Art & Art History News - Visiting Artist Lecture Series, Spring 2023

Tuesday, January 31
6:30 PM in the VAC complex auditorium 1B20

Sarah Rara’s (they/them) multi-disciplinary practice—including video, sound, writing, and performance—explores the position of witness within fragile systems. Rara is a contributing member of the ongoing project Lucky Dragons (with Luke Fischbeck). Their work, solo and in collaboration, has been presented at such institutions as the Hammer Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial), the Centre Georges Pompidou, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, London’s Institute for Contemporary Art, PS1 in New York, REDCAT and LACMA in Los Angeles, MOCA Los Angeles, the 54th Venice Biennale, and the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. Their first volume of poems “Earth Breakup” was released by Hesse Press Fall 2015. The chapbook “Chronic Objector” was released by Miniature Garden in the Spring of 2017. Rara is a 2018 recipient of the LACMA Art + Technology fellowship. Rara is an Assistant Professor of Moving Image at Williams College.

Tuesday, February 21
6:30 PM in the VAC complex auditorium 1B20

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Shoshanna Weinberger (she/her) received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2003 and BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995. Living and working in Newark, NJ, since 2006, Weinberger’s work references her Caribbean-American background, which explores the complexity of heritage and the psychology of peripheral identity. She considers herself a visual anthropologist, cataloging and surveying these experiences that ultimately question notions of assumed beauty norms and identity through ongoing serial works that result in paintings, drawings, collages, mixed media, and sculptural installations. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in numerous invitational group and solo exhibitions. Weinberger is a five-time participant of the Jamaica Biennial from 2006 to 2017 held in Kingston, Jamaica; and included in the 2013 Martinique Biennale. Select solo exhibitions include: The Otherness of Strangefruit, Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery, NJCU, Jersey City (2018); Invisible Fruit: Stories of Camouflage from the Periphery, Project for Empty Space (2018); Allegories of the Invisible, Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn (2019); Passing Between the Lines, Long Gallery, Harlem, NYC (2020); and Fragments of Perception, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY (2021). Weinberger is the recipient of several awards, residencies, and grants including most recently: 2020 Newark Artist Accelerator Grant made possible by the Andy Warhol Foundation; 2021 City of Newark Creative Catalyst Fund Grant; 2022 Fellowship from NJ State Council of the Arts and Artist-in-Residence, at McColl Center.

Tuesday, March 14
6:30 PM in the VAC complex auditorium 1B20

Lenka Clayton (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers, exaggerates, and alters the accepted rules of everyday life, extending the familiar into the realms of the poetic and absurd. In previous works, she has searched for and photographed every person mentioned by name in a German newspaper; worked with artists who identify as blind to recreate Brancusi’s Sculpture for the Blind from a spoken description, and reconstituted a lost museum from a sketch found in an archive. Clayton is the founder of An Artist Residency in Motherhood, a self-directed, open-source artist residency program that takes place inside the homes and lives of artists who are also parents. There are currently over 1,000 artists-in-residence in 62 countries. Recent exhibitions include Fruit and Other Things (2019) at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Object Temporarily Removed (2017) at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Apollo’s Muse (2019) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art NY and The Grand Illusion, at the Lyon Biennial, France (2020). In 2017 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum commissioned a major new work by Clayton and collaborator Jon Rubin, entitled A talking parrot, a high school drama class, a Punjabi TV show, the oldest song in the world, a museum artwork, and a congregation’s call to action circle through New York. 

Tuesday, March 21
6:30 PM in the VAC complex auditorium 1B20

Keliy Anderson-Staley (she/her) was raised off-the-grid in Maine and currently lives and works in Houston, Texas. She is nationally recognized for her portrait work in wet-plate collodion tintype, her experiments in a range of photographic processes, her artist’s books and her long-term project, Raw Materials in Peace and War. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow and a 2013 George and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellow. She has received additional project support from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Houston Center for Photography, Puffin Foundation, and Houston Arts Alliance. She has been an artist-in-residence at Light Work in Syracuse, Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester and Aurora Photo Center in Indianapolis. Collections holding her work include the Library of Congress, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston and Portland Museum of Art. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at Akron Art Museum; Bronx Museum of the Arts; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA amongst others. On a Wet Bough, a monograph of her tintype portraits was published by Waltz Books in 2014. Documents & Dwellings, a catalog for a solo exhibition at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas was published in 2022. She is an Associate Professor of Photography and Digital Media at the School of Art, University of Houston.

Tuesday, April 4
6:30 PM in the VAC complex auditorium 1B20

Aurora Tang (she/her) is program director at the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a non-profit research organization involved in exploring and understanding contemporary land and landscape issues. The organization produces exhibitions about land use phenomenology in the USA, and displays them at its exhibit locations and at other museums and non-commercial and educational venues as well. The CLUI produces publications, online resources, tours, lectures, and other public programs across the country.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research and education organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the surface of the earth, and in finding new meanings in the intentional and incidental forms that we individually and collectively create. They believe that the manmade landscape is a cultural inscription, that can be read to better understand who we are, and what we are doing. The organization was founded in 1994, and since that time it has continuously produced public programs that include exhibits on land use, shown in its own network of exhibit facilities, and in public institutions all over the United States, and overseas. The Center has also published books and periodicals, conducted public tours, and hosted lectures. From the inception of the organization, much of its activity has been focused on an online audience, where visitors to its website can freely access databases and archives. The CLUI exists to stimulate discussion, thought, and general interest in the contemporary landscape. Neither an environmental group nor an industry-affiliated organization, the work of the Center integrates the many approaches to land use—the many perspectives of the landscape—into a single vision that illustrates the common ground in “land use” debates. At the very least, the Center attempts to emphasize the multiplicity of points of view regarding the utilization of terrestrial and geographic resources.

Tuesday, April 25
6:30 PM in the VAC complex auditorium 1B20

Josephine Halvorson (she/her) makes art that foregrounds firsthand experience and takes the form of painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Born in Brewster, Massachusetts, she studied at The Cooper Union (BFA 2003), Yale Norfolk (2002), and Columbia University (MFA 2007). In 2021, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Halvorson is the recipient of major international residencies and fellowships: The US Fulbright to Vienna, Austria (2003-4), the Harriet Hale Woolley at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris, France (2007-8), and was the first American pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome at the Villa Medici (2014-15). Her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., NY, and Peter Freeman, Paris. Selected exhibitions include SECCA (2015), Storm King Art Center (2016), the ICA Boston Foster Prize Exhibition (2019-20), and Ríos Intermitentes, a group exhibition curated by Magdalena Campos-Pons as part of the Havana Bienale (2019). Halvorson’s work and practice have been written about extensively and she is a subject of Art21’s documentary series New York Close Up. She is a Professor of Art and the Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University and lives in western Massachusetts.