MFA in Visual Arts Visiting Artists

June 2008 Art Talks

Visiting artist lectures sponsored by The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University and Massachusetts Cultural Council

All Events 7:30–9:30 pm
Boston University, Kenmore Classroom Building
565 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 101
MBTA: Green Line, Kenmore T stop

Free and open to the public
For more information call: 617.585.6770
Download the Art Talks: June 2008 poster [pdf]

Wayne Gonzales
Monday, June 23, 2008
Image featured second from top left.

Artist Wayne Gonzales will discuss his work.

Random crowds of people either cheering or waiting, five-star hotels and exclusive resorts, strippers and waitresses, the Pentagon and the White House, the Bush administration, flag-draped coffins, and the visual history of the JFK assassination have all been used as subject matter by Wayne Gonzales in his paintings and graphic work. Gonzales will discuss his work and his ongoing interests in the construction of narrative, political engagement, and the subjectivity of the artist.

Gonzales's work is represented in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo. He was recently included in Resistance Is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Currents: Recent Acquisitions at the Hirshhorn, and Empires and Environments at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. Recent solo exhibitions include the Mason Gross Gallery at Rutgers University, Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and Stephen Friedman Gallery in London. Judge, an artist's book made in collaboration with the poet Vincent Katz, was published last year by Edizioni Charta and Libellum.

Dawoud Bey
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Image featured third + fourth from top.

Artist Dawoud Bey will discuss the portrait as a conceptual and actual object, and the development of his ideas around the representation of the human subject over the past thirty years.

Dawoud Bey began as a photographer in 1975 with the series Harlem, USA that was later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The Walker Art Center organized a mid-career survey of his work in 1995 that traveled to institutions throughout the United States and Europe. Since 1992 his work has focused on the teenage subject, attempting to describe the essential emotional, physical, and psychological aspect of these young people.  His work is held in numerous collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums worldwide. He received his MFA from Yale and currently is Professor of Photography at Columbia College in Chicago.

Ellen Harvey
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Image featured fifth from top.

Artist Ellen Harvey will talk about her work and the importance of failure in art.

Ellen Harvey has exhibited in the US and internationally at such venues as Luxe Gallery, New York City, Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland, Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris, NYC, De Chiara Gallery, NYC, Marella Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy, Queens Museum of Art, Queens, Kunsthaus Dresden, Dresden, Kunstverein Göttingen, Göttingen, ICA, London, Gwangju Art Museum, Gwangju, Korea, The Project, Los Angeles, Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, Franfurt Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Secession, Vienna, ICA, Philadelphia, Museé d'Arte Moderne, Sainte-Etienne, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart. She was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and in the 2000 Kwangju Biennale, Kwangju, Korea. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Mariam Ghani
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Image featured bottom left.

Artist Mariam Ghani explores how history and memory are constructed as narrative. She will discuss her individual projects on warm data, security culture, national imaginaries and urban reconstruction, as well as her ongoing collaboration with Chitra Ganesh, Index of the Disappeared, an impossible archive of post-9/11 disappearances and platform for public dialogue, poetic testimony, and political intervention.

Mariam Ghani is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work in video, installation, and new media has been exhibited internationally, including at the Tate Modern, the Liverpool Biennial, Futura, Prague, Smart Project Space, Amsterdam, Curtacinema, Rio, EMAP, Seoul, and the Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens Museums, NYC. Her public, community-based, collaborative projects have been supported by Creative Time, Eyebeam Atelier, LMCC, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Experimental Television Center, the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, the Arab American National Museum, Dearborn to mention but a few. Her articles have appeared in the Sarai Reader, Arts & Leisure, Samar, Viralnet, Pavilion, FUSE, and the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest among others. Visit www.kabul-reconstructions.net/mariam to view her work.

View the Art Talks: January 2008 poster [pdf] to read more about the January 2008 visiting artist lecture series, which featured artists Dan Graham, Constanze Ruhm, Adam McEwen, and Gean Moreno.

Previous visitors have included:

Bill Arning
Jan Avgikos
Dike Blair
Nayland Blake
Holly Block
Barbara Bloom
Laura Donaldson
Maureen Gallace
Gamaliel R. Herrera
Dana Hoey
Jacqueline Humphries
Wendy Jacob
Byron Kim
Steve Locke
Barbara London
Annu Matthew
Tony Matelli
Marilyn Minter
Rebecca Morris
Michael Newman
Tom Patti
Alexis Rockman
Shelburne Thurber
Oliver Wasow