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Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series
Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series
Related Information
Contact:
415.749.4563
Contact:
415.749.4563
Spring 2008 Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series
Visiting artists and scholars are of decisive importance to SFAI’s educational mission. By providing the students and faculty at SFAI—as well as the wider Bay Area public—with direct access to the major practitioners and theorists of contemporary global art and culture, the Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series creates an open forum through which SFAI’s students are challenged both to go beyond basic canonical approaches to the study of art and to discover a global perspective that is enabled by, and further encourages, conceptual and comparative approaches. In addition to the public lectures they give, visiting artists and scholars, whether on campus for several days or for an entire semester, regularly engage with students, in an immediate and active way, by teaching intensives or by participating in seminars, critiques, or colloquia.
The Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series is coordinated by Glen Helfand.
Spring 2008 Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series
Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street campus
7:30pm, free and open to the public
Wednesday, January 23
Jens Haaning
For his eponymous exhibition at SFAI, Danish artist Jens Haaning will extend his ongoing examination of the living and working conditions of immigrants in the West by importing scenes from their everyday reality into the Walter and McBean Galleries (on the SFAI campus). His lecture will be given on the same night as the opening reception of the exhibition (the reception is from 5:30 to 7:30pm and precedes the lecture, which starts at 7:30pm). In mediums that include installation, photography, and performance, Haaning challenges conventional Western perceptions of the “other” in order to create dialogue on the kinds of cultural misunderstandings such perceptions engender. During his on-campus residency, he will lead workshops on the nature of his praxis for SFAI students and faculty. SFAI and the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco will also jointly organize a related panel discussion on immigrant life in the Bay Area. An extension of World Factory, Haaning’s project is part of the New Models of Production component of SFAI’s Exhibitions and Public Programs.
Monday, January 28
David Reed
Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Painting Fellow
Though primarily working with paint, David Reed is known for projects that intrinsically involve film and electronic media and that emphasize everyday culture. His abstract compositions reflect his interest both in the Western landscape and in cinema (particularly, in the films of Hitchcock). His allusions to cinema are unveiled on thin horizontal canvases containing thick gestural curves, spirals, or loops in colors evocative of Technicolor. With installation works like Scottie’s Bedroom, Reed recontextualizes Hitchcock’s Vertigo and blurs the boundaries of film, painting, and architecture. Reed’s work is included in collections at MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Sammlung Goetz (Goetz Collection) in Munich, and the Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst in Humlebaek (Denmark), among others. Since the mid-70s, he has exhibited internationally and recently served as curatorial advisor for the exhibition High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975. www.davidreedstudio.com
Wednesday, January 30
Jill Magid
“To seek intimate relationships with impersonal structures” is how Jill Magid describes her own artistic intentions. To that end, she has worked with police, secret services, CCTV, and forensic identification experts. For her project Evidence Locker, Magid spent a month in Liverpool working with local police on observation techniques. Auto Portrait Pending is a work in the guise of a contract stipulating that the artist’s remains be turned into a diamond when she dies. Magid received her MS in Visual Studies at MIT. She was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and her solo shows include those at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Tate Liverpool, Sparwasser HQ in Berlin, the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona, and Gagosian Gallery in New York. She teaches sculpture at Cooper Union. www.jillmagid.net
Wednesday, February 6
Stan Douglas
Pilara Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellow
Stan Douglas’s films and videos reflect on questions of culture and technology and on the relationship between subjectivity and popular representations of history. The complexities of his audiovisual installations are often based on substantial research (e.g., the work of Samuel Beckett and his themes of alienation, displacement, and the collapse of subjectivity). Together with that of Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham, Douglas’s work examines the socially and environmentally detrimental effects of industry and technology. Douglas has had solo exhibitions at David Zwirner in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Kunsthalle Basel (Germany); the Serpentine Gallery in London; and Secession in Vienna. He was the subject of an international retrospective in 1999. He is included in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art at the International Center of Photography in New York, curated by SFAI’s Dean of Academic Affairs Okwui Enwezor and on view from January 18 to May 4, 2008.
Monday, February 11
B. Ruby Rich
A critic, curator, and cultural theorist, B. Ruby Rich is identified with movements in feminist film, Latin American cinema, independent film, and New Queer Cinema—a phrase that she coined and that is also the subject of her lecture: “From ID to IQ: Looking Backwards and Forwards at the New Queer Cinema.” Rich has contributed to the Village Voice and the Nation, and writes for the Guardian (UK) and Sight and Sound (UK). She is the author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Professor of Community Studies and Social Documentation at UC Santa Cruz, Rich is the recipient of the 2006 Honorary Life Membership Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and of the 2007 Brudner Prize at Yale University. Cosponsored by the SFAI Film department. www.brubyrich.com
Wednesday, February 20
Kader Attia
French multimedia artist Kader Attia explores questions of belonging and exile in the age of globalization—in particular, the tensions between North African culture and Western consumerism. With formal sophistication, he deploys humor, politics, pop culture, and personal history. In the Landing Strip, Attia presents a slideshow depicting Algerian transsexuals and transvestites living in Paris; in Hallal, he transforms a Paris gallery into a boutique featuring Islamic-branded couture. Attia’s international exhibitions include the 2003 Venice Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, Le Magasin in Grenoble, and the ICA in Boston. His first large-scale solo exhibition in the US opens on February 29 at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle and will be on view through May 25.
Monday, March 3
Lari Pittman
Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Painting Fellow
Throughout the last two decades, Lari Pittman’s paintings have addressed the vexed sociopolitical question of identity politics. Through a densely layered amalgam of decorative abstraction and figuration, he juxtaposes images of sexual intimacy and flagrant exhibitionism in what has turned out to be an aesthetically complex anticipation of the age of information overload. Pittman’s work has been included in four different biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at Documenta X in Kassel (Germany). Retrospectives include those at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC; the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; the Villa Arson in Nice; and the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva. Solo exhibitions include those at the Gladstone Gallery in New York; Greengrassi in London; Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers in Munich; and Regen Projects in Los Angeles. Pittman is professor of Fine Arts at UCLA.
Wednesday, March 5
Russell Ferguson
Russell Ferguson is chair of the Department of Art at UCLA. He was deputy director for exhibitions and programs and chief curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where he remains an adjunct curator. From 1991 to 2001 he was at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA), first as editor, then as associate curator. Exhibitions he has organized for the Hammer Museum include the Undiscovered Country, Francis Alÿs, Wolfgang Tillmans, Patty Chang, Christian Marclay, and Jeff Wall. At MOCA, he organized In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O’Hara and American Art as well as surveys of the work of Liz Larner and Douglas Gordon. Ferguson is the editor of two collections of critical writing: Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture and Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture.
Tuesday, March 18
Catherine Opie
Pilara Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellow
Since the early 1990s, Catherine Opie has produced a complex body of photographic work in diverse genres, exploring notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. From her early portraits of transgender people and performance artists to her expansive urban landscapes of cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and New York, Opie has offered profound insights into the conditions under which communities form and define themselves. Influenced by social documentary photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and August Sander, Opie maintains a strict formal rigor, working in stark and provocative color as well as richly toned black and white. Opie’s photographs have been shown extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. She will have a major solo exhibition, Catherine Opie: American Photographer, in the fall of 2008 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Wednesday, March 19
Adel Abdessemed
Examining the system of spectacle, Algerian-born artist Adel Abdessemed works in video, animation, performance, and sculptural installation. Whether through the boldness of the memento mori or the subtle rhythms of hybrid animated forms, his practice challenges perceptions of the forbidden. The video projection God is Design was included in the exhibition Wherever We Go at the Walter and McBean Galleries in 2007. He participated in the 2001 P.S.1 International Studio Program (MoMA) in New York, where he also exhibited. Solo exhibitions include FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims (France). In 2006 Abdessemed was included in Notre Histoire, an exhibition of emerging French artists at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. An exhibition of his work will be on view, in SFAI’s Walter and McBean Galleries, from March 20 to May 31, 2008—the opening reception for which, from 5:30 to 7:30pm, precedes his March 19 lecture.
Monday, March 31
Amelia Jones
Amelia Jones is the Pilkington Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She has organized exhibitions on feminism and contemporary art, has coedited the anthology Performing the Body/Performing the Text, and has edited The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader and A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945. Jones’s recent books include Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada and Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject. Her current projects are a coedited volume Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History and a book tentatively entitled Identity and the Visual. Jones’s talk “Screen Eroticisms: Explorations of Female Desire in the Work of Carolee Schneemann and Pipilotti Rist” is cosponsored by SFAI’s Film department and its History and Theory of Contemporary Art department.
Martin Creed
This lecture has been postponed until Fall 2008
Martin Creed’s art often assumes the form of a minimalist intervention, using found materials and basic ideas. He works in various media, including installation, sculpture, music, film, and text. He won the 2001 Turner Prize for his widely known Work No. 227 (The Lights Going On and Off). More recent works such as Sick Film have been controversial for direct depictions of “unsavory” bodily functions. He has had solo exhibitions at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York; Hauser & Wirth in Zurich; and MC in Los Angeles. He was included in How to Improve the World: 60 Years of British Art at the Hayward Gallery in London; in Surprise, Surprise at ICA in London; and Into Me/Out of Me at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (MoMA) in New York. www.martincreed.com
Wednesday, April 9
Emory Douglas in dialogue with Sam Durant and Jennifer González
Emory Douglas worked as minister of culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967 until its discontinuation in the early 80s. Douglas’s graphic designs defined the trademark visual style of the group’s newspapers, posters, and pamphlets. Disseminating the party’s agenda in a visually powerful way, Douglas’s bold illustrations and striking images spoke forcefully to a community ravaged by poverty and police brutality. Douglas portrayed a populace emerging from segregation and beginning to assert their rights to equality. A retrospective exhibition Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas (organized by Sam Durant) recently showed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Sam Durant creates installations that explore the history of modernist art and design, American politics, and the search for social justice. Public collections of Durant’s work include the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, Tate Modern in London, Project Row Houses in Houston, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. He teaches at California Institute of the Arts.
Jennifer González is associate professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture department at UC Santa Cruz. She writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on installation art, digital art, and activist art. González’s forthcoming book, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art, examines installation art as a form of critical assessment of race politics in the US.
Tuesday, April 15
Michelle Grabner
Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Painting Fellow
Michelle Grabner is widely known for Neo-Op paintings that portray pulsating colors in radial configurations evoking centrifugal or centripetal spaces. Her work came to critical prominence when it was included in the landmark exhibition Post-Hypnotic, which toured museums in the US between 1999 and 2001. Since that time, she has had solo exhibitions in Chicago, London, Vienna, San Francisco, and many other places around the globe. Codirector of the Suburban, an independent artist’s project space in Oak Park, Illinois, she is a frequent contributor to publications such as Frieze, Cakewalk, and the New Art Examiner.
Wednesday, April 16
Kimsooja
Kimsooja’s work is a combination of video, performance, and sculpture. Born in Daegu, Korea, she currently lives and works in New York. She studied in the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Hongik University in Seoul and at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Kimsooja was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. A selection of solo shows includes Kewenig Galerie in Cologne; the Getty Center in Los Angeles; MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge (Massachusetts); and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (MoMA) in New York. In addition to her lecture, Kimsooja will also realize a project as part of the Pacific Perspectives component of SFAI’s Exhibitions and Public Programs. www.kimsooja.com
Thursday, April 17
Annie Leibovitz
2008 McBean Distinguished Lecturer
Annie Leibovitz’s portraits have been appearing on magazine covers for more than thirty-five years. A student of painting at SFAI in the late 60s, she signed up for night classes in photography after a trip to Japan on which she bought a camera and started taking pictures. Soon thereafter, in her early twenties, she began working for the then-fledgling Rolling Stone magazine where she became chief photographer in 1973. After ten more years at Rolling Stone, Leibovitz joined the staff of Vanity Fair in 1983; she began working for Vogue in 1998. Venues at which she has exhibited include the International Center of Photography in New York and, in Washington DC, both the National Portrait Gallery and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Her honors and awards include the Infinity Award in Applied Photography from the International Center of Photography; the Barnard College Medal of Distinction; the French Minister of Culture’s Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; the Library of Congress’ Living Legend Award; one of thirty-five 2005 Smithsonian magazine “Innovators of Our Time”; and, in 2005, both first and second place in the American Society of Magazine editors’ Top Forty Magazine Covers of the Past Forty Years (first place went to the John Lennon and Yoko Ono cover photograph for Rolling Stone taken the day Lennon was shot). Her most recent publication is Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005. A retrospective exhibition by the same name—Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005—will open in San Francisco at the Legion of Honor on 1 March and be on view through 25 May 2008.
Monday, April 21
Thomas Demand
Pilara Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellow
Thomas Demand begins his photographic process with a preexisting image, usually taken from media accounts of German history or of current politically charged events. He then translates the images into life-sized models, using colored paper and cardboard to re-create entire rooms, parking lots, facades, and hallways. He then photographs and destroys the paper sculpture. He has applied a similar strategy to 35mm films, setting his cinematic still images in motion. He had a mid-career retrospective at MoMA in New York. Solo exhibitions include those at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice. He participated in the 6th Shanghai Biennial and the 51st Venice Biennial. He represented Germany in the 26th São Paulo Biennial.
Monday, May 5
James Mackay
James Mackay is the producer of some of Derek Jarman’s greatest films, including The Angelic Conversation, The Last of England, The Garden, and Blue. More recently, he produced Bernard Rudden’s Daybreak. He has also produced music videos for the Smiths, Suede, Patti Smith, and Pet Shop Boys. Since 1996, Mackay has returned to his native Scotland, lecturing at Napier University and working with the Scottish Arts Council on their National Lottery Film Committee. Mackay’s current projects include a film version of a Michael Nyman opera, a new feature by SFAI Film department chair Lynn Hershman Leeson, and a multiscreen project with Turner Prize–nominee Hannah Collins. Cosponsored by the SFAI Film department.
SFAI’s exhibitions and public programs—a component of which is the Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series—are supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Peter Norton Family Foundation, and the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. The Distinguished Visiting Painting Fellowships are also funded by the Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation. The Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellowships are also funded by the Pilara Foundation. Additional funding for the Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series has been provided by Bob and Betty Klausner. The McBean Distinguished Lectureship is endowed by the McBean Family Foundation. The Jens Haaning exhibition, as well as his Visiting Artists and Scholars lecture, is also supported by a grant from the Danish Arts Council; the exhibition is produced in collaboration with the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco. Additional support for Adel Abdessemed’s exhibition, as well as for his and Kader Attia's Visiting Artists and Scholars lectures, has been provided by the Cultural Services of the French Consulate in San Francisco.
Visiting artists and scholars are of decisive importance to SFAI’s educational mission. By providing the students and faculty at SFAI—as well as the wider Bay Area public—with direct access to the major practitioners and theorists of contemporary global art and culture, the Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series creates an open forum through which SFAI’s students are challenged both to go beyond basic canonical approaches to the study of art and to discover a global perspective that is enabled by, and further encourages, conceptual and comparative approaches. In addition to the public lectures they give, visiting artists and scholars, whether on campus for several days or for an entire semester, regularly engage with students, in an immediate and active way, by teaching intensives or by participating in seminars, critiques, or colloquia.
The Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series is coordinated by Glen Helfand.
Spring 2008 Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series
Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street campus
7:30pm, free and open to the public
Wednesday, January 23
Jens Haaning
For his eponymous exhibition at SFAI, Danish artist Jens Haaning will extend his ongoing examination of the living and working conditions of immigrants in the West by importing scenes from their everyday reality into the Walter and McBean Galleries (on the SFAI campus). His lecture will be given on the same night as the opening reception of the exhibition (the reception is from 5:30 to 7:30pm and precedes the lecture, which starts at 7:30pm). In mediums that include installation, photography, and performance, Haaning challenges conventional Western perceptions of the “other” in order to create dialogue on the kinds of cultural misunderstandings such perceptions engender. During his on-campus residency, he will lead workshops on the nature of his praxis for SFAI students and faculty. SFAI and the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco will also jointly organize a related panel discussion on immigrant life in the Bay Area. An extension of World Factory, Haaning’s project is part of the New Models of Production component of SFAI’s Exhibitions and Public Programs.
Monday, January 28
David Reed
Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Painting Fellow
Though primarily working with paint, David Reed is known for projects that intrinsically involve film and electronic media and that emphasize everyday culture. His abstract compositions reflect his interest both in the Western landscape and in cinema (particularly, in the films of Hitchcock). His allusions to cinema are unveiled on thin horizontal canvases containing thick gestural curves, spirals, or loops in colors evocative of Technicolor. With installation works like Scottie’s Bedroom, Reed recontextualizes Hitchcock’s Vertigo and blurs the boundaries of film, painting, and architecture. Reed’s work is included in collections at MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Sammlung Goetz (Goetz Collection) in Munich, and the Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst in Humlebaek (Denmark), among others. Since the mid-70s, he has exhibited internationally and recently served as curatorial advisor for the exhibition High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975. www.davidreedstudio.com
Wednesday, January 30
Jill Magid
“To seek intimate relationships with impersonal structures” is how Jill Magid describes her own artistic intentions. To that end, she has worked with police, secret services, CCTV, and forensic identification experts. For her project Evidence Locker, Magid spent a month in Liverpool working with local police on observation techniques. Auto Portrait Pending is a work in the guise of a contract stipulating that the artist’s remains be turned into a diamond when she dies. Magid received her MS in Visual Studies at MIT. She was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and her solo shows include those at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Tate Liverpool, Sparwasser HQ in Berlin, the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona, and Gagosian Gallery in New York. She teaches sculpture at Cooper Union. www.jillmagid.net
Wednesday, February 6
Stan Douglas
Pilara Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellow
Stan Douglas’s films and videos reflect on questions of culture and technology and on the relationship between subjectivity and popular representations of history. The complexities of his audiovisual installations are often based on substantial research (e.g., the work of Samuel Beckett and his themes of alienation, displacement, and the collapse of subjectivity). Together with that of Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham, Douglas’s work examines the socially and environmentally detrimental effects of industry and technology. Douglas has had solo exhibitions at David Zwirner in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Kunsthalle Basel (Germany); the Serpentine Gallery in London; and Secession in Vienna. He was the subject of an international retrospective in 1999. He is included in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art at the International Center of Photography in New York, curated by SFAI’s Dean of Academic Affairs Okwui Enwezor and on view from January 18 to May 4, 2008.
Monday, February 11
B. Ruby Rich
A critic, curator, and cultural theorist, B. Ruby Rich is identified with movements in feminist film, Latin American cinema, independent film, and New Queer Cinema—a phrase that she coined and that is also the subject of her lecture: “From ID to IQ: Looking Backwards and Forwards at the New Queer Cinema.” Rich has contributed to the Village Voice and the Nation, and writes for the Guardian (UK) and Sight and Sound (UK). She is the author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Professor of Community Studies and Social Documentation at UC Santa Cruz, Rich is the recipient of the 2006 Honorary Life Membership Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and of the 2007 Brudner Prize at Yale University. Cosponsored by the SFAI Film department. www.brubyrich.com
Wednesday, February 20
Kader Attia
French multimedia artist Kader Attia explores questions of belonging and exile in the age of globalization—in particular, the tensions between North African culture and Western consumerism. With formal sophistication, he deploys humor, politics, pop culture, and personal history. In the Landing Strip, Attia presents a slideshow depicting Algerian transsexuals and transvestites living in Paris; in Hallal, he transforms a Paris gallery into a boutique featuring Islamic-branded couture. Attia’s international exhibitions include the 2003 Venice Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, Le Magasin in Grenoble, and the ICA in Boston. His first large-scale solo exhibition in the US opens on February 29 at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle and will be on view through May 25.
Monday, March 3
Lari Pittman
Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Painting Fellow
Throughout the last two decades, Lari Pittman’s paintings have addressed the vexed sociopolitical question of identity politics. Through a densely layered amalgam of decorative abstraction and figuration, he juxtaposes images of sexual intimacy and flagrant exhibitionism in what has turned out to be an aesthetically complex anticipation of the age of information overload. Pittman’s work has been included in four different biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at Documenta X in Kassel (Germany). Retrospectives include those at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC; the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; the Villa Arson in Nice; and the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva. Solo exhibitions include those at the Gladstone Gallery in New York; Greengrassi in London; Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers in Munich; and Regen Projects in Los Angeles. Pittman is professor of Fine Arts at UCLA.
Wednesday, March 5
Russell Ferguson
Russell Ferguson is chair of the Department of Art at UCLA. He was deputy director for exhibitions and programs and chief curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where he remains an adjunct curator. From 1991 to 2001 he was at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA), first as editor, then as associate curator. Exhibitions he has organized for the Hammer Museum include the Undiscovered Country, Francis Alÿs, Wolfgang Tillmans, Patty Chang, Christian Marclay, and Jeff Wall. At MOCA, he organized In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O’Hara and American Art as well as surveys of the work of Liz Larner and Douglas Gordon. Ferguson is the editor of two collections of critical writing: Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture and Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture.
Tuesday, March 18
Catherine Opie
Pilara Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellow
Since the early 1990s, Catherine Opie has produced a complex body of photographic work in diverse genres, exploring notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. From her early portraits of transgender people and performance artists to her expansive urban landscapes of cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and New York, Opie has offered profound insights into the conditions under which communities form and define themselves. Influenced by social documentary photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and August Sander, Opie maintains a strict formal rigor, working in stark and provocative color as well as richly toned black and white. Opie’s photographs have been shown extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. She will have a major solo exhibition, Catherine Opie: American Photographer, in the fall of 2008 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Wednesday, March 19
Adel Abdessemed
Examining the system of spectacle, Algerian-born artist Adel Abdessemed works in video, animation, performance, and sculptural installation. Whether through the boldness of the memento mori or the subtle rhythms of hybrid animated forms, his practice challenges perceptions of the forbidden. The video projection God is Design was included in the exhibition Wherever We Go at the Walter and McBean Galleries in 2007. He participated in the 2001 P.S.1 International Studio Program (MoMA) in New York, where he also exhibited. Solo exhibitions include FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims (France). In 2006 Abdessemed was included in Notre Histoire, an exhibition of emerging French artists at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. An exhibition of his work will be on view, in SFAI’s Walter and McBean Galleries, from March 20 to May 31, 2008—the opening reception for which, from 5:30 to 7:30pm, precedes his March 19 lecture.
Monday, March 31
Amelia Jones
Amelia Jones is the Pilkington Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She has organized exhibitions on feminism and contemporary art, has coedited the anthology Performing the Body/Performing the Text, and has edited The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader and A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945. Jones’s recent books include Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada and Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject. Her current projects are a coedited volume Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History and a book tentatively entitled Identity and the Visual. Jones’s talk “Screen Eroticisms: Explorations of Female Desire in the Work of Carolee Schneemann and Pipilotti Rist” is cosponsored by SFAI’s Film department and its History and Theory of Contemporary Art department.
Martin Creed
This lecture has been postponed until Fall 2008
Martin Creed’s art often assumes the form of a minimalist intervention, using found materials and basic ideas. He works in various media, including installation, sculpture, music, film, and text. He won the 2001 Turner Prize for his widely known Work No. 227 (The Lights Going On and Off). More recent works such as Sick Film have been controversial for direct depictions of “unsavory” bodily functions. He has had solo exhibitions at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York; Hauser & Wirth in Zurich; and MC in Los Angeles. He was included in How to Improve the World: 60 Years of British Art at the Hayward Gallery in London; in Surprise, Surprise at ICA in London; and Into Me/Out of Me at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (MoMA) in New York. www.martincreed.com
Wednesday, April 9
Emory Douglas in dialogue with Sam Durant and Jennifer González
Emory Douglas worked as minister of culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967 until its discontinuation in the early 80s. Douglas’s graphic designs defined the trademark visual style of the group’s newspapers, posters, and pamphlets. Disseminating the party’s agenda in a visually powerful way, Douglas’s bold illustrations and striking images spoke forcefully to a community ravaged by poverty and police brutality. Douglas portrayed a populace emerging from segregation and beginning to assert their rights to equality. A retrospective exhibition Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas (organized by Sam Durant) recently showed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Sam Durant creates installations that explore the history of modernist art and design, American politics, and the search for social justice. Public collections of Durant’s work include the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, Tate Modern in London, Project Row Houses in Houston, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. He teaches at California Institute of the Arts.
Jennifer González is associate professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture department at UC Santa Cruz. She writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on installation art, digital art, and activist art. González’s forthcoming book, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art, examines installation art as a form of critical assessment of race politics in the US.
Tuesday, April 15
Michelle Grabner
Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Painting Fellow
Michelle Grabner is widely known for Neo-Op paintings that portray pulsating colors in radial configurations evoking centrifugal or centripetal spaces. Her work came to critical prominence when it was included in the landmark exhibition Post-Hypnotic, which toured museums in the US between 1999 and 2001. Since that time, she has had solo exhibitions in Chicago, London, Vienna, San Francisco, and many other places around the globe. Codirector of the Suburban, an independent artist’s project space in Oak Park, Illinois, she is a frequent contributor to publications such as Frieze, Cakewalk, and the New Art Examiner.
Wednesday, April 16
Kimsooja
Kimsooja’s work is a combination of video, performance, and sculpture. Born in Daegu, Korea, she currently lives and works in New York. She studied in the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Hongik University in Seoul and at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Kimsooja was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. A selection of solo shows includes Kewenig Galerie in Cologne; the Getty Center in Los Angeles; MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge (Massachusetts); and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (MoMA) in New York. In addition to her lecture, Kimsooja will also realize a project as part of the Pacific Perspectives component of SFAI’s Exhibitions and Public Programs. www.kimsooja.com
Thursday, April 17
Annie Leibovitz
2008 McBean Distinguished Lecturer
Annie Leibovitz’s portraits have been appearing on magazine covers for more than thirty-five years. A student of painting at SFAI in the late 60s, she signed up for night classes in photography after a trip to Japan on which she bought a camera and started taking pictures. Soon thereafter, in her early twenties, she began working for the then-fledgling Rolling Stone magazine where she became chief photographer in 1973. After ten more years at Rolling Stone, Leibovitz joined the staff of Vanity Fair in 1983; she began working for Vogue in 1998. Venues at which she has exhibited include the International Center of Photography in New York and, in Washington DC, both the National Portrait Gallery and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Her honors and awards include the Infinity Award in Applied Photography from the International Center of Photography; the Barnard College Medal of Distinction; the French Minister of Culture’s Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; the Library of Congress’ Living Legend Award; one of thirty-five 2005 Smithsonian magazine “Innovators of Our Time”; and, in 2005, both first and second place in the American Society of Magazine editors’ Top Forty Magazine Covers of the Past Forty Years (first place went to the John Lennon and Yoko Ono cover photograph for Rolling Stone taken the day Lennon was shot). Her most recent publication is Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005. A retrospective exhibition by the same name—Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005—will open in San Francisco at the Legion of Honor on 1 March and be on view through 25 May 2008.
Monday, April 21
Thomas Demand
Pilara Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellow
Thomas Demand begins his photographic process with a preexisting image, usually taken from media accounts of German history or of current politically charged events. He then translates the images into life-sized models, using colored paper and cardboard to re-create entire rooms, parking lots, facades, and hallways. He then photographs and destroys the paper sculpture. He has applied a similar strategy to 35mm films, setting his cinematic still images in motion. He had a mid-career retrospective at MoMA in New York. Solo exhibitions include those at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice. He participated in the 6th Shanghai Biennial and the 51st Venice Biennial. He represented Germany in the 26th São Paulo Biennial.
Monday, May 5
James Mackay
James Mackay is the producer of some of Derek Jarman’s greatest films, including The Angelic Conversation, The Last of England, The Garden, and Blue. More recently, he produced Bernard Rudden’s Daybreak. He has also produced music videos for the Smiths, Suede, Patti Smith, and Pet Shop Boys. Since 1996, Mackay has returned to his native Scotland, lecturing at Napier University and working with the Scottish Arts Council on their National Lottery Film Committee. Mackay’s current projects include a film version of a Michael Nyman opera, a new feature by SFAI Film department chair Lynn Hershman Leeson, and a multiscreen project with Turner Prize–nominee Hannah Collins. Cosponsored by the SFAI Film department.
SFAI’s exhibitions and public programs—a component of which is the Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series—are supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Peter Norton Family Foundation, and the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. The Distinguished Visiting Painting Fellowships are also funded by the Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation. The Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellowships are also funded by the Pilara Foundation. Additional funding for the Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series has been provided by Bob and Betty Klausner. The McBean Distinguished Lectureship is endowed by the McBean Family Foundation. The Jens Haaning exhibition, as well as his Visiting Artists and Scholars lecture, is also supported by a grant from the Danish Arts Council; the exhibition is produced in collaboration with the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco. Additional support for Adel Abdessemed’s exhibition, as well as for his and Kader Attia's Visiting Artists and Scholars lectures, has been provided by the Cultural Services of the French Consulate in San Francisco.
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