Art & Art History News - Visiting Artist Lecture Series, Spring 2024

Monday, February 19 at 4:00 PM
Visual Arts Complex, Auditorium 1B20

Aitor Lajarin-Encina is an artist, educator, and organizer born in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Basque Country, Spain, in 1977, the year of punk. He is currently living with his partner and children, working, playing soccer, and cooking paella in Fort Collins, Colorado. He received his BFA in painting from the University of Basque Country, Bilbao, and his MFA in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego. Aitor is an interdisciplinary artist whose principal expertise is painting and drawing. Some of Aitor's creative work and research interests include contemporary painting and drawing critical issues in the transdisciplinary field, reception and participation aesthetics, poetics of humor, and play. As an organizer and educator, he is interested in exploring intersections between contemporary art practice, self-organizational models of production, public culture, and social equity. He is also the founder of DXIX Projects and cofounder with Marius Lehene of Dinghy Rig. Both initiatives are dedicated to the production and dissemination of contemporary culture and art-related projects and materials. Dinghy Rig is an experimental, community-oriented, artist-run exhibition program for and from Colorado. DXIX began in Los Angeles, California, in 2015 as a curatorial extension of Aitor's studio practice and survives now in Fort Collins, Colorado, as a gallery space in his CSU Art Department building office. Aitor has taught painting, drawing, and interdisciplinary studio classes at UC San Diego and UDLAP in Puebla, Mexico. He is currently an assistant professor of painting in the Department of Art and Art History at Colorado State University, where he teaches painting, drawing, and socially engaged art practice courses. 

Monday, March 4 at 4:00 PM
Visual Arts Complex, Auditorium 1B20

Natalie Ball (Black, Modoc, and Klamath) is a multidisciplinary installation artist who works from her ancestral homelands in the rural community of Chiloquin, OR (Klamath County). As a young woman, she learned quilt making from her aunt, which has fueled a continual practice of challenging assumptions regarding materials, including the loaded politics and power of matrilineal craft. Often mining found objects for her installations, Ball perennially incorporates seemingly incongruous materials into provocative objects that both carry their own stories while inviting dialogue with viewers.

Natalie Ball was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. Ball has a Bachelor’s degree with a double major in Indigenous, Race & Ethnic Studies and Art from the University of Oregon. She furthered her education in Aotearoa (New Zealand) at Massey University where she obtained her Master’s degree with a focus on Indigenous contemporary art. She then relocated to her ancestral Homelands in Southern Oregon/Northern California to raise her three children. In 2018, Natalie earned her MFA in Painting & Printmaking at the Yale School of Art. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s Oregon Native Arts Fellowship (2021), The Ford Family Foundation’s Hallie Ford Fellowship (2020), the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant (2020), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2019), and the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Award (2018). Ball is now an elected official serving on the Klamath Tribes Tribal Council.

Monday, March 18 at 4:00 PM
Visual Arts Complex, Auditorium 1B20

Jovan C. Speller (b. 1983) in Santa Monica CA, is a multidisciplinary artist based in Minnesota. Her work uses photography, installation, sound, text, and mixed media visual works to interpret historic narratives through contemporary discourse. Her research-based practice is centered around elevating, complicating and inventing stories that explore ancestry, identity, and spatial memory.

Speller holds a BFA in Fine Art Photography from Columbia College Chicago. Her photographic works and installations have been published and exhibited in various group and solo exhibitions. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota Museum of American Art,  and private collections internationally. She is a recipient of multiple grants and fellowships including the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship, and Minnesota State Arts Board grants. Speller was awarded the 2021 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Minnesota Art Prize.

Monday, April 8 at 4:00 PM
Visual Arts Complex, Auditorium 1B20

Stephanie is a figurative sculptor whose personal work deals with feminist theory in relation to visual culture and questioning ideas of embodiment, subjectivity, and identity. They explore ideas of the sacred and the profane, dualities of power and its relationships to violence, beauty and grotesqueness. 

Stephanie E. Hanes was born in Alberta, Canada in 1985. In 2009 they received a BFA from The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax, Canada. Hanes is an MFA Graduate of Ceramics at the Rhode Island School Of Design in 2017 and received the prestigious Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship for a graduate student with exceptional promise.  Stephanie was one of the artists awarded the 2020 NCECA Emerging Artist Prize. In addition, they have exhibited Internationally with a solo show at C.R.E.T.A Rome Gallery in Italy and several group shows at Secci Gallery in Florence, Italy and at Lefebvre et Fils Gallery in Paris, France. Their ceramic sculptures have been exhibited throughout the USA and Canada in New York City, Providence, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles and Toronto. Hanes is an Assistant Professor in Ceramic Art at New York College Of Ceramics at Alfred University, where they teach ceramic sculpture. 

Monday, April 22 at 4:00 PM
Visual Arts Complex, Auditorium 1B20

Born in 1947, in Holualoa on the Island of Hawaii, Hiroki Morinoue received his BFA degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA) in 1973. For Hiroki the landscape of Hawaii, its light, rocks, skies, and water has deeply influenced his work alongside the aesthetic of Japanese arts, crafts and landscaped gardens, which is prevalent in his work. In all of Morinoue's work there is a compelling sense of place, curiosity and dialogue between the art and its viewer. He is a patient observer of nature, the rhythms of the ocean shoreline, the fluidity of lava flows, and patterns of light on water, using symbols as suggestive messages and patterns from nature. He transcends these observations in various mediums, including watercolor, oil, acrylic and mixed media paintings, monotypes, sculptures, photography, ceramics and Mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock prints). Hiroki Morinoue has shown widely in the United States and Japan. He has completed several major public art commissions, including projects at the Honolulu Public Library, and for the Hawaii Convention Center in 1996-97 where he executed a 90 foot mural titled Mauka, Makai. Morinoue's work is represented in the collections of The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, The Honolulu Academy of Arts, The Hawaii State Foundation for Culture and the Arts, and the Ueno No Mori Museum in Tokyo, amongst others.

Born in Kanagawa, Japan, Setsuko began her interest in art through photography in high school. Later it transformed into the love for fiber art in Kusaki and Roketsu-zome, a Japanese natural dye with wax resist. She moved to the Big Island of Hawaii and married Hiroki Morinoue in 1970. She began her journey with clay at the Kona Arts Center in Holualoa. Since then her persistent interest and appreciation of various art media have led her to clay with paper, mixed-media painting and printmaking in both 2D and 3D works. She is mainly self-taught by exploring and experimenting while taking many workshops throughout her career by well-established artists. She has participated in numerous group shows in Japan, Hawaii, and the US Mainland. Her works are in numerous private, public and corporate collections. She believes building a culturally rich community will help make for a safe and peaceful global community and live as respectful citizens of the Earth.

Hiroki and Setsuko Morinoue established Studio 7 Fine Arts Gallery in November 1979, as the first and now longest-standing contemporary art gallery in Hawaii. A humble space in a small village with a charmed history, the gallery holds an open-ended mission: to create and promote Contemporary Art.