Lectures & Performances

Andy Slater

Talk: Access Denied
12/13/2025 | 4:00 pm | Dix Chapel

Andy is a United States Artist Fellow and media artist who is blind, working extensively with sound (installation, immersive, XR, sound design, soundtrack, music), sometimes image, sometimes video, sometimes text, and performance.

Andy was the feature of an episode of BBC Outlook, and acknowledged for his art by the New York Times in their article, “28 Ways To Learn About Disability Culture". He has been published in numerous journals, including for his research on Crypto Acoustic Auditory Non-Hallucination in McSweeney’s. His sound description of Molly Joyce’s, “Side By Side”, was commissioned by Carnegie Hall.

Andy is a teaching artist with the Atlantic Center for the Arts’ Young SoundSeekers program, Midwest Society For Acoustic Ecology, and Creative Users’ Sensory Shift program.

Andy holds a Masters in Sound Arts and Industries from Northwestern University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

His current work focuses on advocacy for accessible art and technology, Alt-Text for sound and image, the phonology of the blind body, spatial audio for extended reality, and sound design for film, dance, and digital scent design.

And last but not least, he is a member of the acid-soul band, the Velcro Lewis Group, and performs solo as electronic melting pot, Calculator Font.

Christopher Holt

Talk: A Life in Art-Making, from fresco, public works, teaching, travel painting, and surviving cancer
1/11/2026 | 1:30 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

Christopher Holt's early passion for drawing and painting led him to UNC-Chapel Hill, where he studied under Native American artist Kimowan Metchewais, whose mentorship deepened his interest in storytelling through art. Following his studies, Holt traveled extensively through Central America and Mexico, visiting ancient sites such as Copán and Chichén Itzá and studying the frescoes of Diego Rivera—experiences that profoundly shaped his artistic vision.

Upon returning to his hometown of Asheville, NC, he apprenticed with fresco master Benjamin Long IV, founder of a school dedicated to classical drawing based on Long’s training in Florence, Italy. Over the next decade, Holt became an integral member of the program, assisting on major fresco projects and later serving as its executive director.

Holt now works independently from his Asheville studio, creating paintings and large-scale public works including a fresco for Asheville’s Haywood Street Church and a mural for the Greg Poole, Jr. All Faiths Chapel at Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh. His art reflects a lifelong engagement with the landscapes of the Carolinas and his continued exploration of classical realism through contemporary themes.

Jody Servon

Talk
1/24/2026 | 4:30 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

Jody Servon is an artist, writer, curator, and educator whose interdisciplinary practice bridges visual art, literature, and community engagement. Her artwork and writing have appeared in New American Paintings, Emergency Index, Kakalak, and Artful Dodge.

Servon’s collaborative projects with Lorene Delany-Ullman have been published in *AGNI*, *Tupelo Quarterly*, *Palaver*, and *Lunch Ticket*, and were shortlisted for the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. Her work has been reviewed in *The New York Times*, *The Miami Herald*, *Los Angeles Times*, *Arizona Daily Star*, and *Time* magazine’s *Money.com*.

She has participated in numerous artist residencies, including the Vermont Studio Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Artspace, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. A committed arts leader, Servon has served on the boards of the Elsewhere Museum, the North Carolina Museums Council, the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, and the Center for Craft.

Previously a curator at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art and director of the Smith Gallery at Appalachian State University, Servon is now a Professor and Coordinator of the Art Management program at Appalachian State University.

Servon earned an MFA in New Genre from the University of Arizona and a BFA in Visual Art from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Fred Moten

Talk
2/8/2026 | 11am | The North Carolina Museum of Art

Moten, a MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, is a teacher and writer whose areas of study and practice include Black Literary, Aural and Visual Culture, Critical Theory, Performance Studies, and Poetry and Poetics. His research and writing focus on the social force and origins of Black expressive culture and the ongoing relationship between insurgent social movement and experimental art.

Over the past 25 years, Moten has published widely acclaimed books of poetry and criticism, including In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press), B. Jenkins (Duke University Press), The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions), and the three-volume consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press).

He is also known for long-term collaborations with theorist Stefano Harney—co-authoring The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study—and with artist Wu Tsang, with whom he created Who Touched Me? and Gravitational Feel, presented at Tate Modern, the New Museum, and other international venues.

Moten has served on editorial and advisory boards for leading journals in literary and performance studies and currently teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He earned his A.B. from Harvard University and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

David Clemons

Talk: Connective tissue: the links between history, material, and self
3/7/2026 | 4:00 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

Clemons’s practice embraces the deep craft traditions of metalsmithing while using the medium as a language for exploring identity, narrative, and material inquiry. His work—spanning metal, mixed media, and artist books—examines how objects carry meaning and memory through process and form.

David Clemons was born in El Paso, Texas, and earned his BFA in Painting from the University of Texas at Austin and his MFA in Metalsmithing from San Diego State University. He taught for ten years at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, where he founded and directed the metalsmithing and jewelry program.

He has exhibited nationally in venues such as Craft in America: Expanding Traditions (PBS Series) and Different Tempers: Jewelry & Blacksmithing at the Center for Craft, and his work is held in the permanent collections of the Arkansas Art Center, the Metal Museum (TN), and the Yale Contemporary Craft Museum (CT).

In 2021, Clemons was recognized by the James Renwick Alliance for Craft (Washington, D.C.) as a Master of the Medium, a prestigious biennial award honoring leading voices in American craft.

Tom Ashcraft

Talk
Date TBD

Tom Ashcraft is an artist whose practice spans object-making, public art, and participatory projects. In 2005, he co-founded Workingman Collective, a collaborative group of artists and professionals that reimagines creative collaboration through shifting memberships, goals, and methods. This flexible framework allows Ashcraft and his collaborators to work fluidly across disciplines—from art and architecture to ecology and community organizing.

Ashcraft and Workingman Collective have exhibited and produced projects throughout the U.S., Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Design Grant, Ford Foundation Fellowship, YADDO Fellowship, NY State Arts Grant, Washington DC Commission on the Arts Award, Mabel Pew Grant, and three commissions from the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies program.

Educational projects include The Andros Island Art Project in the Bahamas, Container Space—a repurposed shipping container and social hub at George Mason University—and Public Practice, a multi-year course at Western Carolina University that produced permanent artworks for the U.S. Embassy in Niger.

Born in Long Beach, California, and raised in Nevada and Florida, Ashcraft is now based in Asheville, North Carolina, where he serves as MFA Director and Distinguished Professor at the School of Art + Design, Western Carolina University.

Georgia Deal

Talk
Date TBD

Georgia Deal is a printmaker and papermaker whose mixed-media works explore memory, narrative, and the tactile qualities of handmade paper. She is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the Printmaking and Papermaking Program at the Corcoran School of Art & Design of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Prior to the Corcoran, she taught at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in New York and served as Resident Printmaker at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Deal’s work has been supported by grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, the Washington Project for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts, and is represented in collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Yale University Library.

She has led workshops across the U.S.—at the Penland School of Craft, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Arrowmont School, and the Paper & Book Intensive—and abroad in Italy, Greece, and Mexico.

Deal is the proprietor of Swannanoa Paper in Asheville, where she continues her studio practice. Her work evokes the layered nature of memory, using the transparency and tactility of handmade paper to uncover a personal archaeology of time and place.

Tony Cokes

Talk
Date TBD | 4:30 pm | Dix Chapel

Tony Cokes, a MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, is a post-conceptual media artist whose video, sound, and installation works explore how power and ideology are embedded in everyday media. Using appropriated text, pop music, and archival imagery, Cokes reframes cultural and political narratives to expose how language and sound shape subjectivity under capitalism. His minimalist, text-driven works—set against fields of vivid color and pulsing soundtracks—invite viewers to critically listen as much as look.

Cokes’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art, Haus der Kunst (Munich), MACBA (Barcelona), and the Centre Pompidou (Paris). Screenings include Documenta X, the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

He has received major support from the MacArthur Foundation, American Academy in Rome, Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others.

Cokes is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where his work continues to influence new generations of artists and theorists. Through his incisive use of sound and text, Cokes reveals the political undercurrents of pop culture and the ways media both conceal and amplify structures of power.

Past

Sam Van Aken

Talk: A Tree of 40 Fruit and a Hole in the Sky
10/26/25 | 4 pm | Dix Chapel

Artist Sam Van Aken will present a talk on his past, current, and future work evolving out of David Hume's quote that a miracle is transgression of the laws of nature. Working in the realms of agriculture, botany, climatology, and communication, Van Aken's practice expands towards new genres in contemporary art.

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 place-making, and in some cases even become the basis of scientific research. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and he has received numerous honors, including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, an Association of International Curators of Art Award, and a Creative Capital Grant. Most recently, his work has been presented as part of the Nature-Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial with the Cube Design Museum, Netherlands, as well as at the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Christopher Phillips

Talk: Artful Questioning - And How It Leads to More Fruitful Answers
9/21/2025 | 3 pm | Dix Chapel

For over 30 years, Christopher Phillips, founder of the global grassroots Socrates Cafe initiative (and kindred ones including Constitution Cafe, Democracy Cafe, Shakespeare's Burning Questions) has been gallivanting the world planting seeds in far-flung communities, in an array of bricks-and-mortar and virtual venues, to make ours a world of more thoughtful, artful questioners and empathic listeners, and in ways that connect us, that build bridges between one human soul and society and another, at a time and clime when too many in a position to do so are intentionally constructing real and existential walls between us.

In this interactive presentation, Christopher will show how more artfully framed questions, methodically explored, can lead to the discovery of more fruitful, 'redemptive' answers on sundry scales, enabling us to learn more about ourselves and others, and sculpt a map for what we hope to achieve in life, as we also discover uncommon common ground with the most unlikely bedfellows - arguably what the world needs now, more than ever, and in a big way.

Heidi Schwegler

Talk: Material Junkie
8/9/2025 | 3 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

Schwegler is the founder of the Yucca Valley Material Lab, a space for thinking and making. From 2015 to 2018 she was the Chair of the Masters in Fine Arts Program in Applied Craft and Design, a program jointly offered by Pacific Northwest College of Art and Oregon College of Art and Craft. Schwegler has been included in the 2018 Bellevue Art Museum Biennial, the Portland 2016 Biennial, the Portland 2010 Biennial, and the Oregon Biennial in 1999.

In interviews, Schwegler has expressed “an affinity for the ruin, non-sites, and discarded objects.” Schwegler calls herself “an urban archaeologist” who prefers “to mine the peripheral ruin, the discarded stuff that is ignored and considered worthless. By reassigning the value and purpose of something recognizable, I emphasize the perforation between what it was and what it has now become.” Pulling from the traditions of craft and conceptual art, Schwegler uses a variety of mediums, including glass, metal, sculpture, photography, and installation.

Schwegler received her BFAs in art history and metals from the University of Kansas and her MFA from the University of Oregon.

Chip Thomas

Talk: Immersive Photography and Community Narratives
3/6/2025 | 6 pm | Dix Chapel

Chip Thomas, aka “jetsonorama,” is a photographer, public artist, and activist who worked as a physician between Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon on the Navajo Nation from 1987 to 2023.

There, he coordinated the Painted Desert Project—a community-building project that manifested as a constellation of murals across the Navajo Nation painted by artists from all over the rez and the world. These murals aimed to reflect love and appreciation of the rich history shared by the Navajo people back to Navajo people. Thomas was a 2018 recipient of a Kindle Project gift and in 2020 was one of a handful of artists chosen by the UN to recognize the 75th anniversary of the UN’s founding. Artists were chosen to generate work that “contributes to the envisioning and shaping of a more resilient and sustainable future.” Thomas is originally from Raleigh and will be participating in a residency in Biltmore Hills.

Rilana Vorderwuelbecke

Talk: Presencing in Resonance – Let’s Play!
2/9/2025 l 2 pm l Artspace

Rilana Vorderwuelbecke is a German expressive arts therapist living and working in Berlin. After receiving her BA in Fine Arts in Sculpture and Art History from Boston University and MA in Art Business from the University of Manchester/Sotheby’s, Rilana worked as an artist and art dealer in Berlin for many years.

In 2008, she founded an art school for children and has subsequently expanded into art therapy through studies at the Medical School in Hamburg and healing work with Ariana Strozzi Mazzuchi (California), using horses as healers. Rilana offers workshops that combine the fundamentals of healing with horses and the application of the visual and expressive arts.

Nicole Fleetwood

Talk: Marking Time – Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
11/20/2024 | 6 pm | Dix Chapel

Nicole Fleetwood, a MacArthur Fellow, is a writer, curator, and art critic whose interests are contemporary Black diasporic art and visual culture, photography studies, art and public practice, performance studies, gender and feminist studies, Black cultural history, creative nonfiction, prison abolition and carceral studies, and poverty studies.

She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and both the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism. She is also the curator of the exhibition, Marking Time: Art in the Era of Mass Incarceration, which was listed as “one of the most important art moments in 2020” by The New York Times and among the best shows of the year by The New Yorker and Hyperallergic.

Ellen Harvey

Talk: What is art for? What is the role of the artist in our society? What makes something into an artwork?
11/6/2024 | 6 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

Ellen Harvey is a Whitney Bienniallist and Guggenheim Fellow whose work ranges from guerrilla street interventions like her iconic New York Beautification Project, for which she painted miniature landscapes over New York’s graffiti sites, to immersive institutional installations and large-scale public artworks.

She has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and internationally, including in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Her exhibition, The Disappointed Tourist at Turner Contemporary, was selected by Frieze as one of the five best institutional shows in the UK in 2021 .She is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Yale Law School, and Harvard College, and she attended the Berlin Hochschule der Künste in Germany. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Smithsonian Artists Research Fellowship, the Wivina Demeester Prize for Commissioned Public Art, and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

Lisa Jarrett

Talk: It’s Nice To Be A Regular Somewhere
10/24/2024 | 6 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

Lisa Jarrett is an artist working in social and visual forms, existing and making work within the African Diaspora. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings, including schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and prisms.

She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions, the most urgent of which is, "What will set you free?" She is co-founder/director of projects like KSMoCA (Dr. MLK Jr. School Museum of Contemporary Art), the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice, and Art 25: Art in the 25th Century. Lisa lives in Portland, Oregon where she co-authors social practice projects and continues her 17+ year art investigation into Black hair and its care in various forms. She is Professor of Community and Context Arts at Portland State University's Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design where she leads the Art + Social Practice MFA program.

Caroline Woolard

Talk: What Are the Art Worlds That We Want?
9/26/2024 | 6 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

Caroline Woolard is an artist, educator, and technologist who makes collaboration inevitable. Her work has been commissioned by and exhibited in major national and international museums, including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and Creative Time.

Caroline Woolard is a founding co-organizer of Art.coop and Head of Strategy at Pollinator.coop. She is the Area Head of Foundations in the Department of Art and Design at Montclair State University and the co-author of two major reports: Solidarity Not Charity (Grantmakers in the Arts, 2021) and Spirits and Logistics (Center for Cultural Innovation, 2022) and three books: Making and Being (Pioneer Works, 2019), a book for educators about interdisciplinary collaboration, co-authored with Susan Jahoda; Art, Engagement, Economy (onomatopee, 2020) a book about managing socially-engaged and public art projects; and TRADE SCHOOL: 2009-2019, a book about peer learning that Woolard catalyzed in thirty cities internationally over a decade. Woolard’s artwork has been featured twice on New York Close Up (2014, 2016), a digital film series produced by Art21 and broadcast on PBS.

She is the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships including at Moore College of Art and Design (2019), Pilchuck (2018), the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2016), the Queens Museum (2014), Eyebeam (2013), Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund (2010), Watermill (2011), and the MacDowell Colony (2009). She is member of Research Advisory Board for the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project SNAAP (2024-) and was an AmbitioUS Fellow (2021-2022).

Dan Estabrook

Talk: Photography Past and Future
9/12/2024 | 6 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

Dan Estabrook was born and raised in Boston, where he studied art at city schools and the Museum of Fine Arts. He discovered photography in his teens through the underground magazines of the punk-rock and skateboarding cultures of the 1980s. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he began studying alternative photographic processes with Christopher James.

Dan has continued to make contemporary art using the photographic techniques and processes of the nineteenth century, with forays into sculpture, painting, drawing, and other works on paper. He has exhibited widely and has received several awards. A documentary on Dan and his work was produced in 2009 for Anthropy Arts’ Photographers Series. 2024 will see the publication of a monograph, titled Forever & Never, alongside a large exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

DeWitt Godfrey

Talk
6/20/2024 | 7:30 pm | Dix Chapel

DeWitt Godfrey is an American sculptor, best known for his large abstract constructions of banded steel installed in public sites. He earned a B.A. in art from Yale University and an M.F.A. in sculpture from the Edinburgh College of Art as a Fulbright Scholar, and is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Henry Luce Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Japan Foundation.

From 2008 to 2016 he served on the board of the College Art Association and was formerly the director of the Institute for Creative and Performing Arts at Colgate University, where he is a professor in the Department of Art and Art History. He lives in Central New York and New Orleans.

Margaret Kemp

Talk
6/13/2024 | 6 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

Margaret Laurena Kemp is an actor, a multidisciplinary performing artist, a writer, a teaching artist, and an associate professor of theater & dance at UC Davis. She won worldwide praise for her starring role in the film Children of God. Margaret trained at The George Washington University and at The Shakespeare Theatre and has a B.S. in Interdepartmental Studies from the School of Speech at Northwestern University.

She is also the Director of Creative Projects and an Advisory Group member for the nonprofit Fitzmaurice Institute, as well as a Master Teacher and Lead Trainer for the Fitzmaurice Voicework Teacher Certification Program. She has performed at Arena Stage, Mark Taper Forum, Yale Repertory, South Coast Repertory, La Mama Theatre (Melbourne, Australia), Theatre of Changes (Athens, Greece), Red Pear Theatre (Antibes, France), and The Magnet Theatre (Cape Town, South Africa).

Screen credits in addition to Children of God include the supernatural film thriller Blood Bound, The Orlando Jones Show, and Commander in Chief. Her visual work has been shown in solo and group shows at Art Share Los Angeles and The National Gallery of Art in Nassau, Bahamas. Her recent work, CITE, was shown at the Elaine Jacobs Gallery in Detroit, Michigan, in 2019.

Her research explores authorship and spatial politics through performance. Within actor training environments, while specifically teaching voice, speech, movement, and acting, she incorporates and re-contextualizes interdisciplinary topics such as identity, movement theory, accents and dialects, contemporary and classical heightened text, solo performance, and devised theatre.

Alan Sonfist

Talk
6/6/2024 | 6 pm | Dix Chapel

In the extraordinary range of his work, Alan Sonfist recreates the inventiveness and intricacy of his subject, the natural world itself. Beginning as a teenager in the 1960s, Sonfist has explored issues of ecological deterioration, preservation, and what would later be understood as “climate change” through projects that draw on the materials and methods of the naturalist, historian, and urban planner.

An increasing rejection of commercialization and growing ecological awareness in the early 1960s provide the historical context for many of the themes in Sonfist’s work and connect him to artistic movements such as Conceptual Art, Land or Environmental Art, and site-specific works. But Sonfist’s distinctive interest in urban ecosystems—a result of his upbringing in New York City’s South Bronx—is one of the features that distinguishes him from other artists who use natural elements and processes as their artistic medium. Rather than excluding human history from his pieces, Sonfist is deeply attentive to the many specific histories of a given site, often juxtaposing them to powerful effect.

Jean Shin

Talk
5/30/2024 | 6 pm | Dix Chapel

Jean Shin is known for her sprawling and often public sculptures, transforming accumulations of discarded objects into powerful monuments that interrogate our complex relationship between material consumption, collective identity, and community engagement.

Often working cooperatively within a community, Shin amasses vast collections of everyday objects—Mountain Dew bottles, mobile phones, 35mm slides—while researching their history of use, circulation, and environmental impact. Distinguished by this labor-intensive and participatory process, Shin’s creations become catalysts for communities to confront social and ecological challenges.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in the U.S., Shin works in Brooklyn and Hudson Valley, New York. Her work has been widely exhibited and collected in over 150 major museums and cultural institutions, including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where in 2020 she was the first Korean-American woman artist featured in a solo exhibition. Shin has received numerous awards, including the Frederic Church Award for her contributions to American art and culture. Her works have been highlighted in The New York Times and Sculpture Magazine, among others.

Her body of work includes several permanent public artworks commissioned by major agencies and municipalities, most recently a landmark commission for the MTA’s Second Ave Subway in NYC. She is a tenured adjunct professor at Pratt Institute and holds an honorary doctorate from the New York Academy of Art.

Roland Keller

Talk
5/2/2024 | 6 pm | ArtSpace

Roland initially trained as a glassblower before entering the Kunsthochschule Berlin, where he began to explore the boundaries between art and design and ultimately between art, design, and business.

Since 2001 Roland has worked as a designer in the business world, first as Innovation Manager for Siemens and BenQ, and then for Swiss Post as Head of Customer Insights, Head of Strategic Projects, Head of Innovation Culture, and now Head of Corporate Development. In his current role Roland conducts strategic foresight, promotes intrapreneurship, and helps shape a holistic understanding of corporate sustainability.

Roland holds an Executive MBA in Creative Leadership from Steinbeis University, a Diploma in Product Design from Kunsthochschule Berlin, and additional studies with Henry Chesbrough at ESADE in Barcelona/Spain, with Alexander Osterwalder at Strategyzer in London/England, and with Eric Ries at IDEO in San Francisco/USA.

Throughout his career, Roland has worked to apply the “Think Global, Act Local” principle in his various positions in Sweden, Germany, the USA, South Korea, and Switzerland.

Jen Delos Reyes

Talk
4/18/2024 | 6 pm | Dix Chapel

Jen Delos Reyes was born in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and educated first in its local music scene of the mid-90’s infused with the energy of Riot grrrl and DIY, and then in its university. She was the director and founder of Open Engagement, an international annual conference on socially engaged art that was active between 2007 and 2019 and hosted ten conferences in two countries at locations including the Queens Museum in New York.

1. How she works today is rooted in what she learned in her formative years as a show organizer, listener, creator of zines, and band member. Graduate work at the University of Regina made the space possible for her to see her work as an organizer as a key component of her continued creative work. Jen Delos Reyes is a ‘farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts.'

2. Educator, writer, and radical community arts organizer. She is defiantly optimistic, a friend to all birds, and a proponent that our institutions can become tender and vulnerable. Her practice is as much about working with institutions as it is about creating and supporting sustainable artist-led culture.

Delos Reyes worked within Portland State University from 2008 to 2014 to create the first flexible residency Art and Social Practice MFA program in the United States and devised the curriculum that focused on place, engagement, and dialogue. The flexible residency program allowed for artists embedded in their communities to remain on site throughout their course of study.

She worked with the Portland Art Museum from 2009 to 2014 on a series of programs and integrated systems that allowed artists to rethink what can happen in a museum and reinvigorate the idea of the museum as a public space.

From 2015 to 2022, Delos Reyes was the Associate Director of the School of Art & Art History of the University of Illinois, Chicago’s only public research university, where she taught in the departments of Art and Museum and Exhibition Studies.

After over a decade of large-scale organizing, she is now focused on work on the scale of her life.

She is the author of I’m Going to Live the Life I Sing About in My Song: How Artists Make and Live Lives of Meaning, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Public Engagement But Were Afraid to Ask, and Defiantly Optimistic: Turning Up in a World on Fire.

Delos Reyes divides her time between Chicago, IL, where she is the founder of Garbage Hill Farm, and Ithaca, NY, where she is an associate professor of art at Cornell University.

1. Credit to Saul Alinsky in form, and for the reminder that often the most formative educational experiences happen outside of the classroom.

2. Grateful to Wendell Berry in general, and for this descriptor I am using.

Dudley Edmondson

Talk
4/4/2024 | 6 pm | Dix Chapel

Over the last 32 years, Dudley Edmondson has become an established Photographer, Author, Filmmaker and Presenter. His photography has been featured in galleries and publications around the world.

His photographic work and adventure travels have taken him to so many amazing places from the Arctic Circle of Alaska to the Bahamas.

As a young man, Dudley Edmondson discovered the power of nature and its ability to heal both the mind and body. This led Mr. Edmondson on a lifelong path to follow his passion and instill his love and knowledge of the outdoors in others and inspire a personal understanding and respect for everything nature offers. Mr. Edmondson has collaborated with numerous communities across the county to help urban youth and youth of color to experience nature and the beauty of the outdoors.

Mr. Edmondson was one of the first to highlight the involvement of African Americans in the public lands system. Unsatisfied with the representation of people of color among those in his outdoor pursuits, he created a set of Outdoor Role Models for the African American community by writing his landmark book, Black & Brown Faces in America’s Wild Places (Adventure Keen Publications, 2006). In 2021, Mr. Edmondson created a photography and film exhibit called “Northern Waters,” for the Minnesota Marine Art Museum. Dudley was recently featured in the PBS program, America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston, discussing his passion for birding and nature, as well as the importance of diverse communities enjoying the outdoors. He is currently working on his next book and a number of film projects.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons

Talk
3/21/2024 | 6 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

María Magdalena Campos-Pons is a multidisciplinary artist and MacArthur Fellow exploring how memory, spirituality, and identity are entangled with personal and collective histories across the Caribbean. Her practice spans photography, performance, sculpture, drawing, painting, and video, and her works often take the form of richly layered, multimedia installations. She forges connections between her own experiences as a Cuban woman and global issues of displacement and inequality.

Campos-Pons’s artistic practice spans photography, performance, sculpture, drawing, painting, and video, and her works often take the form of richly layered, multimedia installations. She forges connections between her own experiences as a Cuban woman and global issues of displacement and inequality.

For The Seven Powers Came by the Sea (1992), Campos-Pons inscribed seven wooden boards shaped like a ship’s hull with stick figures representing the bodies of enslaved Africans and the name of a deity from the Yoruba religion. The invocation of the deities consecrates the space the installation inhabits and references rituals lost to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In another early work, Replenishing (2003), Campos-Pons created a wall-based installation comprised of seven large-format Polaroid photographs of herself and her mother. The photographs represent Campos-Pons and her mother in three images each, showing the upper, middle, and lower portions of their bodies. Dividing their bodies into three components disrupts a linear narrative, but each woman holds a strand of colored beads, pictured in a seventh photograph positioned between them, invoking connection across boundaries of time and space. Campos-Pons’s ambitious installation, Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir for the Spirits (2015), draws on memories of her childhood home in a former slave barracks in Mantanzas, Cuba. For the work, she configured cast and blown glass vessels into larger assemblages that recall the machinery of sugar mills and rum distilleries, two industries inextricably entwined with the history of slavery on the island. The ocean and water are recurring motifs across Campos-Pons’s imagery. For her 2019 series Un Pedazo de Mar, Campos-Pons uses gouache, watercolor, and ink to create watery blue expanses that are punctuated by figures of humans and sea creatures. The pieces remember the many people who died during the Middle Passage but also show water as a source of life and regeneration.

Beyond her own artistic practice, Campos-Pons establishes platforms for other artists to advance and exhibit their work. She is the founder and director of the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice, an organization that connects institutions and artists from the U.S. South and the global South and supports creative work that resists and repairs legacies of inequality. Through her expansive approach to materials, themes, and imagery, Campos-Pons is nourishing and enriching the visual vocabulary of the Caribbean. María Magdalena Campos-Pons received degrees from the National School of Art, Havana (1980), and the Higher Institute of Art, Havana (1985), and attended the MFA program (1988) at the Massachusetts College of Art. She held the Bunting Fellowship in Visual Arts at Harvard University in 1993–1994. She currently serves as the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair and Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University, where she founded the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice Program. She also launched Intermittent Rivers, a multi-artist initiative in Matanzas, Cuba, as part of the 2019 Havana Biennial. Her work has been presented at venues including the Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University; Peabody Essex Museum; National Portrait Gallery, Museum of Modern Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Pérez Art Museum, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Johannesburg Biennial, Gwangju Biennale, Documenta, Venice Biennale, and the Brooklyn Museum.

Arnold J. Kemp

Talk
2/22/2024 | 6 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

Arnold J. Kemp is a Guggenheim Fellow whose practice for over five decades has explored the psychological and political dimensions of language. Recent exhibitions of the artist’s work include FALSE HYDRAS (2021) at JOAN in Los Angeles and I COULD SURVIVE, I WOULD SURVIVE, I SHOULD SURVIVE (2021) at the Manetti Shrem Art Museum at the University of California at Davis.

Over the past decade, Kemp received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.

In addition, Kemp’s practice has been reviewed at length in notable art publications and newspapers, including ArtForum (2021) and The New York Times (2021). Kemp’s works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Hammer Museum at UCLA, the Portland Art Museum, the Schneider Museum of Art, and the Tacoma Art Museum. Kemp’s work is represented by Martos Gallery, New York, and M. LeBlanc, Chicago.

Donal Mosher + Michael Palmieri

Talk
2/8/2024 | 6 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

Donal Mosher is a filmmaker, photographer, writer, and musician. Michael Palmieri is a director, cinematographer, and editor. He and Donal Mosher are a collaborative filmmaking team, whose first feature, OCTOBER COUNTRY, won the Grand Jury Prize at Silverdocs, received two Cinema Eye Honors, and was nominated for a Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary.

The film is a haunting portrait of American poverty, described by A.O. Scott as a “Joyce Carol Oates novel rendered as a documentary.” Their next feature, OFF LABEL, an ensemble exploration of pharmaceutical use and abuse, premiered in competition at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival and was released theatrically by Oscilloscope Laboratories. Palmieri and Mosher’s “ROUGAROUING,” a short film about a rural Cajun Mardi Gras celebration, won Best Short Film at the 2014 Ashland Film Festival. Most recently, the duo expanded their short work, “PEACE IN THE VALLEY,” into THE GOSPEL OF EUREKA, a feature-length documentary that premiered at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival, was released theatrically by Kino Lorber, and was broadcast on POV last summer.

Alongside filmmaking, Donal has published fiction, nonfiction, and reviews, including a contribution to the LAMBDA Award-winning anthology PORTLAND QUEER. His photo work has been shown in SF and LA and is part of the artist registry at White Columns Gallery in NYC. His recent photographic work, THE VIBRANCY IS KILLING ME, was exhibited in Munich, Germany, in Dec 2014.

Jonathan Michael Square

Talk
1/25/2024 | 6 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

Jonathan Michael Square is a writer and historian specializing in the fashion and visual culture of the African Diaspora. A proponent of the power of social media as a platform for radical pedagogy, he founded and runs the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom, which explores the intersection of fashion and slavery. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Fashion Institute of Technology, Parsons School of Design, and currently at Harvard University.

He has written for Fashionista, Fashion Studies Journal, Refinery29, Vestoj, Hyperallergic, British Art Studies, and International Journal of Fashion Studies. A proponent of the power of social media as a platform for radical pedagogy, he founded and runs the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom, which explores the intersection of fashion and slavery. He has a PhD in history from New York University, a master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA from Cornell University.

Luis Camnitzer

Talk
1/11/2024 | 6 pm | Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh

Luis Camnitzer is a German-born Uruguayan artist, curator, art critic, and academic who was at the forefront of 1960s Conceptual Art. A Whitney Bienniallist and Guggenheim Fellow, Camnitzer works primarily in sculpture, printmaking, and installation, exploring topics such as repression, institutional critique, and social justice.

Luis Camnitzer was born in Lübeck, Germany, in 1937 and moved to Uruguay when he was a year old. In 1953, he studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, and in 1957 received a grant to study sculpture at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich. He has completed residencies and fellowships with the Guggenheim Foundation (1961 and 1982); Creative Arts Program Services for Sculpture, New York (1978); and Art Matters Foundation, New York (1991).

Camnitzer has had a long career as an artist, critic, educator, and theorist. He began working in parallel with the American Conceptualists of the 1960s and ’70s, and in 1964 founded the New York Graphic Workshop (1964–70) with artists Liliana Porter and José Guillermo Castillo. In 1971, he helped establish New York’s Museo Latinoamericano, and a splinter group, Movimiento de Independencia Cultural de Latino América (MICLA). His 2007 book Conceptualism in Latin American Art is widely considered one of the most influential texts on the subject.

The international nature of Camnitzer’s biography makes him well placed to challenge received ideas of center and periphery, and his work across a range of media has a strong political tenor. Leftovers (1970) is a wall of boxes wrapped in bloody gauze, erected in honor of the casualties of the liberation movements in Latin America. The Journey (1991) is an installation that features three wall-mounted knives engraved with the names “Pinta,” “Niña,” and “Santa Maria.” Such questioning of colonialism and capitalism charges nearly all of Camnitzer’s work.

Through collaborative endeavors, Camnitzer has popularized his own reading of Latin American Conceptualism. He argues that it is not a style but rather a strategy that developed independently of North American and European influence, and has roots as deep as the nineteenth-century teachings of Simón Rodríguez, the philosopher best known for tutoring Simón Bolívar. At the New York Graphic Workshop, Camnitzer worked to democratize art, separating it as much as was possible from the market. And in the Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA, the group established an alternative to the Center for Inter-American Relations (now the Americas Society), which, while it hosted a number of progressive exhibitions in the 1970s, was also linked to U.S. interests associated with Latin American dictatorships. One of his own first Conceptual works, from 1966, consists of a text: “This is a Mirror, You are a Written Sentence.” In this homage to writer Jorge Luis Borges and René Magritte, Camnitzer explores the reflective quality of language.

A major anthological exhibition of Camnitzer’s work traveled from Daros Latinamerica, Zürich, to museums in Canada, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, the United States, and Uruguay from 2010 to 2013. Camnitzer has also had solo exhibitions at Casa de las Américas, Havana (1983); Lehman College, New York (1991); and El Museo del Barrio, New York (1995). He represented Uruguay in the Venice Biennale (1988), and participated in 500 años de represión, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires (1992); Whitney Biennial, New York, (2000); Documenta, Kassel, Germany (2002); The Disappeared, El Museo del Barrio, New York (2007); and América Latina 1960–2013, Fondation Cartier, Paris (2013). He received the Mercosur Konex Award, Visual Arts, Uruguay (2002); the Frank Jewett Mather Award, College Art Association (2011); and the Skowhegan Medal for installations and interdisciplinary work (2012). He was also the United States Artists Ford Fellow, Visual Arts in 2012. Camnitzer lives and works in Great Neck, New York.

Travis Neel

Talk
12/7/2023 | 6 pm | ArtSpace

Workshop
12/8/2023 | 4 pm-5:30 pm | Lump Gallery

Travis Neel works at the intersection of socially engaged art and urban ecology. Collaboratively with his partner Erin Charpentier, he utilizes art as a framework to understand the keystone role that humans play in our landscapes.

Currently, his work with Charpentier centers on the honey mesquite—the charismatic, thorny, and creative protagonist of the Llano Estacado’s ecological theater. In an attempt to understand the honey mesquite, they have become enmeshed in a symbiotic association with other artists, landscape architects, neighbors, Chihuahuan desert and shortgrass prairie plant communities, ranchers, arborists, insects, bacteria, rainwater, mycorrhiza, the City of Lubbock, predictive climate mapping, and students at Texas Tech University. Together, this community of actors has manifested the Mesquite Mile, a project that works to demonstrate how human communities and culture can be in good kin with nature in the urban core of Lubbock, TX.

The Mesquite Mile has been described as many things: an urban afforestation project, a prairie restoration project, and a study in child-friendly urban design. For Erin and Travis, the Mesquite Mile models how human culture can contribute to the mutual flourishing of both humans and the more-than-human.

Travis holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University. His work has been supported and recognized by art museums and cultural organizations, including the Mid-America Arts Alliance’s Interchange Artists Fellowship program, Headlands Center for the Arts, Southwest Contemporary, the British Cultural Council, Stoveworks Artist Residency, the Tallgrass Artist Residency, the Brooklyn Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Temple Contemporary, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the RedLine Contemporary Art Center, and numerous DIY art spaces across the United States and Canada.

Corey Pemberton

Talk
11/9/2023 | 6 pm | ArtSpace

Corey Pemberton is a Los Angeles-based artist who he splits his time between the nonprofit arts organization Crafting the Future, glass blowing, and his painting practice. Pemberton strives to bring together people of all backgrounds and identities, breaking down stereotypes and building bridges, not only through his work with Crafting the Future but also with his personal artistic practice as well. .

He has completed residencies at the Pittsburgh Glass Center (PA) and Bruket (Bodø, NO), as well as a Core Fellowship at the Penland School of Crafts (NC).

Artist Statement: To feel ordinary is a luxury. My portraits extend that luxury to people whose bodies and identities fall outside of the traditional raced, gendered, and sexualized boundaries of ordinariness. They are anchored within the domestic, as our homes allow space to be free amongst curated collections of creature comforts. The spaces and objects carry as much content as their curators do. These seemingly mundane tableaus are at once light and approachable and yet suggest the high stakes involved in claiming space for oneself as a member of a historically oppressed group. In challenging prevailing notions about blackness and queerness, we can redefine the boundaries of the everyday. Acrylic paint, photography, textiles, and glass come together to assemble domestic spaces in which accordingly diverse people are centered and enjoy safety, love, and wholeness.

Amy Whitaker

Talk: Making as a Method: The Arts as a Hub for Interdisciplinary Problem-solving
10/26/2023 | 6 pm | ArtSpace

Amy Whitaker is an award-winning writer and researcher who studies the frictions between art and markets and between politics and economics. Her work on fractional equity in art using blockchain models new structures of economic sustainability for artists and extends to policy proposals for redistribution. She received the 2021 Edith Penrose Award from the European Academy of Management for “trailblazing” research that challenges orthodoxies and has impact.

With explicitly broad engagement across disciplines, political environments, and both academic and generalist conversations, she has published in top peer-reviewed journals in finance, sociology, law, education, archival studies, cultural economics, and arts administration, and has spoken widely, including at the Aspen Ideas Festival, TEDx, TNW, Goop, Unfinished Live, and numerous colleges and universities nationally and internationally. Her work has been covered in The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Guardian, Harper's, The Atlantic, the Financial Times, Artnet News, Hyperallergic, Artforum, The Art Newspaper, and many others.

Dr. Whitaker worked for twenty years before joining academia, including for the investment firm D.E. Shaw & Co., L.P.; the company Locus (where she was named on patents for economic classification systems); the artist Jenny Holzer; and numerous museums, including the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, and Tate. She holds a BA from Williams College with honors in political science and art, an MFA in painting, an MBA, and a PhD in political economy. Her newest work extends her research on fractional equity in art to creative policy design and the reimagination of politics in an age of fragile democracy and increasingly fewer shared truths. She is Associate Professor of Visual Arts Administration at NYU Steinhardt.

Mary Mattingly

Talk: Proposals
10/12/2023 | 6 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

Mary Mattingly is a Guggenheim Fellow and interdisciplinary artist. She founded Swale, an edible landscape on a barge in New York City. Docked at public piers but following waterways common laws, Swale circumnavigates New York’s public land laws, allowing anyone to pick free fresh food. Swale instigated and co-created the “foodway” in Concrete Plant Park, the Bronx in 2017. The “foodway” is the first time New York City Parks is allowing people to publicly forage in over 100 years. It’s currently considered a pilot project.

Mattingly recently launched Public Water with More Art and completed public artwork “Pull” with the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, two spherical ecosystems that were pulled across Habana to Parque Central and the museum. In 2018 she received a commission from BRIC Arts Media to build “What Happens After” which involved dismantling a military vehicle (LMTV) that had been to Afghanistan and deconstructing its mineral supply chain. A group of artists including performance artists, veterans, and public space activists re-envisioned the vehicle for BRIC. In 2016 Mattingly facilitated a similar project with teens at the Museum of Modern Art.

Mary Mattingly’s artwork has also been exhibited at the Cuenca Biennial, Istanbul Biennale, the Havana Biennial, Storm King, the International Center of Photography, the Seoul Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, the Palais de Tokyo, and the Parrish Museum as part of Radical Seafaring curated by Andrea Grover. With the U.S. Department of State and Bronx Museum of the Arts she participated in the smARTpower project, traveling to Manila. Mattingly has been awarded grants and fellowships from the James L. Knight Foundation, Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, Yale University School of Art, the Harpo Foundation, NYFA, the Jerome Foundation, and the Art Matters Foundation.

Her work has been featured in Aperture Magazine, Art in America, Artforum, Art News, Sculpture Magazine, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Financial Times, Le Monde Magazine, Metropolis Magazine, New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Brooklyn Rail, and on BBC News, MSNBC, NPR, WNBC, and on Art21.

It has been included in books such as the Whitechapel/MIT Press Documents of Contemporary Art series title “Nature” and edited by Jeffrey Kastner, Triple Canopy’s Speculations, the Future Is… published by Artbook, and Henry Sayre’s A World of Art, 8th edition, published by Pearson Education Inc. Mattingly’s artwork is represented by Robert Mann Gallery.

Mattingly has a book coming out with the Anchorage Museum and Hirmer Verlag titled “What Happens After.”

Anders Ruhwald

Talk: Space Breathe, Objects Relate
10/5/2023 | 6 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

Anders Ruhwald is a Danish sculptor and installation artist whose practice is grounded in ceramics. He lives and works between Detroit and Chicago. Solo exhibitions include Century Garden, Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA (2020); The Anatomy of a Home at Saarinen House in Michigan (2012), You in Between at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in the UK (2008) and more than 30 gallery and museum solo-shows as well as more than 100 group-exhibitions around the world.

He lives and works between Detroit and Chicago and received his MFA from the Royal College of Art in London in 2005. Solo exhibitions include Century Garden, Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA (2020); The Anatomy of a Home at Saarinen House in Michigan (2012), You in Between at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in the UK (2008) and more than 30 gallery and museum solo-shows as well as more than 100 group-exhibitions around the world.

His work is represented in over 25 public collections internationally including The Victoria and Albert Museum (UK), Musée des Arts décoratifs (France), The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Detroit Institute of Arts, The Denver Art Museum, The National Museum (Sweden) and The Museum of Art and Design (Denmark). His work has been featured in publications like Vitamin C published by Phaidon as well as the New York Times Magazine, Guardian (UK), Forbes Magazine, The Architects Newspaper, Frieze, Hyperallergic and Avenuel (Rep. of S. Korea). Ruhwald has lectured and taught at universities around Europe and North America and has held an associate professorship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 2008-2017 he was the Head of the Ceramics Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, USA. He was a visiting professor at the National Academy of Arts in Oslo, Norway from 2018-2022.

Brenda Mallory

Talk: Means, Memory, Making Do
9/28/2023 | 6 pm | Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh

Brenda Mallory is a Joan Mitchell Fellow whose mixed media sculptural works are comprised of a variety of materials, including cloth, fibers, beeswax, and found objects. Mallory lives in Portland, Oregon, but grew up in Oklahoma and is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

By creating multiple forms that are joined with crude hardware that imply tenuous connections or repairs, her work addresses ideas of interference and disruption in long-established systems of nature and human cultures.

She holds a BA in Linguistics & English from UCLA and a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art. She has received grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, Ford Family Foundation, and the Regional Arts & Culture Council. She is a recipient of the Hallie Ford Fellowship, the Eiteljorg Contemporary Native Art Fellowship, the Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship in Visual Art and the Ucross Native Fellowship. She has participated in artist residencies, including Ucross, Anderson Ranch, Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, Glean, Bullseye Glass, and the Jordan Schnitzer Printmaking Residency at Sitka Center for the Arts.

Kenseth Armstead + Kayla Coleman

Talk: Honoring the Forgotten Through Public Art Dialogue on Community
9/7/2023 | 6 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

Kenseth Armstead has created provocative conceptual art for three decades. His work has been included in pivotal explorations of history, American culture, ethnicity, and institution-defining moments. The list of grants won in support of Armstead’s work over the years includes the inaugural Skowhegan School of the Arts David C. Driskell Fellowship, the NYFA Video Fellowship, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the NYSCA Individual Artist Award in Film/Video and New Technical Production, the Film/Media Grant from the Creative Capital Foundation, and the Digital Matrix Commission from the Longwood Arts Project and the Bronx Council on the Arts.

Selected historic exhibitions that include his work are “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art” at the Whitney Museum of American Art and “It’s Happening! Celebrating 50 Years of Public Art in NYC Parks” in Central Park, NY presented by NYC Parks, Art in the Parks; “Frames of Reference: Reflections on Media” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; “Race in Digital Space” at the MIT List Visual Arts Center; “Veni Vidi Video” at the Studio Museum in Harlem (their first video exhibition in 2003); “Open House: Working in Brooklyn” at the Brooklyn Museum; “Edited at EAI: Video Interference” at Electronic Arts Intermix (celebrating 45 years of their award-winning collection); “Modern Heroics: 75 Years of African American Expressionism” at the Newark Museum of Art.

Armstead’s videos, drawings, and sculptures are included in the collections of Centre Pompidou; the African American Museum in Dallas, Texas; the Newark Museum of Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and numerous public and private collections. Numerous reviews, which include L Magazine, The New York Times, Art in America, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post, have favorably discussed his videos, sculptures, and media installations.

Solo exhibitions of Armstead’s work have been mounted in galleries, kunsthalles, museums, and alternative spaces. The list includes Churner and Churner, New York, NY; LMAKprojects, New York, Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, New York, and FUTURA Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic.

Armstead received a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art & Design in 1990. While still an undergraduate, he participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Upon completion of his degree, he moved to New York City to attend the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (1990-1991). He now holds an MS in Integrated Digital Media from NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering (2005), which awarded him a full scholarship and the Excellence in Integrated Digital Media Award.

Armstead has co-authored multimedia installations collaboratively with the art band X-PRZ, which he co-founded with his mentor Tony Cokes (1991-2001). The art band served to critique culture, resist the notion of the individual productive genius, and challenge social norms, using ephemera and historical and documentary video as base material. He was also the founding managing editor of Rhizome Internet (currently rhizome.org), which he helped launch with Mark Tribe in 1996. Before Rhizome, there simply wasn’t criticism for new media art. Rhizome provided a focused and generous discursive platform for a new community of artists to consider the challenge of producing meaningful work outside the rules of painting and sculpture.

Armstead participated as Artist in Residence at Harvestworks; the Castle Trebesice, Prague, CZ; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program; Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology; Galley Aferro; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space Program on Governors Island; the Brooklyn Musum, Library and Archive; Socrates Sculpture Park; the Louise Bourgeois Endowed Residency for a Sculptor at Yaddo; and currently the Drawing Center, Open Sessions Program (2018-2020).

The Siggraph Asia 2009 conference in Yokohama, Japan, presented scenes from Armstead’s decade-long “Spook™” project in the Art Gallery. Outtakes from the “Spook™” project were also included in a feature-length documentary that was broadcast on PBS nationally: “Lafayette: The Lost Hero,” directed by the Academy Award-nominated Oren Jacoby. Additionally, Armstead served as a historical consultant on the project. The “Spook™” project is still the most complete record of the historical figure James Armistead Lafayette. James Armistead Lafayette was a double agent spy for George Washington, and his intelligence reports led to the end of the American Revolution.

Commissioned work from Armstead’s series “Farther Land” includes site-specific installations at Olana State Historic Site, “Heresy • Hearsay,” for an iteration of the award-winning exhibition Groundswell in 2014; Socrates Sculpture Park, “Master Work: Astoria Houses, Building 24,” in the Emerging Artist Fellowship exhibition in 2015; BRIC House, in The Project Room, “Master Work: Slaves of New York 1776” in 2018; and Union Square Park, “Washington 20/20/20” at the George Washington Equestrian Monument, presented by the NYC Art in the Parks Program in 2018. Future commissions are planned for the NYC DOT ART Community Commission in Harlem, NY, in 2020 and Washington’s Headquarters State Historic Site in Newburgh, NY, presented by Strong Room Inc. in 2021.

Armstead tirelessly works to explore difficult terrain, new histories, complex identities, and nuanced subjects with art. His work seeks to create beauty out of the connection to and honoring of the invisible and forgotten in American culture.

William Deresiewicz

Talk: One Man Band: Surviving the Economy
8/31/2023 | 6 pm | The North Carolina Museum of Art

William Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent speaker at colleges, high schools, and other venues, and the best-selling author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. His new book is The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society.

Bill has published over 300 essays and reviews. He has won the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle’s Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and a Sydney Award; he is also a three-time National Magazine Award nominee. His work, which has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and many other publications, has been translated into 18 languages and anthologized in 39 college and scholastic readers.

Bill taught English at Yale and Columbia before becoming a full-time writer. He has spoken at over 160 educational and other venues and has appeared on The Colbert Report, Here & Now, The New Yorker Radio Hour, and many other outlets. He has held visiting positions at Bard, Scripps, and Claremont McKenna Colleges as well as at the University of San Diego. His previous books are The Death of the Artist, A Jane Austen Education, and Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets.

Bill is a member of the Board of Directors of Tivnu: Building Justice, a Jewish social-justice gap year in Portland, Oregon, and of the Advisory Council of Project Wayfinder, which runs purpose-learning programs in schools across the United States and beyond.

And, since you’re wondering, it’s /də-REH-zə-WITS/.

Whitney Lowe

Talk: Finding
8/17/2023 | 6 pm | Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh

Whitney Lowe is consciously pursuing a carefully nuanced interrelationship between modernity and conventions by signaling the machine and manufacturing with a desire to exploit the material warmth and skin-like characteristics inherent in clay. It’s a play between objective pursuits—rigor, precision, anonymity, and austerity—pivoting to pressure, weight, and compression that are resonant of intimacy and flesh.

Viewing the extravagantly constructed forms is analogous to reading the printed letterform; the eye understands the graphic outline yet lingers because of the precise manipulation—the turbid pleasures—of matter in the play of mass and void, the creation of taut edges and urgent lines. Planar surfaces stripped of any mark of the hand and unblemished by decoration convey desolate spaces of uninhabited cities or discarded objects of alien origin. The goal may be an aesthetic directness; yet, careful inspection reaps deep rewards, revealing nuanced forms that layer historical quotations and material play.

Lowe began his career as a graphic designer. With the fortuitous meeting of luminaries from Cranbrook & California Institute of the Arts, he became one of the founding principals of ReVerb, a Los Angeles-based graphic design studio that was awarded the “Chrysler Award for Design Innovation” in 1994, included in the prestigious ID40 issue, and featured in the British graphic design magazine Eye. In 1997, he was recruited as a creative director by the advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy and was responsible for such noted campaigns as Windows 98, the Microsoft Image Campaign 99, Diet Coke, and, most recently, Starbucks.

It was 9/11, though, that compelled Lowe to rethink his ambitions & priorities. With his passionate interest and scholarly knowledge of 20th-century ceramics, he decided to pursue making, having never previously touched wet clay. Lowe remains committed to being at the forefront of the contemporary ceramic dialogue and a voice—advocate and arbiter—that often grates with today’s craft conventions. His talk will offer some of these opinions as well as identify truths and strategies that have remained steadfast in the universal creative impulse.

His work has been recognized by numerous design publications and exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1994 he co-designed the book “Morphosis, Building and Project” that was awarded the A.I.A. book of the year. Whitney studied architecture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, received a BFA in graphic design & packaging at Art Center College of Design, and earned a post-baccalaureate in ceramics from the Oregon College of Art and Craft. His ceramic work is in the collections of the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California, and the NAU Art Museum, Flagstaff, Arizona, as well as numerous private collections.

Don Crow

Talk: The Spaces Between Two Things
6/22/2023 | 6 pm | Lump Gallery

A teacher, painter, and collage artist, Don Crow has been awarded numerous grants and distinctions, including the Pollak Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts. He has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and Doha, Qatar, worked as a visiting artist at Oregon College of Art and Design, and been selected for numerous residencies, including most recently the Cité internationale des arts in Paris.

Crow’s fragile paper collages, large digital prints, and abstract paintings draw attention to objects as obvious constructions and invisible processes. As part of his mixed media projects, Crow has studied photography and laser-engraved surfaces to explore the tensions between muteness and expressiveness as surfaces and images become subsumed by time, memory, and digital recordings. Recent paintings highlight mysteries and textures with ambiguous relationships between the surface and the ground, the applied or painted surface, the deliberate mark, or the accidental folding.

Crow is a romantic and an engaged reader of contemporary poetry and fiction. He is a good swimmer, a moderate cook, and a lover of dogs. He is currently involved in trying to pay more attention to the moon at night and less attention to what passes for the daily news as it appears on the Internet. And he has the hope of one day in the not too distant future memorizing a poem a month by heart.

He lives and works in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife and two cats.

Erik Brandt

Talk: Ficciones Typografika
6/8/2023 | 6 pm | Lump Gallery

Erik Brandt is a graphic designer and educator who has been active since 1994. He is currently Chair of the Design Department and Professor of Graphic Design at MCAD (Minneapolis College of Art and Design) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) and was appointed International President in 2022. He curated Ficciones Typografika, a project dedicated to typographic exploration in a public space.

Educated internationally, his career began as a cartoonist in Japan in 1994 and has since found focus largely in print media. He maintains a small graphic design studio, Typografika (Visual Communication und Konditorei). His work has been published and exhibited internationally and he has also received recognition for his very, very silly short films.

Akiko Busch

Talk: Invisible Ink: Notes On Why the Ink We Do Not See is as Essential to Contemporary Human Expression as the Ink We Do See
5/18/2023 | 6 pm | Artspace

Akiko Busch writes about design, culture, and nature for a variety of publications. Her most recent book, Everything Else is Bric-a-Brac, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in September 2022. She was a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine for twenty years, and her essays have appeared in numerous national magazines, newspapers, and exhibition catalogues.

Her collection of essays, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency, was published by Penguin Press in 2019. The Incidental Steward, her essays about citizen science and stewardship, was published by Yale University Press in 2013 and awarded an Honorable Mention in the Natural History Literature category of the 2013 National Outdoor Book Awards. She is also the author of Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects: Essays on Design and the Everyday, and Nine Ways to Cross a River: Midstream Reflections on Swimming and Getting There from Here.

She has been a visiting teacher at Bennington College and was on the faculty of the MA Design Research Program at the School of Visual Arts from 2009 until 2020. Her work has been recognized by grants from the Furthermore Foundation, NYFA, and Civitella Ranieri.

She lives in the Hudson Valley and makes it a point to swim across the Hudson River once a year.

Bukola Koiki

Talk: On Motifs and Meaning
5/11/2023 | 6 pm | Artspace

Bukola Koiki is a Nigerian-American conceptual fiber artist and educator known for the depth of material curiosity and technical research in her practice. A first-generation immigrant with several intersecting identities, she interprets the world and the complexities of the contemporary Black experience through the lens of a trained designer-turned-craftsperson and from a liminal existence between nations, gender, and culture.

Her multidimensional fiber works include, amongst other innovations, hand-pulled prints rendered with embroidered collagraph plates, giant handmade and hand-dyed paper beads employing Nigerian hair threading techniques, and indigo-dyed and hand-printed Tyvek head ties.

Koiki received her MFA in Applied Craft + Design from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and her BFA in Communication Design from the University of North Texas. In 2023, Koiki was awarded a United States Artists Fellowship. She was named a Shortlist Finalist for the American Craft Council’s Emerging Voices Award in 2019 and nominated for the Textile Society of America’s Brandford/Elliott Award in the same year. In winter/spring 2022, Koiki was the inaugural artist in residence and lecturer in humanities at Bates College in Lewiston, ME, and a summer artist in residence at the Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, GA. Her work has been featured in American Craft and Surface Design magazines and on OPB (NPR Oregon). She has exhibited nationally, including in Chicago, IL, and Portland, OR. She currently lives and works in Maine.

Stefani Bardin

Talk: Outside/Inside + Inside/Outside: Food Design and Perception
4/27/2023 | 6 pm | Artspace

Stefani Bardin is an artist whose work is split between food and climate change projects and initiatives. Based in New York City, she partners with scientists, chefs, architects, technologists, and designers to investigate the influences of corporate culture and industrial food production on our food system and the environment.

She was a member of the New Museum’s Cultural Incubator NEW INC from 2018 to 2021, where projects included collaborations with Smallhold on a modular unit for NEW INC as well as workshops and collaborations with OS Hospitality on food and climate change. Our work has been featured in and commissioned by organizations including Wired Magazine, Scientific American, Art21, Forbes, Creative Time, the Bauhaus, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal.

As a professor of Food, Design, Technology + Climate Change in NYU’s Food Studies and Interactive Telecommunications Programs and Parsons Interactive Design department, she has worked with The James Beard Foundation, Rethink Food NYC, and Brigaid on projects that developed scalable and actionable design outcomes to uncover and respond to ruptures in the food system.

She is also the founder of the project No Free Lunch through NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, a web platform that focuses on mapping the context and content of climate change issues, beginning locally with New York stakeholders and organizations working to address the climate and environment-related impact on our food system.

She has successfully migrated the systems and design thinking methodologies she uses as an artist and professor to corporate and business clients in order to show them (through workshops and lectures) how to connect the dots between internal and external issues like climate change, means of production, CSR, and global impact and create new pathways for products, branding, and messaging.

Additionally, she works with companies on innovation and growth strategies, teaching tools for reimagining current workflows, product development, and systemic initiatives for cohesive growth for the company, its employees, and consumer trust.

Karl Burkheimer + Heidi Schwegler

Talk: Mining The Everyday
4/13/2023 | 6 pm | Artspace

Karl Burkheimer is a practicing artist residing in Portland, Oregon. His artistic practice is founded on labor, skill, and the built environment, reflecting varied experiences as a carpenter, artist, and educator. His work has been exhibited nationally, including solo exhibitions in Seattle, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon.

Heidi Schwegler is an artist in Yucca Valley, CA. She is the founder of the Yucca Valley Material Lab, a space for thinking and making. From 2015 to 2018, she was the Chair of the Masters in Fine Arts Program in Applied Craft and Design, a program jointly offered by Pacific Northwest College of Art and Oregon College of Art and Craft.

Burkheimer's critical writing has been published in Ceramic Monthly, and he has received several awards of recognition as well as institutional funding, including project grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, a 2012 Individual Artist Fellowship from OAC, the 2013 Contemporary Northwest Art Awards at the Portland Art Museum, a 2013 U.S.-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, a Hallie Ford Fellowship in 2016, and a MacDowell Fellowship in 2021.

As an educator, Karl taught for 15 years at Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland, Oregon, as a professor and chair of the MFA in Craft and the department head for the wood program. Prior to joining OCAC’s faculty, he taught design at the Virginia Commonwealth University’s branch campus in Qatar. He also worked with students and faculty from the University of Manitoba as a guest artist for service-learning studios in Turkey and Uganda. Karl earned an MFA from the Department of Crafts and Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and a Bachelor of Environmental Design in Architecture from North Carolina State University.

Schwegler has been included in the 2018 Bellevue Art Museum Biennial, the Portland 2016 Biennial, the Portland 2010 Biennial, and the Oregon Biennial in 1999. She has received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission, a Hallie Ford Fellowship and two MacDowell Colony Fellowships in the Visual Arts. She was artist-in-residence at MacDowell, Pilchuck, VCCA, Yaddo, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and Bullseye Glass Company, among others.

In interviews, Schwegler has expressed “an affinity for the ruin, non-sites, and discarded objects.” Schwegler calls herself “an urban archaeologist” who prefers “to mine the peripheral ruin, the discarded stuff that is ignored and considered worthless. By reassigning the value and purpose of something recognizable, I emphasize the perforation between what it was and what it has now become.” Pulling from the traditions of craft and conceptual art, Schwegler uses a variety of mediums, including glass, metal, sculpture, photography, and installation.

Killeen Hanson + Leslie Vigeant

Talk: How Do We Pay Attention to What We Are Paying Attention To?
4/30/2023 | 6 pm | Artspace

Killeen Hanson works, writes, and teaches about radical listening, material culture, and the relationship between education, publication, and civic engagement. She is a designer, educator, and researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. Hanson is the founder and editor of the Sobremesa Reading Club, a publication and discussion series organized around an evolving library of individually bound primary sources from voices, viewpoints, and geographies iconic and overlooked.

Leslie Vigeant knows how to sweat. Based in Portland, OR, her practice is filled with artificial skyscapes, big-box store cakes, colored lights, and spreadsheets galore. She is the Director of Marketing and Communications at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), the manager of the GLEAN Residency, and plays with the hierarchies of social expectations in her studio.

Hanson currently teaches design research within the School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City and consults as a thought partner and design strategist with individuals and organizations pushing the boundaries of what is and what can be.

Her ongoing research projects and collaborations explore the power of radical listening, the potential of objects as verbs, and the relationship between education, publication, and civic engagement.

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with degrees in English Literature and French Language and earned a dual MFA in Applied Craft + Design from Pacific Northwest College of Art and Oregon College of Art and Craft.

Vigeant received her MFA in Applied Craft + Design from Oregon College of Art and Craft/Pacific Northwest College of Art and has a BFA in 2D Studies and Painting from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Leslie has exhibited at the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, Canada; Woodbury Art Museum, UT; AIA, San Francisco, CA; Cambridge College, MA; University of Missouri, MO; Marchutz School, Aix-en-Provence, France; Stephanie Chefas Projects; and beyond. She has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Portland’s Regional Art and Culture Council, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. Residencies with Recology, Artspace, and Penland School of Crafts. Leslie was a founding member of the artist-run space Carnation Contemporary and is the Interim Board President of the Contemporary Art Council (CAC) at the Portland Art Museum. Forthcoming solo show at One Grand Gallery, Portland, OR, November 2023.

Saki Mafundikwa

Talk: Twenty Years of Running a Design School in Zimbabwe
3/15/2023 | 6 pm | Artspace

Saki Mafundikwa is the recipient of the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award (also known as the President’s Award) from Design and Art Direction (D&AD), the UK’s premier design and advertising organization. He is the founder and director of the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts (ZIVA), a design and new media training college in Harare.

Saki has an MFA in graphic design from Yale University. His book, Afrikan Alphabets: The Story of Writing in Afrika, was published in 2004. Besides being of historical importance, it is also the first book on Afrikan typography. It is currently out of print.

His award-winning first film, Shungu: The Resilience of a People, had its world premiere at 2009’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). He was a speaker at TED2013, he keynoted the first Pan African Design Institute (PADI) conference in Ghana in 2019 and he spoke at TED/PMI in Tanzania in 2019. He has also run workshops for design students in Europe, North, South, and Central America, and Africa.

He has been published widely on design and cultural issues and is currently working on a revised edition of Afrikan Alphabets, which he hopes will be published in 2023. He lives, works, and farms in Harare, Zimbabwe.

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