Visiting Artist Lecture Series, SPR 2025

Monday, February 17, 2025 at 4:00 pm
Visual Arts Complex Auditorium (located on the lower-level), RM 1B20

Jonathan VanDyke's work reflects on the unfolding of art objects in dynamic relationship to the passing of time. He seeks a reclamation of the sensorial realm, with an emphasis on modes of attention and embodiment. Manifested through installations, paintings, videos, sculpture, writings, collaborative projects, and live and durational works featuring performers from the queer community of which he is a part, VanDyke's work prioritizes slowness, pauses, subtexts, and doubt.

The artist's object-based work is often the result of "piecing": the base for his complex paintings, for example, are textiles that have been worn by friends and companions, then painted and stained through slow processes of accumulation, cut into shapes and patterns, and sewn together. The resulting double-sided works, which are often shown in sculptural and architectural installations, are conceived of as tools for long looking. His durational performances have stretched for as long as 48-hours, such as The Patient Eye, in which he asked The Columbus Museum to center itself around a collection of historic quilts, made primarily by anonymous women and most of which had never been on public view: he observed these works silently for 7 days, joined throughout by community members.

VanDyke studied at the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow as the recipient of a Rotary International Fellowship. He received his MFA from The Milton Avery School at Bard College. He was a resident at the Atlantic Center for the Arts through a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, where he was mentored by the artist Paul Pfeiffer. 

Monday, March 3, 2025 at 4:00 pm
Visual Arts Complex Auditorium (located on the lower-level), RM 1B20

Kelly Chorpening's work primarily explores drawing, as a contemporary art discipline, and as a tool for thinking and communication across disciplines. She has had solo presentations of work in the UK, USA and Austria and done residencies that include Voorkamer (Belgium), Shandy Hall, The Laurence Sterne Trust (UK) and Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh). Many of her projects are co-developed as books, published by Studio International (USA), RGAP (UK), Sint-Lucas Visual Arts and OPAK, FAK, KULeuven (Belgium). She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Contemporary Painting (Intellect, UK) and in 2024, edited and contributed to a double issue on correspondence as a creative research method.

Her interdisciplinary work has involved collaborations with the Architectural Association, Trinity Laban Conservatory of Music, the Gordon Museum of Pathology and the National Gallery, London. In 2023, she chaired and presented at ‘Land, Water, Place: an Art and Science Collaborative’, at Nevada Museum of Art, a symposium that brought artists, poets, geographers and biologists together to explore the politics and possibilities of working in the Great Basin region. A curatorial project, "Drawing in Social Space," was exhibited at Drawing Room London in 2023.

Chorpening defines herself as an artist, curator, writer and educator. She has a BFA from Cleveland Institute of Art and MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. 

Monday, March 17, 2025 at 4:00 pm
Visual Arts Complex Auditorium (located on the lower-level), RM 1B20

Baldwin Lee is a Chinese-American photographer and educator known for his photographs of African-American communities in the Southern United States. He has had solo exhibitions at the Chrysler Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is held in many private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Yale University Art Gallery, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

In 1982, he became an art professor at the University of Tennessee, where he founded the university's photography program. He then decided to take a tour of the Deep South, covering 2,000 miles over the course of ten days. During this trip, Lee widely photographed the people, landscapes, and cities of the South. After developing his photos, he realized that he had a particular passion for the African-American communities he had interacted with. He took a longer tour of the southern United States from 1983 to 1989, producing roughly 10,000 photographs.

Lee received a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1972) where he studied photography with Minor White, and went on to receive an MFA from Yale University (1975) where he studied with Walker Evans.

Monday, March 31, 2025 at 4:00 pm
Visual Arts Complex Auditorium (located on the lower-level), RM 1B20

Emily Brady is Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. Her research and teaching interests span aesthetics and philosophy of art, environmental ethics, eighteenth-century philosophy, environmental humanities, and animal studies. She has published seven books as author, co-author, or editor, including, Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modified Environments (co-authored with Isis Brook and Jonathan Prior, Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018) and The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Image credit: Patricia Johanson, Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility, Petaluma, California

Monday, April 14, 2025 at 4:00 pm
Visual Arts Complex Auditorium (located on the lower-level), RM 1B20

Koichi Yamamoto's artworks explore themes of the sublime, atmosphere, and fluid mechanics. His practice spans from meticulous copper engravings to large-scale monotypes with a recent focus on kite-makings.

His works has been showcased in more than 150 solo and group exhibitions. Most recently, at venues such as Fondazione Pastificio Cerere in Rome, Italy; B.J. Spoke Gallery in Huntington, New York; Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair in London, United Kingdom; Gallery Shoal Creek in Austin, Texas; Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio; and Cartavetra Gallery in Florence, Italy. 

Koichi studied at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, then moved to Krakow, Poland, and later to the Bratislava Academy of Fine Arts in Slovakia to study copper engravings. He completed his MFA at the University of Alberta, Canada in 1999. He is currently a professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. 

Monday, April 21, 2025 at 4:00 pm
Visual Arts Complex Auditorium (located on the lower-level), RM 1B20

Sharif Farrag merges classic ceramics styles with his own improvisational building techniques, representing his hybrid identities through clay. Farrag received a BFA from the University of Southern California and an MFA in ceramics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was an artist in residence at Cal State Long Beach’s Center for Contemporary Ceramics from 2018 to 2020, and in 2019, he was awarded a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

He has had several solo exhibitions at Los Angeles galleries, including François Ghebaly, in lieu, New Image Art, and gallery1993. His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch, New York; the 2020 Clay Biennial at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles; Adams and Ollman, Portland; High Art, Arles; and Matthew Brown, Los Angeles. He is included in the collections of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, and the Rubell Museum in Miami. Farrag lives and works in Los Angeles.