Visiting Artist Lecture Series, SPR26
Maria Gaspar
Monday, January 26th at 4:00 PM
Visual Arts Complex Auditorium (lower-level 1B20)
Maria Gaspar is a Chicago-born, first-generation, interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s body of work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. For the past decade, Gaspar has been recognized nationally for her multi-year projects that attempt to dismantle borders, transcend penal matter, and turn places of precarity into places of possibility. Formative works like “Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall” and the “96 Acres Project” include site interventions at the largest single-site jail in the country, the Cook County Department of Corrections, in her childhood neighborhood.
Gaspar has received the Guggenheim Award for Creative Arts, the Latinx Artist Fellowship, the United States Artists Fellowship, the 3Arts Next Level Award, the Frieze Impact Prize, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Gaspar’s projects have been supported by the Art for Justice Fund, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including MoMA PS1 and El Museo Del Barrio in New York, NY; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA; the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA; and the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, FL.
Judd Schiffman
Monday, February 9th at 4:00 PM
Visual Arts Complex Auditorium (lower-level 1B20)
Judd Schiffman (b. 1982) is a Providence, Rhode Island based artist working primarily in ceramics. He has lectured at Harvard University Ceramics, Brown University, SUNY New Paltz, and Umass Dartmouth, and participated in residencies at the Zentrum Fur Keramiks in Berlin, Germany, Millay Arts in New York, and Arch Contemporary in Tiverton, Rhode Island. Schiffman received his MFA in Ceramics from CU Boulder, Post-Baccalaureate in Ceramics from Umass Dartmouth, and BA from Prescott College in Holistic Health. Schiffman’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, most recently at Headstone Gallery, Kingston, NY and Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami. In 2016, he received an emerging artists award from the National Council for the Education of Ceramic Arts, and in 2025, he received the Hopper Prize. Schiffman is currently Assistant Professor of Ceramics at Providence College and is represented by Headstone Gallery.
Nick Briz
Monday, March 9th at 4:00 PM
Visual Arts Complex Auditorium (lower-level 1B20)
Nick Briz is an internationally recognized new-media artist, educator and organizer. His work investigates the promises and perils of living in an increasingly digital and networked world. He is an active participant in various online communities and conversations including glitch art, net art, remix culture, digital literacy, hacktivism and digital rights.
He has shared his work internationally at major festivals such as FILE Media Arts Festival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Mozilla Festival in London, and the Images Festival in Toronto Canada, as well as major cultural institutions such as the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, the Pinakothek der Modern in Munich, the Tate Exchange in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others.
As an organizer he has been invited to curate events at various international galleries and conferences, he co-founded and ran an international new-media art conference called GLI.TC/H (2010-2012, 2023), co-ran an experimental performance series in Chicago called NO-MEDIA (2012-2016), and most recently organized a public lecture series called d.r.e.a.m. (data rules everything around me) for Mozilla (2015, 2018-2019).
He's an Assistant Instructional Professor in the Media Art and Design program at the University of Chicago.
Baseera Khan
Monday, March 30th at 4:00 PM
Visual Arts Complex Auditorium (lower-level 1B20)
Baseera Khan is a New York-based visual artist interested in materials, color, and their economies. From public art installation to sculpture, painting to performance and music, Khan collages the effects of these relationships to labor and family structures, religion, and spiritual well-being. Khan has performed and exhibited at several locations in the past years sharing this diverse practice. "Painful Arc II, Shoulder High," a public art commission for High Line Art, NYC, was installed from 2023-24, and "New Leaf," a permanent public art commission for Help USA, Brooklyn, NY was installed in 2025. Khan has had several solo institutional exhibitions such as Mass Art Museum, Boston, Massachusetts (2026), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2023), Brooklyn Museum, NY (2021-22), and a solo touring exhibition at Moody Arts Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, TX, and Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, OH (2022-23). Khan mounted recent international solo exhibitions at Niru Ratnam Gallery, London, U.K. (2025) and 10 & Zero Uno in Venice, Italy (2024) . Several recent group exhibitions are the Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany (2026), Sargent’s Daughters, NYC (2026), Paul Robeson Gallery at Rutgers University, NJ (2025), 12 Gates, Philadelphia, PA (2025), Patel Brown, Toronto, Canada (2025), Ruttkowski;68, NYC (2025), North Carolina Museum of Art, NC (2024). Over the years Khan has shared work at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2021), New Orleans Museum of Art, LA (2020), Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, Munich, Germany, and Jenkins Johnson Projects, Brooklyn, NY (2019), Simone Subal Gallery, NYC (2019), Sculpture Center, NY (2018), Aspen Museum (2017), Participant Inc. (2017). Khan's performance work has premiered at several locations including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Art POP Montreal International Music Festival. Khan completed a 1-moth residency at Plop, London, U.K. (2024), Lux Art Residency, San Diego (2021), Wexner Center Film/Video Studio Residency (2020), a 6-week performance residency at The Kitchen NYC (2020), and was an artist in residence at Pioneer Works (2018-19), Abrons Art Center (2016-17), Khan was an International Travel Fellow to Jerusalem/Ramallah through Apexart (2015) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014). Khan received the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Michael Richards Award for Visual Art (2024), and was the Hirshhorn Museum Gala Artist Honoree for 2023 and the 50th Anniversary Honoree (2024). Khan won an Artist Prize for the MTV/Smithsonian Channel TV docu-series, “The Exhibit,” (2022-23). Khan is also a recipient of the UOVO Art Prize (2020), BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize, and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019), NYSCA/NYFA and Art Matters (2018). Their works are part of several public permanent collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, MN, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA. Khan received an M.F.A. from Cornell University (2012) and a B.F.A. from the University of North Texas (2005).
Barbara Madsen
Monday, April 13th at 4:00 PM
Visual Arts Complex Auditorium (lower-level 1B20)
Barbara Madsen is an artist and Professor at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Madsen’s practice is at the intersection of sculpture, prints, painting, ready-mades, and photography. Her vast collections of industrial matter -- spark plugs, machine parts, welding masks, light switches, rubber, plastic, prosthetics, artificial eyes, toys and much more – serve as the stimulus for the work. Her work is riddled with skeptical questions about society, civilization and collapse. Who is the Guardian and who is the Barbarian? Who enters the gate and who’s banned? She aims to lift the lid off canonical hierarchical art forms and queer space. Her work is an ever-evolving quest that picks out and unravels a new thread about greed and power to see how far she can push farcical realities from the primitive to the futuristic. Her explosive use of color is in the service of creating awkward, ridiculously sublime sculptures-works and installations that seem to infect, corrupt, and devour the universe. Yet, seeks joy and sustenance to find balance in an absurd world.
She has had solo exhitions theBlanc Gallery in NYC; Qi Fengge Musuem of Print History, Shenzen, China; MGalleries, NJ; New York Public Library, NYC; Scuola de Grafica, Venice, Italy; Sykes Gallery, PA; Lowry Lab Theater, MN; Palacky University, Czech Republic; Graphics Collective Gallery, Belgrade, Serbia; Recitation Gallery, DE; Pratt Studios Gallery, Brooklyn; Benedicta Art Center, MN; Sommers Gallery, MN; Minneapolis College of Art and Design, MN; and Tyler School of Art, PA, among others. Madsen has been included over 100 group exhibitions.
Madsen's works are in the collections of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco Museum of Art, Princeton University firestone Library, Swarthmore College, Lafayette CollgeLibrary of Congress, Dartmouth College, University of Sharijah: United Arab Emirates, Guanlan Print Museum, Shenzhen, China, New York Public Library, and the Amoco Corporation.