studio_art
Art and Art History

The Visiting Artists Program

Each year, internationally known artists visit the department every fall semester to give lectures and to meet with graduate students for lectures, seminars and critiques with graduate students.

Recent visiting artists include:

  • Painters: Erik Parker, Yun-Fei Ji, Polly Apfelbaum, Trenton Doyle Hancok, Dana Schultz, Bridget Riley, Mary Heilman, Julie Heffernan, Pat Stein, Richmond Burton, Alexis Rocman, Philip Taaffe, Jim Nutt
  • Photographers: James Welling, Justine Kurland, Mitch Epstein, Michael Snow, Barbara Ess
  • Installation/Performance/Transmedia: Stanya Kahn, Daniel Bozhkov, William Pope.L, Barbara Bloom, Lawrence Weiner, Matt Mullican
  • Printmakers: See GAPP, Guest Artist in Printmaking Program
  • Sculptors: Luis Gispert, Kristin Morgin, Rachel Harrison, Dario Robleto, Sarah Sze, Petah Coyne, Judy Fox, Mark Dion, Charles Long, Charles Ray, James Turrell

Map to Art Building (ART)

Current Events in the Department of Art and Art History

 

Fall 2009 Visiting Artists

Michael Bell-Smith (Transmedia): September 15-17, 2009

Lecture: Tuesday, September 15, 5 – 7 pm, ART 1.102

Seminar: Wednesday, September 16, 3 – 4 pm, Transmedia Studio (ART 3.206)

Michael Bell-Smith uses digital forms to explore contemporary visual culture and how it is mediated through popular technologies. His work often incorporates the visual vocabulary of the Internet, such as animated gifs and lo-res images, and references the aesthetics and semiotics of common computer programs such as Powerpoint and Web sites such as YouTube. Remixing and reinterpreting sources ranging from industrial videos and music clips to classic cinema and contemporary art, Bell-Smith reconsiders the cultural meaning of these materials in a "post-personal computer, post-Internet, post-Google" age.

Michael Bell-Smith was born in 1978 in East Corinth, Maine. He received a BA in Semiotics from Brown University in 2001. His works have been seen in exhibitions at venues including The New Museum, New York; Foxy Production, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.

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Wangechi Mutu (Painting): October 27-29, 2009

Lecture: Wednesday, October 28, 5 – 7 pm, ART 1.102
(Note: This lecture has been rescheduled from Tuesday to Wednesday)

Seminar: Thursday, October 29, 12:30 – 2 pm, Transmedia Studio, ART 3.206

Wangechi Mutu, a Kenyan-born artist based in New York, makes luscious yet unsettling pictures of female figures. Her painted and collaged works on Mylar function as potent social critique while simultaneously exploring more poetic strains of mythology and allegory as well as the sensuousness of form, color, and pattern. Particularly interested in myths about gender and ethnicity that have long circulated in Africa and the West, Mutu has adopted the medium of collage - which by its nature evokes rupture and collision - to depict the monstrous, the exotic, and the feminine.

Mutu's work has exhibited internationally at galleries and museums including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Miami Art Museum, Tate Modern in London, the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Her work has been featured in major exhibitions including Greater New York at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Black President at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and the Barbican in London, and USA Today at The Royal Academy in London.

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Shannon Ebner (Photography): November 10-12, 2009

Lecture: Tuesday, November 10, 5 – 7 pm, ART 1.102

Seminar: Wednesday, November 11, 3 – 4 pm, Location TBA

A light, sharp political humor infuses the photographs of Shannon Ebner, an artist from Los Angeles. Ebner's work centers on a do-it-yourself alphabet of handmade letters and signs temporarily placed—and strategically displaced—in public contexts. The artist sets language in the service of photography, her cryptic messages captured and fixed in black-and-white photographs. Populating actual yet uncertain landscapes or mise-en-scènes including California real estate sites, the La Brea Tar Pits, and the Washington Monument, these ephemeral signs spell out such darkly ambiguous phrases as "Landscape Incarceration," "The Doom," and "The Day-Sob-Dies."

Ebner's work has been included in Trace at The Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, Uncertain States of America at The Serpentine Gallery in London, Learn to Read at the Tate Modern, London and the 2008 Whitney Biennial.