Art & Art History News - Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Visiting Artist Lecture Series, Spring 2022
Alanna Airitam
Questioning generalized stereotypes and the lack of fair representation of Black people in art spaces has led photographer Alanna Airitam to research critical historical omissions and how those contrived narratives represent and influence succeeding generations. Her portraits and vanitas still life photography in series such as The Golden Age, Crossroads, White Privilege, and individual works such as Take a Look Inside and How to Make a Country ask the viewer to question who they are and how they choose to be seen.
Alanna Airitam is a 2020 San Diego Art Prize winner and recipient of the 2020 Michael Reichmann Project Grant Award. Her photographs have been exhibited at Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, San Diego Art Institute, Art Miami with Catherine Edelman, Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia, Colorado Photographic Arts Center in Denver, and Candela Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Her work has been acquired for the Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s collection. Airitam has been elected Board Member and led workshops and mentorships for Oakwood Arts, acts as an Advisory Board Member and Juror of the Black Photographers Scholarship Program for Medium Photo, and a Juror for the MFA Photography Reviews. Born in Queens, New York, Airitam now resides in Tucson, Arizona.
Tuesday, February 1 at 6:30 PM
Glenn Ligon
Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is an artist living and working in New York. Throughout his career, Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. He is best known for his landmark text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, which draw on the influential writings and speech of 20th-century cultural figures including James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Genet, and Richard Pryor. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. In 2011 the Whitney Museum of American Art held a mid-career retrospective of Ligon’s work, Glenn Ligon: America, organized by Scott Rothkopf, that traveled nationally. Important recent shows include Grief and Grievance (2021), at the New Museum, where Ligon acted as a curatorial advisor; Des Parisiens Noirs at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris (2019); Blue Black (2017), an exhibition Ligon curated at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, inspired by the site-specific Ellsworth Kelly wall sculpture; and Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions (2015), a curatorial project organized with Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool. Ligon has also been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the Camden Arts Centre in London, the Power Plant in Toronto, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. His work has been included in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2015 and 1997), Berlin Biennial (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2011, 2019), Documenta XI (2002), and Gwangju Biennale (2000).
Ligon’s work is held in the permanent collections of museums worldwide including Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His awards and honors include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the Studio Museum’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize. Most recently, Ligon was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Tuesday, February 8 at 6:30 PM
Link to Livestream Event
Image Left: Glenn Ligon, A Small Band, 2015. Neon, paint, and metal support, three components, approximately 74.75 x 797.5 inches (189.9 x 2025.7 cm). Exhibition view: “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” 2021. New Museum, New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Chantal Crousel, Paris.
Image Right: Courtesy of Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Cannupa Hanska Luger
Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multidisciplinary artist and an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota descent). Through monumental installations and social collaboration, Luger activates speculative fiction and communicates stories about 21st Century Indigeneity, combining critical cultural analysis with dedication and respect for the diverse materials, environments, and communities he engages. He lectures and produces large-scale projects around the globe and his works are in many public collections. Luger is a recipient of a 2021 United States Artists Fellowship Award for Craft and was named a 2021 GRIST Fixer, he is a 2020 Creative Capital Fellow, a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, and the recipient of the Museum of Arts and Design’s 2018 inaugural Burke Prize, among others.
Zoom registration is required in advance. Please click here to register.
This lecture is part of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Deep Horizons: Making Visible an Unseen Spectrum of Ecological Casualties & Prospects.
Cara Jaye
Cara Jaye is multi-faceted artist whose practice is rooted within drawing and expands into various printmaking techniques, painting, collage, conventional and alternative photographic processes, and embroidery. She considers drawing her first and primary medium - she loves drawing for its immediacy and intimacy of marks placed directly on the page. Jaye is interested in examining ideas of process, classification, reproduction, and perfection. Treading the line between the apparent and the ambiguous, the beautiful and grotesque, Jaye enjoys working with re-occurring dichotomies. Building work of a diverse nature, she crosses into various subjects and material concerns. Themes in the work move between notions of environmentalism, consumerism and the picturesque. She examines the intersectionality of femininity, portraiture, authorship, and identity, and finds subtle affinities between these interactions.
Tuesday, March 15 at 6:30 PM
Cammie Staros
Cammie Staros makes sculptures that draw from Classical antiquities and the contexts in which we view them. Through a combination of ancient techniques, contemporary sensibility, and museological display, her work folds the past in on itself and reveals semiotic and institutional systems created and reinforced through art history. Increasingly, it also explores how the relics of fallen empires might speak to the political and environmental threats to contemporary civilization, and to how our own moment will be remembered.
Cammie Staros (b. 1983, Nashville, TN) received her BA from Brown, Providence, in 2006 and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, in 2011. Staros has had solo exhibitions at Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, Lefebvre & Fils, Paris, and Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles. The artist was included in the Craft Contemporary’s second clay biennial in Los Angeles. Staros’ work is featured in 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow, a survey of contemporary sculpture, authored by Kurt Beers and published by Thames & Hudson. Staros was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2020.
Tuesday, March 29 at 6:30 PM
Sam Van Aken
Sam Van Aken is a contemporary artist who works beyond traditional modes of art-making, crossing artistic genres and disciplines to develop new perspectives on such themes as communication, botany, agriculture, climatology, and the ever-increasing impact of technology. Van Aken’s interventions in the natural and public realm are seen as metaphors that serve as the basis of narrative, sites of placemaking, and in some cases even become the basis of scientific research.
Born in Reading Pennsylvania, Sam Van Aken received his undergraduate education in Art and Communication Theory. Immediately following his studies he lived in Poland and worked with dissident artists under the former communist regime through the auspices of the Andy Warhol Foundation and the United States Information Agency. Van Aken received his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and since this time his work has been exhibited and placed nationally and internationally. He has received numerous honors including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, Association of International Curator’s of Art Award and a Creative Capital Grant. Most recently, his work has been presented as part of Nature-Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial with the Cube Design Museum, Netherlands. Sam Van Aken lives and works in Syracuse New York, where he is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art at Syracuse University.
Tuesday, April 12 at 6:30 PM
Leticia R. Bajuyo
Through her large-scale works, Leticia Bajuyo engages audiences and connects with communities through her site-specific installations that involve community collections of media and memories. Bajuyo’s drawings, sculptures, and installations highlight the impact of desire and the machines that create more desire. Her interest in unpacking value perceptions began with her autobiography growing up bi-racial small town named Metropolis on the border of Illinois and Kentucky. The time and space of quiet landscapes outside and the multi-national dialogues inside her family’s house influenced the development of her critiques of consumer capitalism, fickle domestic desires, and internalized pressures of assimilation. Her continued research of cultural privilege and consumer pressure yields a drive to both create and question a vision that is comfortable, contained, and controlled. By incorporating recognizable materials and forms including CDs, artificial grass, and insulation styrofoam, Bajuyo creates spaces and multi-layered experiences that invite audiences to participate in theatrical re-arbitrations of value.
A Filipinx-American interdisciplinary artist and object maker based in Texas, Leticia R. Bajuyo started creating in rural Midwest flyover communities. Bajuyo received her B.F.A. from the University of Notre Dame and her M.F.A. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In 2017, Bajuyo joined the faculty at Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi, where she is an Associate Professor of Art - Sculpture. Prior to this professorship in Texas, she served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the University of Notre Dame and Professor of Art at Hanover College.
Her recent solo exhibitions include the Beatrice M. Haggerty Gallery in Dallas, Texas; Beeville Art Museum in Beeville, Texas; Hall Art Gallery at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi; and Rudolph Blume Fine Art / ArtScan Gallery in Houston, Texas. Bajuyo's large-scale, site-specific artworks include creating installations at the From Waste to Art Museum in Baku, Azerbaijan; in the silos of the Site Gallery at Sawyer Yards in Houston, Texas; at the Nashville International Airport in Tennessee; and in the Tony Hillerman Library in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Tuesday, April 19 at 6:30 PM