CECA Visiting Artist Speaker Series
Throughout the history of the Department of Art + Design, we have been committed to bringing top artists, designers, curators, and thinkers to Austin Peay State University and the Clarksville community. Along with the support of the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts, all of our events within the Department of Art + Design are free and open to the public. Due to concerns regarding the spread of COVID-19, we've made some shifts in programming to maintain the safest environment possible. All visiting speaker talks for 2020-21 academic year will held virtually on the Zoom platform. Fall 2020 October 6: Chloë Bass, is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 – 2013), has recently concluded a study of pairs (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015 – 2017), and will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. She is currently working on Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place (2018 – 2022), an investigation of intimacy at the scale of immediate families. Artist Talk, 6:00 p.m., ZOOM (Chloë Bass registration link) October 13: Cassils, (rescheduled from Spring 2020 due to COVID shutdown) is a visual artist working in live performance, film, sound, sculpture and photography. Cassils has achieved international recognition for a rigorous engagement with the body as a form of social sculpture. Drawing on conceptualism, feminism, body art, gay male aesthetics; Cassils forges a series of powerfully trained bodies for different performative purposes. It is with sweat, blood, and sinew that Cassils constructs a visual critique around ideologies and histories. Artist Talk, 6:00 p.m., ZOOM (Cassils registration link) Spring 2021 January 27: Debbie Millman, was named “one of the most creative people in business” by Fast Company and “one of the most influential designers working today” by Graphic Design USA. Millman is also an author, educator, curator and host of the podcast Design Matters. For 20 years, Millman was the president of Sterling Brands, one of the world’s leading branding consultancies. She arrived there in 1995 when the company was 2 years old and had 15 employees in one office. Under her leadership, Sterling grew to 150 employees in five offices and she was instrumental in the firm’s acquisition by Omnicom in 2008. Omnicom is one of the world’s largest holding companies. While there she worked on the logo and brand identity for Burger King, Hershey’s, Haagen Dazs, Tropicana, Star Wars, Gillette and the No More movement. Millman will also conduct a virtual workshop with design students via Zoom. Artist Talk, 6:00 p.m., ZOOM (Debbie Millman registration link) March 2: Paula Scher is one of the most influential graphic designers in the world. Described as the “master conjurer of the instantly familiar,” Scher straddles the line between pop culture and fine art in her work. Iconic, smart and accessible, her images have entered into the American vernacular. Scher has been a partner in the New York office of Pentagram since 1991. She began her career as an art director in the 1970s and early ’80s, when her eclectic approach to typography became highly influential. In the mid-1990s her landmark identity for The Public Theater fused high and low into a wholly new symbology for cultural institutions, and her recent architectural collaborations have reimagined the urban landscape as a dynamic environment of dimensional graphic design. Her graphic identities for Citibank and Tiffany & Co. have become case studies for the contemporary regeneration of American brands. Artist Talk, 6:00 p.m., ZOOM (Paula Scher registration link) March 24: Eliza Evans, experiments with sculpture, print, video, and textiles to identify disconnections and absurdities in social, economic, and ecological systems. The initial parameters of each work are carefully researched and then evolve as a result of interaction with people, time, and weather. Evans was born in a rustbelt steel town and raised in rural Appalachia. She currently splits her time between New York City and the Hudson Valley. Her work was exhibited at the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, NY (2019), Edward Hopper House Museum, Nyack, NY (2019), Chashama Sculpture Field, Pine Plains, NY (2018), BRIC, Brooklyn (2017), and Purchase College, Purchase, NY (2017). Residencies include the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, UC Santa Barbara (2020), Bronx Museum AIM, and Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer, MN (both 2019). Evans holds an MFA from SUNY Purchase College in visual art and a Ph.D. in economic sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. Artist Talk, 6:00 p.m., ZOOM (Eliza Evans registration link). Time Machine performance in the Arts Quad, March 25, 9a-4p. April 6: Stephanie Syjuco, works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Using critical wit and collaborative co-creation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies and empire. Recently, she has focussed on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship. For 2019/2020 she is a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC. She is featured in Season 9 of the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. Recent exhibitions include "Being: New Photography" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; "Public Knowledge," at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; "Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States," at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; and "Disrupting Craft: the 2018 Renwick Invitational" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, and a 2020 Tiffany Foundation Award. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at MoMA/P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, ZKM Center for Art and Technology, the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, The 12th Havana Bienal, The 2015 Asian Art Biennial (Taiwan), among others. A long-time educator, she is an Associate Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California. Artist Talk, 6:00 p.m., ZOOM (Stephanie Syjuco registration link)
Fall 2019 October 8: Antwaun Sargent, is an art critic and a writer who has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vice and more, as well as essays to multiple museum publications. His first book, “The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion” will be published by Aperture this fall. Artist Talk, 6:00 p.m., @ AD120 October 28: Nina Stössinger, is a Senior Typeface Designer at Frere-Jones Type in Brooklyn. She also teaches type design at Yale School of Art. Her published retail type designs include Empirica and Conductor (both designed with Tobias Frere-Jones), Nordvest, and FF Ernestine. Artist Talk, 6:00 p.m., @ AD120 November 6: Raheleh Filsoofi, is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Texas, South Florida and Iran. Her work synthesizes socio-political statements as a point of departure and further challenges these fundamental arguments by incorporating ancient and contemporary media such as ceramics, poetry, ambient sound and video; aiming for a holistic sensory experience. Her interdisciplinary practices act as interplay between the literal and figurative contexts of border, immigration and inter-cultural communications. Artist Talk, 6:00 p.m., @ AD120 November 12: Deborah Roberts, is a mixed media artist whose work challenges the notion of ideal beauty.
Spring 2020 January 30: Carla Repice, is a first generation Italian American born to Southern Italian immigrants Post-World War II. Her work investigates systems of oppression and memory, and probes the effects of racism and dehumanization on the human psyche. She will have a short-run exhibition of her series, The White Problem, in the Barbara Beach Gallery from Jan. 20-31. Conversational Discussion, 6:00 p.m. @ Barbara Beach Gallery February 26: Heather Abels, is a senior matte painter with over 12 years of experience in the visual effects industry. Her work encompasses live-action blockbusters, animated feature films, national advertising campaigns, cutting-edge VR and concept work. She also has taught at several universities and has an ongoing workshop at CGSociety. She has worked at top studios including Walt Disney Animation, Blur Studios, Weta Digital, Matte World Digital, The Orphanage and Rhythm & Hues. During her time at Rhythm & Hues, she became matte department supervisor. In doing so, she was able to cross the divide between artists and technicians in order to build and adapt the department to meet new demands, as seen in the Academy Award-winning film “Life of Pi.” Artist Talk, 6:00 p.m., @ Trahern Theatre March 6: CECA TN Artist Fellow, The CECA Tennessee Artist Fellowship was created to celebrate contemporary art, and
to support the continued creative work of exceptional Tennessee artists. Unlike other
fellowships, nominations and applications from artists are not solicited. A committee
of APSU faculty compiles a list of outstanding artists from across the state and selects
the fellowship recipient. Through the generous support of the Center of Excellence
in the Creative Arts (CECA), the selected artist receives $5,000 to aid in the creation
of new artwork. Artist Talk, 6:00 p.m., @ The Frist Art Museum April 9: Cassils, is a visual artist working in live performance, film, sound, sculpture and photography. Cassils has achieved international recognition for a rigorous engagement with the body as a form of social sculpture. Drawing on conceptualism, feminism, body art, gay male aesthetics; Cassils forges a series of powerfully trained bodies for different performative purposes. It is with sweat, blood, and sinew that Cassils constructs a visual critique around ideologies and histories. Artist Talk, 6:00 p.m., @ Trahern Theatre *dates subject to change Be sure to follow us for upcoming announcements and special programming.
Below is just a selection of nationally and internationally renowned artists that the Department of Art + Design has hosted at APSU. |
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