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Visiting Artists/Critics Program

The primary goal of the Visiting Artists/Critics Program is to educate and foster a greater understanding and appreciation of contemporary art through dialogue. Artists of national significance, working in all media, are invited to the Department of Art to present a public lecture and meet with graduate students in seminars and for individual critique. Undergraduate and graduate students are welcome to attend workshops and lectures and may receive credit for participation through enrollment in (ArtS 3420) Visiting Artist Workshop or (Arts 8420 ) Visiting Artists Program .

Unless otherwise noted, all lectures are held in the In-Flux space, room E110, Regis Center for Art.
All events are free and open to the public.

View past visiting artist talks online: http://art.umn.edu/events/watch.html

Visiting Artists/Critics Programming 2009-2010

September 10: PANEL DISCUSSION: CONTEMPORARY ART IN CHINA

Moderator: Wang, Chunchen, curator & professor, Central Academy of Fine Art and featured artists Li, Shuan and Liu, Xuguang.

Liu, Xuguang has been teaching at the Beijing Film Academy since 2004 where he is the course director for the New Media Lab in the Fine Art Department.  He is a 2004 graduate of Qinghua University where he received a Ph.D. in Fine Art. In 1996 he taught at Tokyo University of Art as a tutor at the Contemporary Art Studio.  He also studied abroad in Tokyo.

Li, Shuan graduated from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts where he studied painting.  He currently works for the Professor and Vice Dean of the Department of Painting at the Beijing Film Academy.  He also acts as a member of the Chinese Fine Arts Association.  He is a member of the Beijing Oil Painting Society.

Both artists have extensive and impressive exhibition records.  They have had exhibitions across Asia and have had some exposure in the West.

September 24: Chris Atkins

Chris Atkins is Coordinator of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program, a unique curatorial department at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Since 1975, and with close to 200 hundred exhibitions, the MAEP has been devoted to Minnesota artists and supporting their work.

Before starting at the MAEP last March, Chris was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Macalester College where he taught a visual cultures course based on a thematic approach to fine art, national monuments, literature, and cinema. He has also taught Art History and a seminar on the work of Francis Bacon at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design.

He studied Art History at the College of Wooster, Museum Studies at Harvard University, and received MA and MRes degrees in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College, University of London. His Masters was focused on the work of American photographer Chris Verene and French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 1 & 2 books.

The following ceramic events are co-sponsored by the Walker Art Center, Northern Clay Center and the University of Minnesota:

October 7:  Wednesday, 1:30 pm-2: 30 pm, 134 East Building of Regis, Kathy Butterly lecture

Kathy Butterly's colorful, cartoony, and richly ornamented vessels might be seen as 3-D "cousins" to the drawings of Robert Crumb on view in an adjacent gallery. The artist packs tremendous sculptural and textural complexity, as well as interpretive potential, into these tiny forms. She treats her whimsical objects with irreverence and wit, transforming them into an army of small vessels bursting with anthropomorphic personalities. She lives and works in New York, New York.

October 7: Beverly Semmes, Wed. 7pm Influx Space

Beverly Semmes is an internationally recognized artist who has been showing her work since 1990. By the mid-1990s, she was exhibiting work across the United States and in Europe. Semmes attended Yale University School of Art where she was awarded an MFA in Sculpture (1987).

Semmes's work is in the permanent collections of many important museums, such as the Albright Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, N.Y.), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington D.C.), the Whitney Museum of American Art in (New York, N.Y.) and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, (Los Angeles, Calif.). She will be teaching at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va., as a visiting professor in the spring of 2009.

October 8:  Thursday, 7 pm, Cinema, Walker Art Center
Panel Discussion: Ann Agee, Kathy Butterly, and Beverly Semmes

There’s Just Something About Clay: Three Dirt on Delight artists discuss the process of working with clay in conversation with Walker coordinating exhibition curator Andria Hickey. The exhibition Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form from

 July 11, 2009 until November 29tth, 2009.

Free tickets available at the Bazinet Garden Lobby desk from 6 pm

October 9:  Friday, 10am- 12 pm, 1:00 pm-3 pm. Free

Artist Talk and Demonstration: Ann Agee

Northern Clay Center Studios, 2424 Franklin Avenue East, Minneapolis

Originally a painter, Ann Agee became interested in working with clay after taking classes at Greenwich House Pottery in New York in 1985. She became smitten with the process and history. Since then, she continues to, in her own words, “be endlessly interested.” Join Agee at Northern Clay Center for a presentation about her working process in the morning, 10:00 am - 12:00 noon and a talk about her artwork in the afternoon 1:00 - 3:00pm.

This program is being co-sponsored by The Walker Art Center, The University of Minnesota, and Northern Clay Center.

Join the artist for a discussion and demonstration of her working process.

October 15: : Minna Rainio & Mark Roberts

Minna Rainio is a photographer and media artist based in northern Finland. She studied photography in the Surrey Institute of Art & Design in England (BA) and audiovisual media culture in the University of Lapland (MA). At the moment she is working on her PhD in the Elomedia research school (University of Art & Design in Helsinki). In her art Rainio combines the use of photography or video with fact and fiction to deal with the social and political issues relating to people’s personal histories, stories and memories.

Mark Roberts is an English media artist based in northern Finland. He studied multimedia and photography first in London and then at the Surrey Institute of Art & Design where he graduated with his Bachelors degree in 1999. In 2008, he will complete an MA in Film Scriptwriting at the University of Salford.  Roberts works mainly with video installations, photography and live sound installations. He is currently working on a series of video works, which explore the relationships and tensions that exist between landscapes and societies. His new work focuses on the hidden histories or social conflicts that exist within apparently ‘innocent’ or ‘natural’ landscapes.

Minna Rainio and Mark Roberts combine media art, conceptual art and documentary to deal with social and political issues, and to investigate the impact of these on people's individual experiences and histories.

October 29: Joseph Grigley

Joseph Grigely is an artist and a critical theorist with a specialty in bibliography and textual criticism. His articles include “White” in Cabinet (Fall 2007), “Blindness and Deafness as Metaphors: An Anthological Essay” in the Journal of Visual Culture (Summer 2006), “The Next Documenta Should Be Curated By An Artist” in Revolver (2004), and a book-length-study, Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism, published by the University of Michigan Press (1995). Grigely holds a DPhil from Oxford University. Exhibitions include the following: Whitney Museum of American Art; Kunstmuseum, Bern; De Appel, Amsterdam; Portikus, Frankfurt; Anthony D'Offay Gallery, London; Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam; Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Whitney, Venice, Berlin, Sydney, and Istanbul Biennials.

 

 

Contact:

 

Past Visitors:

Doug Aitken
Siah Armajani
Mark Beasley
Xu Bing

 

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