Programs

Virtual Artist Talk with Jen Liu

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Jen Liu is a visual artist based in New York and Vermont, working in video/animation, choreography, biomaterial, and painting to explore national identity, gendered economies, neoliberal industrial labor, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts. She is a 2019 recipient of the Creative Capital Award, 2018 LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant, and 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video. She has presented work at The Whitney Museum, MoMA, and The New Museum, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC; Royal Academy and ICA, London; Kunsthaus Zurich; Kunsthalle Wien; the Aspen Museum of Art; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; MUSAC, Leon; UCCA and A07 @ 798, Beijing; and the 2014 Shanghai Biennale and 2019 Singapore Biennale. 
 
To learn more about Liu, visit: jenliu.info/main.html 

Panel Discussion with Jamal Batts, Ariel René Jackson, Michael J. Love and Betelhem Makonnen

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Jamal Batts is a curator, writer, and doctoral candidate in the Department African American and African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. His dissertation project, Immoral Panics: Black Queer Aesthetics and the Construction of Risk, reflects on the relation between blackness, queerness, contemporary art, and the intricacies of sexual risk and risk-taking. His writing has appeared in the catalogue for The New Museum’s exhibit Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, Open Space, ASAP/J, New Life Quarterly, and SFMOMA’s website in conjunction with their Modern Cinema series. He is a 2020 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Scholar-in-Residence, 2020 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, and ONE National Lesbian & Gay Archives LGBTQ Research Fellow. In 2019 he served as the SFMOMA Summer Curatorial Intern in Contemporary Art where he curated film screenings and artist discussions for the exhibit SOFT POWER. He is a member of the curatorial collective The Black Aesthetic.

Ariel René Jackson grew up between New Orleans & Mamou, LA. She currently lives and works in Austin, TX where she completed her MFA at The University of Texas at Austin in 2019. Jackson's lyrical video essays explore kinship with places and situations. Her multidisciplinary practice translates narratives of belonging, by way of performative and sculptural acts, utilizing repurposed imagery or objects. Black histories and Jackson's familial farming legacy sustain and inform her focus on land and landscape as sites of internal representation. Jackson is an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and has shown work nationally at institutions such as the SculptureCenter, CUE Art Foundation, Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, Depaul Art Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, and RISD Museum. Jackson's work is currently on view in Dear Future, on view in Campus Commons Gallery through December 7, 2020. 
 
Michael J. Love is an interdisciplinary tap dance artist whose research intermixes Black queer feminist theory and aesthetics with rigorous practice to engage in thinking on the Black cultural past and Black futurity. He is currently based in Austin, TX where his performance work has been supported and presented by Fusebox Festival, ARCOS Dance, and the Cohen New Works Festival. He has given lectures and presentations at Texas A&M University, the 2020 Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, and the 2019 Dance Studies Association conference. He has also curated live, interactive performance-based experiences for The Banton Museum of Art (Austin) and the Fusebox Festival Hub as a founding member of Block Party Collective in addition to designing Season 34 pre-show lobby experiences and communications strategies in-house at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Washington, DC). Love holds an M.F.A. in Performance as Public Practice from The University of Texas at Austin and is an alumnus of Emerson College. Most recently, Love’s performance collaborations with transmedia artist Ariel René Jackson have been featured in New York Time Magazine’s #TBlackArtBlackLife Instagram series, screened at the New Museum (New York), SXSW (Austin), PARA Foundation (Berlin), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), and presented at CUE Art Foundation (New York), the George Washington Carver Museum (Austin), and the Visual Arts Center (Austin). Past credits include the Broadway laboratory for Savion Glover and George C. Wolfe’s “Shuffle Along,” performances alongside Baakari Wilder, and roles in work by Andrew Nemr’s NYC-based Cats Paying Dues. Learn more by visiting DancerMLove.com and following love on Instagram at @dancermlove.
 
A native of Ethiopia (b. 1972), Betelhem Makonnen, currently lives and works in Austin, Texas. Her formal education consists of an MFA (2019) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a New Artists Society Merit Scholar and a B.A (1995) in History and Literature of Africa and the African Diaspora from University of Texas in Austin. Working with a variety of mediums that include video, photography, and installations, she researches questions on perception, presence, purpose and place within a trans-temporal and trans-locative topology that operates on the relational dynamics of a diasporic consciousness. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally. In addition to her practice she is an active member of the Austin-based contemporary arts collaborative Black Mountain Project.

Pivots, A Virtual Artist Talk with Benjamin Rasmussen

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Benjamin Rasmussen is a photographer and curator based in Denver, Colorado. In 2019, Rasmussen, started Pattern, a gallery, photobook library and community space dedicated to the documentary arts.  
In 2014, Benjamin was chosen as one of PDN’s 30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch. His work has been selected for the American Photography Annuals, shortlisted for the Leica Oskar Barnac Award, and awarded in the 2010 POYi awards. He works with clients including Time, Vanity Fair, Vogue and National Geographic. 
 
To learn more about Rasmussen, visit: www.benjaminrasmussenphoto.com

Virtual Artist Talk with Ariel René Jackson 

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Ariel René Jackson grew up between New Orleans & Mamou, LA. She currently lives and works in Austin, TX where she completed her MFA at The University of Texas at Austin in 2019. Jackson's lyrical video essays explore kinship with places and situations. Her multidisciplinary practice translates narratives of belonging, by way of performative and sculptural acts, utilizing repurposed imagery or objects. Black histories and Jackson's familial farming legacy sustain and inform her focus on land and landscape as sites of internal representation. Jackson is an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and has shown work nationally at institutions such as the SculptureCenter, CUE Art Foundation, Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, Depaul Art Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, and RISD Museum. 
 
To learn more about Jackson, visit: www.arielrenejackson.com

Virtual Studio Visit with Christian Ruiz Berman

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Christian Ruiz Berman is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice encompasses various mediums including painting, poetry, film, and sculpture. His recent body of works continue to envision the new ways to continue the tradition of Mexican and magical realist painting, as well as finding hopeful and joyful means of defining the immigrant experience. Christian lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri.

To learn more about Berman, visit: http://www.cruizberman.com/

Virtual Studio Visit with Juvana Soliven

Recorded talk coming soon!

Juvana Soliven is a Filipina visual artist and educator from Honolulu, Hawaii. Predominantly working in metal and fiber, her work subverts and utilizes object languages to speak to issues regarding emotional intimacy, labor, loss, and women’s positionality within the patriarchal system. Soliven exhibits nationally and internationally, including group exhibitions in Germany, the Netherlands, and Iceland. She completed an MFA in Metalsmithing at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2016, a BFA in Sculpture at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2013, and studied Art Restoration and Conservation at Lorenzo de’ Medici International School in Florence, Italy. Soliven is a Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
 
To learn more about Soliven, visit: www.juvanasoliven.com

Virtual Artist Talk with Sherwin Rio

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Click to view Rio's classroom engagement with Advanced Studio Practice

Sherwin Rio is an interdisciplinary artist who uses visual metaphors from a Filipino-American perspective to address invisibility, hyper-visibility and mis-visibility produced by colonial structures. Rio has exhibited and performed as a solo and collaborative artist throughout the U.S. in venues such as: Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, PA), Carlsbad Museum of Art (NM), San Jose State University (CA), Portland State University (OR), Dominican University (San Rafael, CA), Human Resources (Los Angeles, CA), Torpedo Factory (Alexandria, VA), and SOMArts Cultural Center (San Francisco, CA). He has received awards including the 2019 International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, 2018 Ella King Torrey Award for Innovation & Excellence in the Arts, and the 2017 Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Fellowship Award. Rio received a dual MFA/MA in Studio Art/History and Theory of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2019 and a BFA in Printmaking with a minor in Art History from the University of Florida in 2014. 
 
To learn more about Rio, visit: http://sherwinrio.com/ 

Virtual Professional Practice Talk with Johannah Herr

*Rescheduled for Friday, February 12th at Noon

Johannah Herr holds an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2016) and a BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design (2009). She has had solo shows at Geary Contemporary, Untitled San Francisco, BRIC, Elijah Wheat Showroom and Envoy Enterprises (all New York City), Red Ger Gallery (Ulaabaatar, Mongolia) and Galeri Metropol (Tallinn, Estonia) and been featured in group shows at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY), Visual Arts Center of New Jersey (Summit, NJ), Center for Contemporary Art (Warsaw, Poland) and DADAPost (Berlin). She is a Fulbright Scholar (Mongolia) and has attended residencies at SIM (Reykjavik, Iceland), Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), IEA’s Experimental Projects Residency (Alfred, NY), Oxbow Artists Residency (Saugatuk, MI), and Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY) and Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT). She is an upcoming resident at the Arctic Circle Residency (Svalbard, International Territory). She currently teaches at Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute and New York University and is additionally the Co-Founder of Daughters Rising, an anti-human trafficking, indigenous women’s empowerment NGO based in Mae Wang, Thailand. She lives and works between Brooklyn and Mae Wang.  

To learn more about Herr, visit: http://www.johannahherr.com/

Virtual Panel Discussion with Jessica Houston, Maya Pindyck, Lisa Speer 

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Jessica Houston has traveled from pole to pole—using photography, painting, oral histories and objects—to evoke natureculture entanglements. Her multimedia projects often include site-specific oral histories that amplify the memory of a place and evoke land as a living process. She has worked on projects involving communities and their relationship to their environments in the Canadian Arctic, Antarctica, Greenland, Iceland, and Italy. Houston has created site-specific works for the New Jersey MOCA, Asbury Park, New Jersey; the Castello di Corigliano, Puglia, Italy; Governors Island, NY, NY; and The Albany Airport, Albany, NY. Select exhibitions include Art Mûr Gallery, Montréal, Canada; The Hyde Collection Museum, Glens Falls, NY; and The Latimer House Museum, New York, NY. Her works are funded by The Canada Council for the Arts and are in the collections of Prêt d’œuvres d’art, Musée National Des Beaux-Arts du Quebec; Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), Montréal, Québec; Bank of Montréal, Toronto; and the Consulate General of Monaco, Montréal. 

Maya Pindyck is a poet and interdisciplinary artist whose work examines intersections of memory, place, and ordinary violence. A 2019 National Endowment for the Art Fellow, she is the author of the poetry collections Emoticoncert (Four Way Books) and Friend Among Stones (New Rivers Press, winner of the Many Voices Project Award). Her poetry has been published in various journals, anthologies, and magazines including Quarterly West, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, The Los Angeles Review, Narrative Magazine, Seneca Review, and The Golden Shovel Anthology. She earned her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and her PhD in English education from Columbia University’s Teachers College. She lives in Philadelphia where she is an assistant professor and directs the writing program at Moore College of Art & Design. 

Lisa Speer directs the International Oceans Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental organization dedicated to protecting natural resources and public health with offices in the United States, India and China. Ms. Speer’s work currently focuses on conservation and management of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction. Comprising nearly 2/3rds of the world’s ocean, the high seas lack basic management tools to address growing threats including overfishing and destructive fishing practices, plastic waste, chemical and noise pollution, ocean warming and acidification. No mechanism exists to establish fully protected MPAs on the high seas, and there are no uniform requirements for individual or cumulative prior environmental assessment. Modernizing the legal regime governing the conservation and management of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction is essential to address multiplying stressors. Ms. Speer has served on a number of U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Committees on the Arctic and marine issues, and served a six year term as a member of the Academies’ Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology. Ms. Speer received her Master’s degree from Yale University and her bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College.