple Contemporary, Philadelphia; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Sculpture Center, Long Island City; and the List Center for the Visual Arts at MIT in Cambridge.

Daniela Rivera

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Webinar Recording (Access Password: W8t6sKe%)

Born in Santiago, Chile, Daniela Rivera received her BFA from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1996 and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, Boston in 2006. She is currently Associate Professor of Studio Art at Wellesley College. She has exhibited widely in Latin American cities including Santiago, Chile, as well as in the United States. She has been awarded residencies at Surf Point, Proyecto ACE in Buenos Aires, Vermont Studio Center, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is the recipient of notable fellowships and grants including The Rappaport Prize, Now + There, VSC, National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, and the Berkshire Taconic Foundation. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include: Labored Landscapes; Where The Sky Touches the Earth, Fitchburg Art Museum; Fragmentos para una Historia del Olvido/ Fragments for a History of Displacement, The Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA (2018–2019); En Busca de los Andes, solo exhibition with Proyecto ACE, Buenos Aires, Argentina (June 2019); Sobremesa (Karaoke Politics), a public art project developed as her Now + There Accelerator Fellowship, Boston MA (summer/fall 2019), and The Andes Inverted, solo show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2017–18).

Tishan Hsu

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Courtesy of the artist. Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, and Empty Gallery, Hong Kong

Webinar Recording

Tishan Hsu (b. 1951, Boston) spent his very early years in Zurich, then grew up in Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia, and New York. He studied environmental design and architecture at MIT and received his BSAD in 1973 and M.Arch in 1975. While at MIT, Hsu studied film at the Carpenter Center, Harvard University. He moved to New York in 1979, where he currently resides. His first exhibition in New York was at Pat Hearn Gallery. Since 1985 he has shown extensively in the United States, Europe, and Mexico. Hsu has served as a board member of White Columns, New York, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has been a professor of visual arts at Sarah Lawrence College and a visiting professor at Pratt Institute and Harvard University.

Selected public collections include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt am Main; High Museum, Atlanta; Terra Museum, Mexico City; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; The Rubell Family Collection, Miami; and the Weisman Museum, Minneapolis. Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit, his first survey exhibition in the United States, was recently on view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (January 26–April 19, 2020). It was curated by Sohrab Mohebbi and will travel to SculptureCenter, New York (September–November, 2020). Hsu’s work will be included in the 13th Gwangju Biennale, Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning (February 26–May 9, 2021). His first solo-exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery will be held in 2021.

Kianja Strobert

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Kianja Strobert (b. 1980) received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Yale. She has had solo exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Marinaro, NY; Jack Tilton, NY; and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, California. Strobert has been included in numerous group exhibitions including shows at Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, NY; Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, NY; Lehmann Maupin, NY; and The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX. Strobert lives and works in Hudson, NY.

Jerome Harris

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Webinar Recording

Jerome Harris is a graphic designer, educator, and curator from New Haven, CT, currently based in Richmond, VA. He is the Design Director at the non-profit organization, Civic Nation, which focuses on developing initiatives that activate communities and promote social change. Harris’ research on twentieth-century African-American graphic designers has grown into a touring exhibition, with its next stop here at Boston University. He holds an MFA in graphic design from Yale University and a BA from Temple University.

Anthea Hamilton

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Photo credit: Sophie Thun. Courtesy of the artist. The New Life, 2018, Secession, Vienna, AT

Anthea Hamilton was born in London in 1978, where she lives and works. She was one of four shortlisted artists for the 2016 Turner Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Prude, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, England (2019); The New Life, Secession, Vienna, Austria (2018); The Squash, Tate Britain, London, England (2018); Anthea Hamilton Reimagines Kettle’s Yard, Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, England (2017); Lichen! Libido! Chastity!, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York NY (2015). Her work has been presented as part of the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, the British Art Show 8 and in numerous international venues including the Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (with Nicholas Byrne), the 13th Lyon Biennale, and the 10th Gwangju Biennale.

Julianne Swartz

Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Webinar Recording

Julianne Swartz creates immersive, multi-sensory installations, sculptures, and photographs. Her work synthesizes sound and light into ephemeral, participatory, performative, and social experiences.

Swartz’s site-specific installations vary widely in material, process, and function. Her work in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Somewhere Harmony, utilized a system of plexiglass tubing to distribute singing voices throughout five floors of the museum’s stairwell. Can You Hear Me (2004), an auditory and optical periscope commissioned by the New Museum, enabled conversations across physical and social boundaries. In The Sound of Light (2009), radio transmitters broadcasted a sonic treasure hunt throughout the permanent collection exhibits at the Jewish Museum.

Commissioned for The High Line, Digital Empathy (2011–12) animated eleven different park fixtures with startling public service announcements. In Joy, still (2018–19), a commission for Grace Farms Foundation in New Canaan, Connecticut, Swartz created a sixteen-channel soundscape, activating the River building to become an acoustic instrument.

She has completed several permanent and long-term projects, including a 20-channel soundscape, In-Harmonicity, the Tonal Walkway (2016), which is integrated into a footbridge at Mass MOCA. Blue Sky with Rainbow (2016), a permanent installation for the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, harnessed sunlight from the roof of the museum. A permanent commission for the City of New York, Four Directions From Hunters Point (2019), embedded four optical portals in the walls and roof of a Queens library, and received the NYC Public Design Commission’s Annual Award For Excellence in Design.

Adrian Wong

Tuesday, January 26, 2021

Dream Cosmography 2015 / 2019 edit, Digital Video 7″30

Recording

Adrian Wong was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois in 1980. Originally trained in psychology (MA, Stanford ‘03), he began making and exhibiting work in San Francisco while concurrently conducting research in developmental linguistics. He continued his post-graduate studies in sculpture (MFA, Yale ‘05). Wong relocated his studio to Hong Kong in 2005, but recently returned to Chicago, where he currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center (New York), Kuandu Museum (Taipei), Kunsthalle Wien, Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunstverein (Hamburg), Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul), Palazzo Reale (Milan), Saatchi Gallery (London), and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam)—and can be found in public and private collections worldwide, including the 21C Collection (Chicago), DSL Foundation (Paris), K11 Art Foundation (Shanghai), Kadist Foundation (San Francisco), M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Sifang Museum (Nanjing), and the Uli Sigg Collection (Lucerne).

Caroline Wells Chandler

Tuesday, February 2, 2021

Orange Sunshine crochet (installation view), 2017. Andrew Rafacz Gallery.

CW Chandler is a Bronx based artist who explores ecology, community, gender and queer iconography through the mediums of crochet, embroidery, drawing and cake. He received his MFA from Yale University in 2011 where he was awarded the Ralph Mayer Prize for proficiency in materials and techniques. From 2016-17 he was a recipient of the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Galerie Eric Mouchet (Paris, France), MOCA Tucson (Tucson, AZ), Mrs. (Maspeth, NY), Union Gallery (London, England), and Andrew Rafacz (Chicago, IL). Recent group exhibitions include Choi and Lager (Cologne, Germany), Nathalie Karg (New York, NY), Marinaro Gallery, (New York, NY), Crush Curatorial (New York, NY), Dio Horia (Mykonos, Greece), Kate Werble Gallery (New York, NY), and 11R (New York, NY). His work has been reviewed by Roxane Gay, Art Forum, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, TimeOut, Modern Painters, Maake Magazine, Two Coats of Paint and AEQAI. Chandler is a Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY Purchase.

Nicole Awai

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

“Vista 3: Emerging Properties A” (detail) 2013, mixed media on synthetic paper, 25 x 28 in.

Nicole Awai is a multi-media artist. She earned her Master’s Degree in Multimedia Art from the University of South Florida in 1996. She attended the Showhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency in 1997 and was artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2000. Awai was a featured artist in the 2005 Initial Public Offerings series at the Whitney Museum of American Art and was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2011 and an Art Matters Grant in 2012.

Her work has been included in seminal museum exhibitions including Greater New York: New Art in New York Now, at P.S. 1/ MOMA (2000), the Biennale of Ceramic in Contemporary Art, Italy (2003), Open House: Working in Brooklyn (2004), Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art (2007) both at the Brooklyn Museum; the 2008 Busan Biennale in Korea; The Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA II, the Getty Foundation Initiative exhibitions Circles and Circuits I: History and Art of the Chinese Caribbean at the California African American Museum and Circles and Circuits II: Contemporary Art of the Chinese Caribbean at the Chinese American Museum, along with Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago at the Museum of Latin American Art and the High Line Network exhibition New Monuments for New Cities. Currently, Awai’s work can be seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in the group exhibition Citizenship: A Practice of Society.

Her work has also been exhibited at the Queens Museum, Kemper Museum of Contemporary, Portland Museum of Art, Delaware Art Museum, Philip Frost Art Museum FIU, the Vilcek Foundation and the Biennale of the Caribbean in Aruba(2013). Other recent exhibitions include Splotch at Sperone Westwater, NY. Figuring the Floral, Wave Hill, NY; Summer Affairs at Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston, TX and Nicole Awai: Envisioning the Liquid Land at Lesley Heller Gallery, NY. Awai was a Critic at the Yale School of Art in the Department of Painting and Printmaking from 2009-2015 and is currently faculty in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Awai is represented by Barbara Davis Gallery in Houston, TX.

Yevgeniya Baras

Tuesday, March 9, 2021

Untitled, 2020, Oil and Wood on Canvas, 9 × 11 in.

Yevgeniya Baras is an artist living and working in NY. She has exhibited her work in several New York City galleries and internationally. She is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in NY and the Landing Gallery in LA. Yevgeniya is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, the Pollock-Krasner grant and the Chinati Foundation Residency in 2018, and the Yaddo Residency in 2017. She received the Artadia Prize and was selected for the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program and the MacDowell Colony residency in 2015. In 2014 she was named the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Prize. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, LA Times, ArtForum, and Art in America.

Yevgeniya’s current exhibitions are at Inman gallery in Houston and Station gallery in Sydney. Yevgeniya co-founded and co-curated Regina Rex Gallery on the Lower East Side of NY (2010-2018). Yevgeniya has curated and co-curated over twenty exhibitions at Regina Rex and other galleries in NY, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

Yevgeniya has a BA and MS from the University of Pennsylvania (2003) and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007). Yevgeniya teaches at RISD and Sarah Lawrence College.

Fiona Connor

Tuesday, March 16, 2021

Closed Down Clubs, 2020. New Low (Rampart).

Recording

Fiona Connor (born in New Zealand) is an artist based in Los Angeles. Vital, recurring concerns in my practice include the social and psychological life of the object, the politics of camouflage and mimesis, and the ethics and aesthetics of the built environment. She has made solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna, SculptureCenter, New York, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne among others. She has been involved with various artist-run spaces, including the Laurel Doody Library Supply, a distribution project that places small run artist books in libraries located in the United States, Puerto Rico, New Zealand and France. Connor received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BA/BFA from the University of Auckland.

Barbara Takenaga

Tuesday, March 23, 2021

Red Meryl (detail), 2020, acrylic on linen, 54 x 45 inches.

Barbara Takenaga is an American artist known for swirling, abstract paintings that have been described as psychedelic and cosmic, as well as scientific, due to their highly detailed, obsessive patterning. She gained recognition in the 2000s, as critics have placed her among artists renewing abstraction with paintings that emphasized visual beauty and excess, meticulous technique, and optical effects. Her work suggests possibilities that range from imagined landscapes and aerial maps to astronomical and meteorological phenomena to microscopic views of cells, aquatic creatures or mineral cross-sections. In a 2018 review, The New Yorker described Takenaga as “an abstractionist with a mystic’s interest in how the ecstatic can emerge from the laborious.”

Takenaga has had solo exhibitions at the MASS MoCA Hunter Center Lobby, Space 42 of the Neuberger Museum of Art, DC Moore Gallery, and a twenty-year survey at Williams College Museum of Art in 2017. She has participated in group shows at the Frist Art Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, deCordova Museum, and American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. In 2020, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she has been recognized by the National Academy of Design. Takenaga lives and works in New York City and is the Mary A. & William Wirt Warren Professor of Art, Emerita at Williams College.

Matt Bollinger

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Candy At Home, 2019, Flashe and acrylic on canvas, 38 x 48.

Matt Bollinger (b. 1980, Kansas City, MO) is an artist living in Ithaca, NY who works across painting, animation, sculpture and music. Bollinger earned his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute in 2003 and his MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007. He has had 6 solo exhibitions at Zürcher Gallery, New York and 3 solo exhibitions at Galerie Zürcher, Paris. His animations have been included in numerous film festivals and screenings in the US and Europe. His work is in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO), Museum of Fine Arts (Dole, France), and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (Brunswick, ME) Recent solo exhibitions include Extended Present, at the South Bend Museum of Art (South Bend, IN) and Labor Day at M+B (Los Angeles, LA). In 2020, Zürcher Gallery participated in the Armory Show for the first time with a duo-presentation of Staver and Matt Bollinger in the Focus Section, curated by Jamillah James.

Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Mother’s Tankstation (London, 2021) and Zürcher Gallery (New York, 2021).

Sulki & Min

Tuesday, April 6, 2021

Transitions, 2018. Single-channel video, 17 seconds. Exhibited in Disrupt the Channel, curated by Adam Griffiths as part of the Design Manchester festival and presented at Transient Space, Manchester School of Art, 15–26 October 2018.

Recording

Choi Sulki and Choi Sung Min are graphic designers based in and around Seoul, South Korea. They met at Yale University where they both earned their MFA degrees. After working as researchers at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, they returned to Korea in 2005 to start their practice. Since then, they have created graphic identities, promotional materials, publications, and websites for clients including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), Asia Culture Center, BMW Guggenheim Lab, Munhakdongne, and Mass Studies. Crossing the border between design and art, they have participated in numerous exhibitions in Korea and abroad. Their recent solo exhibitions in Seoul were held at Perigee Gallery in 2017 and Whistle in 2020. The first mid-career survey of their work has opened in 2021 at the Kyoto DDD Gallery, Japan. Their work is included in the permanent collection of MMCA, Gwacheon; M+, Hong Kong; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; and Victoria & Albert Museum, London. They have written and translated extensively on the subject of graphic design and typography and published artist books through their own Specter Press since 2006. They have lectured and taught internationally, at such institutions as Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; International Biennial of Graphic Design Brno; Osaka University of Arts; China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Yale University; Central Saint Martins, London; and Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. Sulki is an associate professor at Kaywon University of Art & Design, and Sung Min is a professor at the University of Seoul.

Arcmanoro Niles

Tuesday, April 27, 2021

Show Me I’m Not Shattered (Try To Ignore The Elephant Somehow), 2020, oil, acrylic and glitter on canvas, 66 x 81 in.

Niles comes from Washington DC and graduated from New York’s Academy of Art in 2015. That same year, he paid a visit to the Brooklyn Museum and sat down to draw an Egyptian fertility sculpture. He’d never drawn anything like it before (Niles’s other major influences are Caravaggio and Rembrandt), but it was from these drawings that he developed a set of characters he now calls “seekers”: the magical beings that roam his otherwise realist paintings and surprise those who notice them. Niles’s seekers are pictorial manifestations of our various desires, like devils on our shoulders. He paints them as two distinct kinds: his see-through, red line drawing seekers are bawdy and sexual, while his more fleshly seekers are agents of chaos and often pictured harming themselves. “Seekers,” says Niles, “are more impulsive, chasing whatever they think will make them happy in that moment, with no fear of consequence, while the human subjects are more vulnerable and open with their feelings.” But all of these different characters are just trying to figure out how to feel good, how to get through the day; and, of course, they’re all interconnected and a part of one another.

Niles makes honest paintings about how it feels to be alive. He shows us more than we can see with our own eyes. He tells us stories about what lies beneath: how we feel in the moment, and how we replay those moments again and again in our heads and our hearts and in the things that we make.

2019-2020 Lectures

Esteban Cabeza de Baca
Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Fundamentally influenced by growing up on the US-Mexico border, Esteban Cabeza de Baca draws largely from his personal experiences and the histories embedded within the American landscape. Of Mexican and Native American heritage, Cabeza de Baca’s work in painting, sculpture, and installations are often shaped toward capturing and reimagining lost cultural histories, as tools for unlearning and reimagining the past. Blurring the boundaries between abstract and figurative modes of representation, Cabeza de Baca’s paintings are rendered in accumulated layers. Employing a broad range of painterly techniques, pictorial space is transcended and amplified. Rooted in a deep sense of place and purpose, Cabeza de Baca’s work confronts colonialist histories of erasure to unveil and complicate suppressed histories of the American West.

A recent Columbia University MFA graduate, Cabeza de Baca has completed residencies at the LMCC Workspace Program, New York, NY; the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, New York, NY; and a Byrdcliffe Residency, in Woodstock, New York, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Gaa Projects Cologne, Germany; Worlds without Borders, Boers-Li Gallery, New York, NY; Unlearn, Fons Welters Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Bluer than a sky weeping bones, Gaa Gallery, Provincetown, MA. Group exhibitions include The Complexities of Unity, Yale University, New Haven, CT; Home/Not Home, Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO; Water Is Life: Indigenous Peoples Day in Support against Dakota Access Pipeline, Salvage Station, Asheville, NC; The Narrative Figure, David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Scent, Dickinson Gallery, New York, NY; and Manhattan TODAY, Leroy Neiman Art Center, New York, NY. Cabeza de Baca currently lives and works in Queens, NY.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman
September 17, 2019

Jibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist working fluidly across poetry, video, photography, and installation. His video and photo works use found, archival material and contemporary ephemera to address slippage in memory and language, particular to race and visibility. Lyrical strophes of text and densely-composed imagery produce objects of perpetual flux, indexed by accumulating layers which that normative symbolic and semiotic hierarchies. Through projection and repetition, Huffman’s work evokes the untranslatable, ruminating on the liminal qualities of singular experiences through narrative and graphic rhythms.

Huffman is the author of three books of poems, “19 Names For Our Band” (Fence, 2008), “James Brown is Dead” (Future Plan and Program, 2011) and “Sleeper Hold” (Fence, 2015). His recent and forthcoming exhibitions include the Hammer Museum, MOCA Detroit, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, The Jewish Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, The Studio Museum in Harlem and Swiss Institute. Educated at Bard College (BA), Brown University (MFA, Literary Arts), and USC (MFA, Studio Art), his awards include the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Jerome Foundation Travel Grant and fellowships from the Lighthouse Works, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Huffman was a 2015-16 Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem and lives and works in New York.

Mike Cloud
Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Evolving a unique painterly language over the last two decades, Cloud’s work comprises a mash-up of thick paint and patchworks of collaged material and language culled from books, newspapers, and other ephemera from daily life. Cloud is best known for his shaped canvases, newspaper collages made up of clippings from various New York dailies, and large-scale paper quilts composed of photographic fragments. These works represent the confluence of the artist’s expressive mark making with a myriad of recognizable forms including graphic symbols, text, and pattern. In combining these elements, Cloud explores the creative possibilities of abstraction in contemporary painting while unravelling the multiple meanings and associations embedded in familiar signs and symbols of our time.

Cloud earned his MFA from Yale University School of Art and a BFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago. A selection of exhibitions include: ‘Special Project: Mike Cloud’ at P.S.1, NY; ‘Agreement and Subjectivity’ at Max Protetch, NY; ‘Jesse Chapman/ Mike Cloud’ at Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY and ‘Bad Faith and Universal Technique’ at Thomas Erben Gallery, NY. His work has been included in group exhibitions such as ‘Frequency’ at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; at Apexart, NY and Honor Fraser Gallery, CA. Cloud’s works and writing have been featured in the New York Times, Art in America, Art Review and in the painting survey Painting Abstraction by Bob Nickas, published by Phaidon Press. He has been awarded the inaugural Chiaro Award from the Headlands Center for the Arts, CA; a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and residencies at the Meulensteen Art Centre in the Netherlands as well as the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in New York. Cloud has lectured extensively on his work and issues of contemporary art theory at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, NJ; The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, MA; Yale University, CT; Cooper Union, NY; Bard College, NY and The University of Illinois- Chicago, IL, among others. He is currently an assistant professor at Brooklyn College/ CUNY in New York.

Keltie Ferris
Tuesday, October 22, 2019

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.

Mathew Cerletty (CFA’02)
in conversation with Lucy Kim
Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Mathew Cerletty (CFA’02) utilizes a hyper-realistic approach to painting that marries the quotidian and the surreal within a range of motifs and subjects. While an undergraduate at Boston University, Cerletty developed the ability to carefully paint the figure in the academic, representational mode. Today, he has developed a practice in which virtuosic yet slightly uncanny depictions of human subjects, corporate logos, and domestic objects are rendered in high-key color and with flat precision. Pervading Cerletty’s paintings is a deadpan sense of humor tempered by a disarming sincerity towards his seemingly banal subjects.

His work has been exhibited in museums including Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego; and at galleries including Rivington Arms, Team Gallery, Plum and Poe in New York, and the Boston University Art Galleries. He is represented by Office Baroque in Brussels, Belgium and Standard in Oslo, Norway.

Lucy Kim is an Assistant Professor of Painting at Boston University. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. She is the recipient of the 2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize and the 2015 Boston Artadia Award. She was a fellow at the Yale Norfolk Summer Program and the MacDowell Colony, a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and an artist-in-residence at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Her work has been exhibited at the ICA Boston, Fitchburg Museum of Art, Lisa Cooley, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Institute of Fine Arts-NYU, and Galerie Pact, among others, and her work is in the collection of the Kadist Foundation, Paris, and the ICA Boston. She was a founding member of the artist collaborative kijidome, which received the 2015 Foster Prize. Her work has been reviewed by the Boston Globe, Brooklyn Rail, Artforum.com, ArtNews, Kaleidoscope, and Big Red & Shiny.

Abigail DeVille
Tuesday, November 5, 2019

Abigail DeVille creates immersive installations composed of salvaged urban detritus and expressive painterly gestures. Often site-specific, her work confronts issues of displacement, migration, marginalization, and cultural invisibility. DeVille undertakes intensive preparatory research and acts as an archaeologist, collecting and reallocating found materials to give physical presence to unspoken stories and forgotten pasts.

DeVille’s work has been exhibited at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO; Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; the Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev, Ukraine; New Museum, NY; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL. DeVille has designed sets for theatrical productions—at venues such as the Stratford Festival directed by Peter Sellers, Harlem Stage, La Mama, JACK, and Joe’s Pub directed by Charlotte Brathwaite. She has received honors including a fellowship at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, a Creative Capital grant, received an OBIE Award for design, and was nominated for The Future Generation Art Prize in 55th Biennale di Venezia. Recent residencies include the American Academy in Rome, Italy; and the Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, Florida. She received her BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology and her MFA from Yale University.

Andy Graydon
Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Working in film and video, sound, performances and installations, Andy Graydon explores the development and transformation of forms, from morphogenesis to translation to decay. His work engages structures of music such as scoring and improvisation. Interested in natural and social ecologies and the role of listening and the voice, he seeks to create evolving relations between subjects, objects, and environments.

Graydon is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Maui, Hawai’i. His work has been presented internationally at the New Museum, Participant Inc, New York; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Mass.; Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawai’i; Wroclaw Media Arts Bienniale, Poland; and others. Graydon has been artist in residence at the MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire; NKD Norwegian Artists’ Center, Norway; and the Center for Computer Music, Brooklyn College. Graydon received his MFA in Radio, Television, and Film from Northwestern University.

Matt Saunders
Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Based in Boston, Matt Saunders is an interdisciplinary artist whose work brings together painting, photography, printmaking, and moving image. Best known for works that combine painting with cameraless photographic techniques, Saunders creates evocative, ambiguous images that are elusive in both their source imagery and their mode of production. A cinematic quality pervades his work, and his chosen imagery ranges from a broad catalogue of sources including experimental film, West German television, found portraits, and Polaroid stills of his television screen. Saunders has said of his work, “I’m interested in the private experience of a performance and its mediation.”

Saunders is based between New York, Boston, and Berlin. He holds degrees from Harvard University and Yale University, where he studied painting. He is the Harris K. Weston Associate Professor of the Humanities in the department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Recent solo exhibitions include Currents 114: Matt Saunders, Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Tank Space, Shanghai, China; Century Rolls, Tate Liverpool, UK; and Parallel Plot, Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL. His work is represented in numerous public collections including the Deutsche Bank Collection; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul, Turkey; Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Tate Modern, London, UK; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

Gala Porras-Kim
Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Gala Porras-Kim is an interdisciplinary artist living in Los Angeles. Her work is made through the process of learning about the social and political contexts that influence how such intangible things as sounds, language, and history have been represented through methodologies in the fields of linguistics, history, and conservation. Interested in the nature of museum practices of preservation and conservation, Porras-Kim’s research-driven practice takes as a point of departure the assumptions that imbue cultural objects and artifacts with meaning and value. Utilizing museological approaches of display and cataloguing, the artist speculates on the possible narratives of objects that would otherwise be lost in history. Her recent work explores the limits of artists’ agency, property rights, and corporal integrity, considering artworks and artifacts within institutional collections.

Originally from Bogotá, Colombia, Porras-Kim lives and works in Los Angeles. She has an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Hammer Museum. In 2017 she was the recipient of an Artadia Award, and in 2015 of a Creative Capital award and a Tiffany Foundation award. She is currently a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Sangram Majumdar
Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Sangram Majumdar’s paintings engage deeply with the sensory experience of the world. While rooted in direct observation, his work often veers into the territory of abstraction by utilizing darkness, reflective glare, and refraction, which all serve to dissolve the unity of the subject and disorient the viewer. Majumdar’s recent work is inspired by the Indian Sanskrit epic poem the Ramayana. Figures and repeating motifs such as hands are partially erased and redrawn, producing a central absence that simultaneously alludes to various pictorial conventions ranging from figuration to total abstraction.

Born in Kolkata, India, Majumdar has an MFA from Indiana University and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibition venues include Barbara Davis Gallery, TX; Asia Society Texas Center, TX; Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, NY; The Landing Gallery, LA; Freight & Volume, NY; Geary Contemporary, NY; and James Cohan Gallery, NY. Awards include a Purchase Award from the 2010 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, American Academy of Arts and Letters, NY, a MacDowell Fellowship, a residency at Yaddo, the 2009-10 Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Space Program Grant, and two Maryland State Art Council Individual Grants in Painting. He is a Professor of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Adam Milner
Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Adam Milner draws from personal and historical archives to create highly poetic sculptures and assemblages. His practice draws upon personal exchanges with people, things, and institutions to examine systems of intimacy, value, and power. Approaching materials and spaces that are often off limits, his work reveals boundaries and involve a process of negotiation and exchange. He has performed aboard a cruise ship hosted by the app Grindr, collaborated with material engineers at NASA to use rare lunar regolith simulant, intervened in the archives of Andy Warhol, and routinely drawn his boyfriend’s blood.

Milner lives and works in Brooklyn. He received an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, is a recent participant of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and is a fellow with Black Cube Nomadic Museum. Milner has exhibited at the Mattress Factory, The Andy Warhol Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Aspen Art Museum, Casa Maauad, Galería Mascota, Flux Factory, Florian Christopher Zurich, Mindy Solomon Gallery and David B. Smith Gallery.

Tschabalala Self
Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Tschabalala Self creates large-scale figurative paintings that integrate hand-printed and found textiles, drawing, printmaking, sewing, and collage techniques to tell stories of urban life, the body, and humanity. Her paintings and sculptures represent personal avatars, couplings, and everyday social exchanges inspired by urban life. Together, they articulate new expressions of embodiment and humanity through the exaggerated forms and exuberant textures of the human figure, pointing to its limitless capacity to represent imagined states, memories, aspirations, and emotions. Yet Self’s characters possess an ordinary grace grounded in reality: they are reflections of the artist or people she can imagine meeting in Harlem, her hometown.

Self received her MFA from Yale University and a BA from Bard College. Recent exhibition venues include the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle Washington, Yuz Museum in Shanghai, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the New Museum in New York, among many others. Her work can be found in collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the ICA Boston, the Perez Art Museum in Miami, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Oiakothek de Moderne in Munich, Germany, among others. She has been in artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Red Bull House of Art in Detroit, and was an Al Held Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, Italy. Her first solo exhibition in Boston, Out of Body, is on view now at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.

Marc Handelman
Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Marc Handelman is an American painter living and working in Brooklyn, New York known for large scale paintings, landscapes and abstract images. Drawing from popular cultural and art historical visual references, he crops, reframes, and deconstructs iconic images to explore politics, spirituality and ideology. Engaging themes such as the re-emergence of nineteenth-century landscape aesthetics in corporate advertising, political branding, white-nationalist mythology, settler-colonialism, and the essentialization of Nature, Handelman’s work questions the ways in which the omnipresence of these and other naturalisms obfuscate, aestheticize and legitimize forms of violence and oppression.

Handelman studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) earning a BFA in Painting in 1998, with an Art History concentration. He spent two of those years at RISD at the European Honors Program, studying in Rome. In 2003, he was awarded an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. Handelman’s work has been shown internationally and has been featured in the USA Today exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. He has participated in exhibitions at several prominent commercial galleries such as Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York, and Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Los Angeles. He is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York.

John C. Welchman
Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Organized in partnership with the department of the History of Art and Architecture, with support from the BU Arts Initiative.

John C. Welchman is Professor of Modern Art History in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. He writes regularly on modern and contemporary art and critical theory. Among his numerous publications are Past Realization: Essays on Contemporary European Art;After the Wagnerian Bouillabaisse: Essays on European Avant-Gard Art; Modernism Relocated: Towards a Cultural Studies of Visual Modernity; Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles; and Art After Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s. He is the editor of three collections of writings by the artist Mike Kelley, and the co-editor of Black Sphinx: On the Comedic in Modern Art. Welchman has written art criticism for Artforum, where he had a column in the late 1980s and early 90s; Screen; and the New York Times, among other newspapers and journals.

Gordon Hall
Tuesday, April 7, 2020

Organized in partnership with the departments of English and History of Art & Architecture, as well as the Women and Gender Studies Program, with support from the BU Arts Initiative.

As a sculptor, performer, and writer, Gordon Hall examines the personal, relational, and political effects of the ways we relate to objects and to each other. Using both abstract forms and re-constructed copies of found objects, the artist asks how we might use such things and how they solicit bodily engagements from us. Ultimately, Hall’s interests lie in the social and political dynamics of these exchanges. The intentional, specific, and enigmatic objects Hall creates are both provocations to performance and allegories for an ethics of relationality. The sculptural objects and the performances that occur with and adjacent to them explore possibilities for an engagement with space, time, and objecthood that seek to model alternative futures.
Hall was born in Boston and lives and works in New York. The artist has performed and exhibited at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; the Wysing Arts Centre, London; Temple Contemporary, Philadelphia; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Sculpture Center, Long Island City; and the List Center for the Visual Arts at MIT in Cambridge.

Ella Kruglyanskaya
Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Ella Kruglyanskaya is a contemporary painter known for her stylized depictions of female figures. Characterized by splashy colors and patterns, her paintings depict women in revealing and exuberantly styled clothing, engaged in leisure activities or absurdist scenarios punctuating by visual puns and physical confrontations. Kruglyanskaya’s practice engages with the historical tropes of Western painting in regard to the female figure, updating and subverting these conventions through humor and a bold expressionistic approach.

Born in in Riga, Latvia, she emigrated to the United States in the 1990s, receiving her BFA in painting from Cooper Union and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. Kruglyanskaya lives and works in New York. She has exhibited at Gavin Brown Enterprise in New York; Bonner Kunstverein in Germany; Tate Liverpool; Contemporary Art Center in Riga, Latvia; The Power Station in Dallas, TX; and White Columns in New York, among others. Her works are held in the collections of the Broad Museum in Los Angeles and the Tate Modern in London.

Akili Tommasino
Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Akili Tommasino is the Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. An advocate of emerging artists and a scholar of the twentieth-century avant-garde, he has curated and collaborated on numerous exhibition projects at institutions internationally. Previously, he was a curatorial assistant at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he organized 2017 exhibition Projects 107: Lone Wolf Recital Corps, and a Fulbright Fellow at the Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’art Modern in Paris, where he pursued research for his dissertation on the machine aesthetic of Fernand Léger.

Tommasino is completing a PhD in History of Art and Architecture through Harvard University, where he earned his MA and BA. With the support of Sotheby’s, Tommasino founded the the Prep for Prep/Sotheby’s Summer Art Academy, which gives New York City high school students of color an early window into the art world and to promote diversity in the field.

Peter Halley
Monday, April 27, 2020

Peter Halley is a contemporary American artist best known for his neon-colored geometric paintings. Since the early 1980s, Halley has honed in on motifs related to barred windows, prison cells, and the conduits and grids composing cities. “Space became geometrically differentiated and partitioned. Circulatory pathways, the omnipresent straight lines of the industrial landscape, were established to facilitate orderly movement,” he wrote. Halley helped define the Neo-Geo movement, developing themes meant to critique the utopian vision of avant-garde idealists and the narratives produced by various cultural authorities.

Halley has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, at sites including the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany; the Sanata Barbara Museum of Art; Kunsthalle Schirn in Frankfurt, Germany; and has been featured in numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Alongside his career as a visual artist, Halley has written a number of essays on art theory. An influential teacher to a generation of young artists, he served as Director of Graduate Studies in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale University School of Art from 2002 to 2011. Halley studied at Yale University and received an MFA at the University of New Orleans. His work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Tate Modern in London, among many others.

2018–2019 Lectures

Matt Phillips (CFA’07)
Tuesday, September 11, 2018

The paintings of Matt Phillips (CFA’07) blend influences from modernist abstraction, folk art, and African textiles, creating contemporary pastiches that are just as colloquial as they are clever. Phillips paints with a pigment and silica blend that allows each brushstroke to dry instantaneously, leaving a map of his paintings’ construction through physical evidence of touch. He uses notions of pattern, textile, and decorative to hint at referential codes that allow the abstract to take on tangible, comfortable forms. Phillips graduated from the MFA Painting program at Boston University in 2007. He is a founding member of the Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery in Brooklyn and has taught at Mount Holyoke College and Hampshire College. Solo exhibitions have been held at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects and the University of Maine Museum of Art.

Jennifer Packer
Monday, October 1, 2018

Critiquing the art historical gaze, Jennifer Packer’s portraits address the privilege of viewership and the ways the body has been represented and looked at throughout history. In her paintings, the existence of either person or object relies wholly on its surroundings—a figure reclining in a chair, or a vase sitting on a table, becomes inextricable from its support. Grounded in personal grapplings with sorrow, bitterness, and affection, Packer’s paintings employ contradictions as a means of raising questions and revealing otherwise overlooked complexities. Favoring friends and family as subjects, Packer imbues her paintings with intimacy and affection, creating a distinct sense of atmosphere through scenes in which foreground and background both defy and merge with each other.

Karthik Pandian
Tuesday, October 9, 2018

American artist Karthik Pandian makes works in moving image, sculpture and performance. Questions of history, migration and the built environment motivate his research into subjects ranging from pre-Columbian mound-building cultures, race and the aesthetics of the avant-garde and camel choreography as an analogy for political movement. He says about his work, “I rub the monument like a magic lamp, polishing it into a mirror for our times, such that we may see ourselves, albeit darkly – both as ourselves and reversed.”

Pandian has held solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Bétonsalon, Paris, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, and White Flag Projects, St. Louis, amongst others. His work was featured in the inaugural Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum and La Triennale: Intense Proximity at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris as well as in group exhibitions such as Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015, at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Film as Sculpture at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; and the 4^th Marrakech Biennial, Higher Atlas.

Pandian is currently working on a series of exhibitions in sculpture and performance with his collaborator, choreographer Andros Zins-Browne. Atlas Unlimited will be the subject of his talk.

Chie Fueki
Tuesday, November 6, 2018

Chie Fueki is a Japanese American painter. Her intricately patterned and detailed paintings, often created on mulberry paper or wood panel, combine influences from both Eastern and Western decorative and folk arts, and range in subject from sports imagery to more traditional subjects such as memento mori and portraits of friends. Laura Newman wrote that the shimmering surfaces in Fueki’s paintings “give the works a sensuous, intoxicating delight of the sort more often associated with decoration than with thoughtful contemporary painting.” Beyond these surfaces lie rich emotional and sometimes humorous content. She is represented by Mary Boone Gallery in New York City and Shoshana Wayne gallery in Santa Monica, California.

Frank Jackson
Tuesday, November 13, 2018

The recent work by New England-based artist Frank Jackson shifts between raw, heavily pigmented paintings exploring the materiality and alchemy of his materials, to delicate works on paper suggesting maps of imagined terrains. Through the language of abstraction, Jackson addresses the question of what constitutes a landscape by describing certain sites as an emotional and intellectual state created by memory as much as a physical place to be experienced. Since receiving his MFA from University of California Davis in 1990, Jackson’s work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions. He has taught and lectured extensively with positions at Williams College, Rhode Island School of Design, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Alexandria Smith
Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Alexandria Smith is a mixed media visual artist and co-organizer of the collective, Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter. In Smith’s large-scale, mixed media works, humor and a dark probing of social issues are filtered through her personal mythology. Interweaving memory, autobiography and history, her work utilizes painting, collage and installation to explore transformative girlhood experiences as they intersect with the complexities of Black identity. Through amorphous, hybrid characters, Smith obsessively deconstructs images of the female body: legs, hands and pigtails become characters and landscapes—a topography of the psyche. Smith is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including: MacDowell, Bemis and Yaddo; LMCC Process Space Residency, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, the Virginia A. Myers Fellowship at the University of Iowa and the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Her recent exhibitions include: Black Pulp at Yale University, The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night at Mass MoCA, and an upcoming solo exhibition at Boston University Art Galleries.

Jim Skuldt
Tuesday, January 29, 2018

Interested in the mediated realities we construct, normalize and inhabit, Jim Skuldt’s work probes our dwindling relationship with physicality: from the construction (and locking) of a renegade structure in the back yard of his Art school, to the acquisition and distribution of the 48-foot-diameter circular rotating touring stage formerly belonging to Neil Diamond, to the cataloguing of each piece of his neighbors’ profuse trash droppings over the course of a year, to the ongoing quest to ship himself worldwide within a modified shipping container. Skuldt is the recipient of numerous grants including the Creative Capital Foundation, Harpo Foundation, the California Community Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation. His work has been exhibited worldwide at venues including Marlborough Chelsea; LTD Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree, CA; Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille; and SECONDroom, Antwerp.

Troy Michie
Tuesday, February 5, 2018

Working in collage, painting, and sculptural assemblage, Troy Michie engages with the presence and absence of body through a queer lens. His work deconstructs the codes that inform our understanding race, gender, sexuality, and other fields of identity and power. Michie’s work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad, including the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the Stedelijk Museum-Hertogenbosch, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, and the Artist’s Institute. Michie attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, ME (2015) and was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA (2016). Michie is also a recipient of an Art Matters grant (2016) and an emerging artist grant from the Rema Hort Mann foundation (2015). He received his BFA from the University of Texas El Paso and his MFA from the Yale University School of Art.

Emily Mae Smith
Tuesday, February 12, 2019

Emily Mae Smith’s crisply imagined paintings reference classic animation, art history, mythology, and science-fiction kitsch as tools for tongue-in-cheek reflections on gender, the gaze, and the role of the artist. Her slick surfaces, dry wit and collapse of the distinctions between high and low culture all draw on the traditions of Pop art, but are updated to reflect contemporary feminist concerns in painting. Smith lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Smith has been the subject of exhibitions at Le Consortium in Dijon, France; Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin; Perrotin, New York; Simone Subal Gallery, New York; and Mary Mary in Glasgow, among others. This spring, she will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT. She earned an M.F.A. in Visual Art from Columbia University, New York and a B.F.A. from Studio Art, University of Texas at Austin.

Rochelle Feinstein
Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Rochelle Feinstein explores and collapses the history of painting, including text-based work, Neo-Expressionism, and collage, to create her distinctive and varied oeuvre. In recent years, Feinstein has reworked her older pieces, collaging photographs on top of old paintings and presenting slides of early work with text scrawled over the image. This retrospective mode prompts questions about individual artistic style and how we value and perceive art through the lens of authorship. Feinstein received a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in 1975 and an M.F.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1978. Her work is exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe, and is included in numerous public and private collections. Among recent awards and grants she has received: a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. Feinstein was appointed to the Yale faculty in 1994 as professor of Painting and Printmaking, and became Professor Emerita in 2017.

Tammy Nguyen
Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Tammy Nguyen is a multimedia artist working with geopolitics, fiction, and lesser-known histories. She received a BFA from the Cooper Union in 2007 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2013. From 2007-08, Nguyen was a Fulbright Scholar in Vietnam, where she studied traditional lacquer painting techniques. She has exhibited at the Rubin Museum, The Fine Arts Museum of Ho Chi Minh City, and the Bronx Museum, among others; and her work is included in the collections of Yale University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, MIT Library, the Walker Art Center Library, and the Museum of Modern Art Library. In Fall 2016, Nguyen founded Passenger Pigeon Press, an independent press that brings the work of scientists, journalists, creative writers, and visual artists together to create politically nuanced projects.

Steve Locke
Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Steve Locke is an artist and educator based in Boston. Portraiture is a central concern of Locke’s paintings, which deconstruct the codes of masculine desire, intimacy, and violence. The artist is best known for portraits of men’s disembodied heads, images that are precariously positioned between the humorous, violent, and vulnerable. More recent works have addressed racial politics and civic life in public space and at a larger scale, shifting into the territory of public monuments. Recent projects include Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie (A Memorial for Freddie Gray), an outdoor installation at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Love Letter to a Library, an interdisciplinary, text-based work at numerous libraries throughout Boston; and a large-scale sculptural monument to victims of the Atantic slave trade at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, currently in the proposal stage. Locke is a faculty member at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Louis Comfort Tiffanny Foundation Grant, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and has served as Artist in Residency for the city of Boston. His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions at sites including the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, the Drawing Center in New York, the Boston Center for the Arts, among others.

Catherine Sullivan
Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Catherine Sullivan creates ensemble work in film, theater, and visual art. She is concerned with the ways in which history is projected through the body, and with questions of redress in American social life. Performers in her works cope with written texts, stylistic economies, re-enactments of historic performances, gestural and choreographic regimes, and conceptual orthodoxies. Solo exhibitions, collaborations, performances and films have been presented at venues such as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Monden, London; Secession, Vienna; Cricoteka, Krakow; Volksbühne, Berlin; Berlin International Film Festival; and BFI London Film Festival. Notable awards include The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, United States Artists Walker Fellowship and a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award. Sponsored by Boston University’s MFA program in Sculpture and Harvard University’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies.

David Brooks
Tuesday, April 9, 2019

David Brooks’ sculptures and installations are concerned with humans’ relationships to both the natural world and the built environment. His work investigates how cultural concerns cannot be divorced from the natural world, while also questioning the terms under which nature is perceived and utilized. Brooks has exhibited at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Dallas Contemporary, the Galerie für Landschaftskunst in Hamburg, and MoMA/PS1, among others. Major commissions include Storm King Art Center, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum and Cass Sculpture Foundation, UK, as well as Desert Rooftops in Times Square, a 5000 sq. ft. urban earthwork commissioned by Art Production Fund. Brooks is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a research grant to the Ecuadorian Amazon from the Coypu Foundation, and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. He received his BFA from the Cooper Union in New York and his MFA from Columbia University.

2017-2018 Lectures

Ryan Johnson
Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Ryan Johnson is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His sculptures, made from a variety of materials, among them wood, medical casting tape and sheet metal, have been described as having “strange spatial compressions, surreal displacements and quasi-Futurist illusions of movement.” Johnson grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia and holds a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Columbia University. His work has been featured in exhibitions at MoMA PS1 in New York, The Sculpture Center, Sikkema Jenkins, White Flag Projects, and the Saatchi Gallery in London, among others. He is represented by The Suzanne Geiss Company in SoHo, New York.

James Siena
Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Based in New York, James Siena creates rule-based linear abstractions. His artwork is driven by self-imposed predetermined sets of rules, or “visual algorithms,” which find their end-result in intensely concentrated, vibrantly-colored, freehand geometric patterns. Siena works across a diverse range of media, including lithography, etching, woodcut, engraving, drawing and painting. He has been featured in more than one hundred solo and group exhibitions since 1981, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His work is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Siena was inducted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2000 and was elected an Academician at The National Academy in 2011. He is represented by Pace Gallery.

Caitlin Cherry
Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Caitlin Cherry was born in Chicago and lives and works in Brooklyn. In a hybrid practice that combines installation and painting, Cherry weaves together references to art history and present day politics, expanding the formal and discursive spaces of painting. Her installations often involve the institutions in which they are shown, such as museums and galleries, to playfully suggest the ability to inflict damage on what could be regarded as bastions of cultural authority. Cherry received her MFA from Columbia University and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Cherry’s work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, the University Museum for Contemporary Art at UMass Amherst, and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. She is a recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Fellowship Residency.

Corin Hewitt
Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Corin Hewitt is an artist working primarily in sculpture, photography and installation. Hewitt’s process-driven work is defined by a constant and open-ended manipulation of materials, spaces and images. His methods include cooking, sculpting, heating and cooling, casting, canning, eating, and photographing both organic and inorganic materials. The result is an intimate examination of the cycles of transformation and transience. Hewitt received a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, and the Seattle Art Museum, among others. He has been awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rome Prize.

Tomashi Jackson
Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Tomashi Jackson’s practice combines painting, textile, sculpture, video, and collage. Her works draw disparate connections between formal concerns such as Albers’ color theory and social realities such as police brutality and racism in America. Her visually and mimetically layered works explore the entwined relationships between the aesthetic and the political within society. Her work has been exhibited at MASS MoCA, the New Museum in New York, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, the Walker Art Center, and MoMA PS1, among others. Jackson earned a BFA from The Cooper Union, an MS from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, and an MFA from Yale School of Art.

Mark Thomas Gibson
Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Mark Thomas Gibson is a Brooklyn-based painter. Gibson works with the visual language of comics and cartoons to wrestle with difficult historical and social issues. Working in open-ended series, his paintings feature recurring characters and settings that serve as allegories for the history of colonialism and its impact on the American cultural fabric. Gibson received a BFA from Cooper Union and an MFA from Yale in 2013. His work has been exhibited at Matthew Mark Gallery, Fredericks & Freiser, and Salon 94, and he was recently featured in the group exhibition Black Pulp! at Yale University Art Gallery.

Peter Saul
Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Long before Bad Painting became a central concern of contemporary art, San Francisco-born painter Peter Saul deliberately offended good taste. Employing a crossover of Pop Art, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, San Francisco funk and cartoon culture of the 1960s, Saul’s work addresses the pressing political and social issues that underlie American culture. Vietnam, Reagan, protests, sex, drugs, and the American dream clash in paintings rendered in screaming Day-Glo colors. Throughout his over fifty-year career, he has explored difficult subjects with transgressive yet engaging humor, influencing generations of young artists in the process. His work can be found in the collections of major museums across the world, including the Art institute of Chicago, Centre Georges Pompidou, Moderna Museet, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, to name just a few.

Ulrike Müller
Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Born in Austria and based in New York, Ulrike Müller works primarily in painting, pushing the tradition of hardedge abstraction beyond formal concerns to explore issues of identity and representation. Combining her painting practice with performance, sculpture, publishing, and textiles among numerous other media and approaches, oftentimes working collaboratively, Müller’s work explores questions of the body and identity politics from a queer perspective. She has been a coeditor of the queer feminist journal LTTR and organized Herstory Inventory. 100 Feminist Drawings by 100 Artists. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at mumok in Vienna, as well as inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and in Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age at Museum Brandhorst in Munich. Her work has also been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Hessel Museum of Art, Dia Art Foundation and the ICA Boston. Most recently her work is included in the exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon at the New Museum in New York. Müller teaches painting at Bard College and Yale University.

Keltie Ferris
Tuesday, February 6, 2018

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
Tuesday, March 20, 2018

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, 2018

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 Union School of Art in New York. Her work has been exhibited at Mary Boone Gallery, MoMA PS1, the Whitney Museum of American 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, 2018

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.

2016-2017 Lectures

Dru Donovan
Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Dru Donovan received a BFA from California College of the Arts in 2004 and an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2009. Donovan’s work has shown nationally and internationally and was included in reGeneration2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, and in the 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. She has been included in group shows at Fraenkel Gallery, Yancey Richardson Gallery, Brancolini Grimaldiand, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and a solo show at Hap Gallery. Donovan’s photographs have been published in Aperture Magazine, Blind Spot, Picture Magazine, Matte Magazine, The New York Times Magazine and Vice. Her work is in the collections of Deutsche Bank and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2011 TBW Books published her first book, Lifting Water. In 2011-2012 she participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace studio residency. Awards Donovan has received are the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship in 2015 and is a 2016-2017 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow.

She has taught at many institutions including Parsons School for Design, Pratt Institute, Lewis & Clark College, University of Hartford and Yale University and will be a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard in the fall of 2016.

Jordan Casteel
Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Jordan Casteel (b. 1989 in Denver, CO) received her B.A. from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA for Studio Art (2011) and her M.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art in New Haven, CT (2014). She has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY, (2015) Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Process Space, Governors Island, NY, (2015), The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2015), and is currently an awardee for The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, DUMBO, NY (2016). She has had two solo exhibitions in New York with Sargent’s Daughters in August 2014 and October 2015 and was featured in Artforum, The New York Times, Flash Art, New York Magazine, FADER, Time Out New York, The New York Observer and Interview Magazine. Casteel is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University-Newark.

Lucy Kim
Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Lucy Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised between South Korea, Myanmar, and the United States. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001 and her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2007. She attended the Yale Summer School of Art and Music, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the MacDowell Colony, and is the recipient of the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize and the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship from Yale, as well as the Boston Artadia Award. She is a founding member of the collaborative kijidome, and is currently Lecturer in Fine Arts at Brandeis University. Kim lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work is included in the collection of the Kadist Foundation in Paris, amongst others. She is a recipient of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston’s Foster Prize, and will have an exhibition at the ICA in 2017.

Allison Katz
Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Allison Katz is a painter who investigates and pushes the conventions and history of Western painting. Her work rejects formal or thematic coherence—within the picture plane or throughout the artist’s oeuvre—and therefore resists the labeling of a style. Avoiding narrative or continuity, the artist instead chooses to approach each canvas anew, taking on different personas, and sometimes forcing opposing tastes to coexist uncomfortably within a single tableau. Motifs do reappear—black pears, strawberries, monkeys, noses, silhouettes, roosters, clocks—but less as representations or signatures, and more as a visual lexicon which allows her to expand and distort their meanings in an ongoing meditation on the nature of representation and the elasticity of symbols.

Katz’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Johan Berggren Gallery in Malmö, Sweden, Battat Contemporary in Montreal, and BFA Boatos in Sao Paulo. She has also been included in group exhibitions at Scupture Center in New York, and Tate Britain in London. She is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant.

Lydia Dona
Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Lydia Dona was born in Bucharest, Romania. She received her BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem and the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1982 and her MFA from Hunter College in New York in 1984. Her work is held in significant public and private collections including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Canada, the S.M.A.K. Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgium, and the Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich. In addition, she has lectured extensively on contemporary painting. Her work focuses on the exploration of the urban environment and the encroachment of technology on the human body. Her approach to abstraction often emphasizes a collision of natural form and machinery parts.

Meriem Bennani
Tuesday, November 1, 2016

New Yorked-based artist Meriem Bennani grew up in Morocco, earned an MFA from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and a BFA from Cooper Union in New York. Bennani and artist Hayden Dunham are the co-founders of Other Travel, a collaborative curatorial project involving the creation and delivery of extra-terrestrial gifts to seven artists in the New York area. She is also one half of Some Silly Stories, a series of hand-animated perversions based on her own crude drawings and a constant dialog with musician Flavien Berger.

Meriem is currently working on videos and photographs documenting the life of Fardaous Funjab, the avant-garde Moroccan Hijab designer. The project explores the encounter of fashion and religion with a focus on the aesthetics of sexuality in a contemporary Muslim context. Bennani is interested in dissolving tropes and questioning systems of representation through a strategy of magical realism and humor as an unreliable pacifier.

Mike Rader
Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Mike Rader’s images grow and evolve with his surroundings and are influenced not only by his physicality in the world, but in the work as well. His fascinating approach to painting creates a multiplicity of theme and images as the canvases unfold and unfold again, while opening the images from the inside out like the gutting of a large animal. This dynamic struggle to literally cut open the canvas to expose the art within breaks the boundaries of a conventionally flat surface to create a new dimension of artistic form. Mike has created a malleable two dimensional surface without relying on a dense or mountainous layer of paint to achieve a new space in works of canvas. Mike lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Didier William
Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Didier William is originally from Port-au-prince, Haiti. He received his BFA in painting from The Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University School of Art. His work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of Art, The Fraenkel Gallery, Frederick and Freiser Gallery, and Gallery Schuster in Berlin. He was an artist in residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in Brooklyn, NY and has taught at Yale School of Art, Vassar College, Columbia University, and SUNY Purchase. Forthcoming he will serve as the Chair of the MFA Program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, beginning in the fall of 2016.

Paula Wilson
Monday, November 21, 2016

Artist Paula Wilson’s work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Bellwether Gallery, Fredric Snitzer Gallery, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Johan Berggren Gallery in Sweden, and Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. She is a recipient of numerous grants and awards including a Joan Mitchell Artist Grant, Art Production Fund’s P3Studio Artist-in-Residency at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, and the Happy and Bob Doran Artist-in-Residence Fellowship at Yale University Art Gallery.

Wilson earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Washington University in 1998 and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in 2005. She lives and works in Carrizozo, New Mexico.

Jennifer Bornstein
Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Working in film, photography, and intaglio printing, Jennifer Bornstein creates representations of ordinary people engaged in the quotidian. Bornstein’s works often layer varying mediums and periods of artmaking—typically representing both slow processes with more fast-paced processes—such as her etchings based on photographs of figures posed in the same manner as the subjects of 19th-century archival photographs.

Bornstein received an M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. She has received numerous awards and grants, including a DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm fellowship, a Sharpe Foundation grant, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. Her work has been widely exhibited in the United States and Europe, including solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and group exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Serpentine Gallery, London, and Menil Collection, Houston, among others. She has contributed essays to Frieze Magazine, the Getty Research Journal, Mousse Magazine, and other publications. Bornstein was a Radcliffe Institute and Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University in 2014-15. She was recently announced as one of the winners of the 2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize at the ICA Boston, and will have an exhibition at the museum this spring.

Caroline Woolard
Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Caroline Woolard works collaboratively to make art and infrastructure for the solidarity economy. After co-founding and co-directing resource sharing networks OurGoods.org and TradeSchool.coop from 2008-2014, Woolard’s organizing work is now focused on BFAMFAPhD.com to raise awareness about the impact of rent, debt, and precarity on culture and on the NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative to create and support truly affordable commercial space for cultural resilience and economic justice in New York City. While making infrastructure, Woolard furnishes gathering spaces with objects that are as imaginative as the conversations that occur in those spaces.

Caroline Woolard’s work has been supported by residencies and fellowships at MoMA, the Queens Museum, the Judson Church, the Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund, Eyebeam, the MacDowell Colony, and by unemployment benefits, the curiosity of strangers, her partner, and many collaborators. Recent group exhibitions include: Crossing Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; Maker Biennial, The Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; and Artist as Social Agent, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH. Woolard’s work will be featured in Art21’s New York Close Up documentary series over the next three years. Woolard is a lecturer at the School of Visual Arts and the New School, a project manager at the worker-owned design firm CoLab.coop, and is a member of the Community Economies Research Network and the board of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics.

Mira Dancy
Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Taking a feminist approach, Mira Dancy makes powerful, expressive works centered on the female nude. She works primarily on canvas, but has also branched out into wall painting, neon light pieces, projected images, and sculptural painted combines. Dancy often works on a large-scale, filling her canvases with expansive nudes rendered in a vibrant array of colors and with calligraphic, sweeping lines. Unlike the women who appear in paintings throughout art history, her nudes are imbued with a sense of strength and self-possession, in addition to a knowingly exaggerated sex appeal.

Dancy received her MFA from Columbia University in 2009, and her BA from Bard College in 2001. She has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery in Los Angeles; Chapter NY in New York; and Galerie Hussenot in Paris. In 2015 she was included in Greater New York at MoMA PS1. Dancy’s work has been covered in The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, Kaleidoscope, and ArtNews, among other publications.

Sheila Pepe
Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Sheila Pepe is best known for her large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculpture made from domestic and industrial materials. Since the mid-1990s, Pepe has used feminist and craft traditions to investigate received notions concerning the production of canonical artwork as well as the artist’s relationship to museum display and the art institution itself.

Pepe’s work has been exhibited widely, in group exhibitions such as the first Greater New York at PS1/MoMA; Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art & Craft, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Texas; Queer Threads at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Lesbian and Gay Art in New York; and the ICA/Boston’s traveling exhibition Fiber: Sculpture 1960-present. She received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is a Core Critic in the Painting + Printmaking Department at Yale University.

Steffani Jemison
Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Steffani Jemison is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers issues that arise when conceptual practices are inflected by black history and vernacular culture. Jemison uses rigorous formal methods to explore her interests in the politics of serial form, the limits of narrative description, and the tension between improvisation, repetition, and fugitivity. Her time-based, photographic, and discursive projects question notions of “progress” and its alternatives.

Jemison’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, at the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Drawing Center, LAXART, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art, Team Gallery, and others. Jemison holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She has taught fine art at Columbia University, Parsons The New School for Design, Wellesley College, Trinity College, Rice University, the Cooper Union, and other institutions. She is the 2016-2017 Arthur J. Levitt ’52 Artist-in-Residence at Williams College.

Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley
Monday, March 27, 2017

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley are a husband-and-wife collaborative duo whose work collides video, performance, painting and writing. Their highly theatrical vignettes explore gender, class, and social norms within history, art, and literature. The artists’ use wordplay, punning and rhyme humorously and incisively deconstruct how history is written and represented.
Mary Reid Kelley earned a BA from St. Olaf College and an MFA from Yale University. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Grant. Major exhibitions include Salt Lake Art Center, SITE Santa Fe, Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Patrick Kelley earned a BFA from St. Olaf College and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has taught Photography, Video and New Media courses at the University of Minnesota, St. Olaf College, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and Skidmore College in New York.

Vishal Jugdeo
Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Vishal Jugdeo is a Canadian artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Jugdeo works primarily in video and sculptural installations, which sometimes include moving elements that enhance the works’ narrative and conceptual dimensions. His videos include biographical elements, retelling stories about Jugdeo and his boyfriend, his friends, and his family. Although his videos are carefully scripted, the ambiguity of his characters’ interactions and the permeability of their modes of display disrupt passive spectatorship, encouraging his audience’s full immersion in the work.

Jugdeo completed an MFA at University of California Los Angeles, a BFA at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine. He has exhibited widely, including solo shows at LAXART, Los Angeles, and The Western Front and Helen Pitt Artist Run Center in Vancouver, BC. He is currently developing a performative work for live broadcast, which will air on public access television in conjunction with an exhibition at Queens Nails Projects, San Francisco. Jugdeo is represented by Thomas Solomon Gallery in Los Angeles.

Sam Messer
Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Sam Messer’s portraits of writers and still-lifes of typewriters reveal a deep commitment to the connections between visual art and language. Messer regularly collaborates directly with writers on his paintings, as well as on hand-made animations created from thousands of individual etchings and drawings.

Messer received a B.F.A. from Cooper Union in 1976 and an M.F.A. from Yale University in 1982. His work may be found in public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Art Institute of Chicago, and Yale University Art Gallery. He has received numerous awards including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, the Engelhard Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is Associate Dean and professor at the Yale School of Art. He is represented by Nielsen Gallery, Boston, and Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles.

Dana Frankfort
Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Merging graffiti and high art abstraction, Dana Frankfort’s paintings occupy a hazy space between verbal and visual communication. Using text as a platform for expressive embellishment, each canvas reveals a word or phrase within its sumptuous, intensely colored surface; simple statements such as ‘Believe’, ‘Beyond’, or ‘Paint’ become esoteric starting points for the physical negotiation of painting. Repeatedly scrawled, painted over, scribbled out, and intensified, each slogan becomes abstracted as a series of intersecting lines, curves and angles, their meanings amplified and distorted through the gesture and surface quality of their manifestation.

Frankfort received an MFA from Yale in 1997 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. One-person exhibitions include The Space Between Paintings, Carillon Gallery, Fort Worth, TX; HIT OR MISS, James Harris Gallery, Seattle, WA; Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels; Bellwether Gallery, New York, NY; Inman Gallery; and Kantor/Feuer Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Her paintings were included in the group exhibition Abstract America: New Painting from the U.S., Saatchi Gallery, London; and in Learning by Doing: 25 Years of the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Frankfort received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2006. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, Rice University, Houston, TX, and The Jewish Museum, New York, NY.

Aliza Nisenbaum
Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Born in Mexico City and currently based in New York, Aliza Nisenbaum’s paintings are intimate exchanges between herself and her subjects. The artist makes portraits of undocumented Latin American immigrants, hand-written letters, books, and other personal objects. Often lushly decorated with patterened textiles, her canvases demand close looking in keeping with her personal connections to her subjects.

Nisenbaum has presented her work internationally, at Mary Mary, Glasgow; White Columns, New York; Lulu, Mexico City; and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago. National and International group exhibitions have included the Biennial of the Americas, MCA, Denver; the Rufino Tamayo Painting Biennial, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; 68 Projects, Berlin; Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice; Princeton University School of Architecture; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Green Gallery, Yale School of Art, among others. She received her BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been a resident at The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program and Artist-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee. Fellowships and grants include the Rema Hort Mann NYC award, and the Fellowship for Immigrant Women Leaders from NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA). She has also been a participating artist at Immigrant Movement International, Corona Park, Queens. Her work will be featured in the upcoming 2017 Whitney Biennial.

Harold Mendez
Tuesday, May 2, 2017

A first-generation American artist born in Chicago to Colombian and Mexican parents, Harold Mendez works with installation, photography, sculpture and text to reference reconstructions of place and identity. His work addresses the relationships between transnational citizenship, memory and possibility, considering how history is not only an affirmed past, but a potential future. His recent work examines how reclaimed objects, makeshift monuments and images reveal a life parallel to conflict, demonstrating both factual evidence and where traces of fiction emerge.

Selected exhibitions include the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Renaissance Society; Museum of Modern Art / PS1, New York; Studio Museum, Harlem; Drawing Center, New York; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Project Row Houses, Houston; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Studio Museum, Harlem; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Mendez has held residencies at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. He is a recipient of the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship; 3Arts Award; Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship; and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Mendez studied at Columbia College Chicago; University of Science and Technology, School of Art, Ghana, West Africa; and the University of Illinois at Chicago.