Dan Graham, Skateboard Pavilion, 1989. Architectural model, two-way mirror glass, brushed aluminum, steel, wood, and graffiti, 55 x 57 x 51.375 in. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery in New York and Paris. Photo by Steven White.

Spring 2009 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 SFAI faculty member Glen Helfand.

Spring 2009 Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series
Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street campus
7:30pm
Free and open to the public

Monday, January 26 — 7:30pm
Yoshiharu Tsukamoto/Atelier Bow-Wow

Tokyo-based architecture studio Atelier Bow-Wow was established by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima in 1992. Their work explores the use and function of space within urban environments. In Tokyo, they developed the phrase “pet architecture”—a style of small, ad hoc, multifunctional structures that make the most of limited space. In addition to numerous building projects, Atelier Bow-Wow has participated in such exhibitions as the 27th São Paulo Biennial, the 2006 Busan Biennial (South Korea), the 2003 Echigo-Tsumari Triennial (Japan), the 50th Venice Biennial, and the 2002 Gwangju and Shanghai Biennials. Their work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA), the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and the New National Gallery Museum in Berlin. Their first solo exhibition in the US will take place at REDCAT in Los Angeles from 31 January to 29 March 2009. www.bow-wow.jp

Monday, February 9 — 7:30pm
Lawrence Weschler

Director of the New York Institute of the Humanities at NYU and artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival, Lawrence Weschler is an author whose works of creative nonfiction have often chronicled the lives and practices of artists. His Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982), recently republished, is perhaps his best known work; it originally instigated dialogue with artist David Hockney, which, in turn, led to True to Life: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with David Hockney (2009) (Irwin and Hockney will be the primary subjects of Weschler’s lecture at SFAI). Essays that were originally columns in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern were published in 2006 as Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, receiving the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. A book signing will follow the lecture.

Monday, February 16 — 7:30pm
Dan Graham

First emerging on the art scene in the mid-60s, Dan Graham is a widely influential first-generation conceptual artist. His acute critique of the ideology of the art system led him to exhibit much of his work outside the art-gallery context. In the 70s, he concentrated on performance, film, and video, exploring the limits of private and public space and creating the work for which he is most known internationally. He has had major solo exhibitions at such venues as the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (The Netherlands), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (MoMA) in New York City, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, Lisson Gallery in London, Neue Galerie Graz (Austria), and Marian Goodman Gallery in New York City. Graham’s first North American retrospective, Dan Graham: Beyond, will debut at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in February 2009, whereupon it will travel to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and then to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA).

Tuesday, February 17 — 7:30pm
Shirin Neshat
Pilara Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellow

An Iranian-born artist who has lived in the US since 1974, Shirin Neshat portrays, in her photographs and films, the emotional space of exile, in particular, as such emotions touch on the role of women in Islamic society. She has had solo exhibitions at such venues as the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (Texas, USA), the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA), the Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Espoo (Finland), Castello di Rivoli in Turin (Italy), the Art Institute of Chicago, Serpentine Gallery in London, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in León (Spain), the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin, and Gladstone Gallery in New York City. Her awards include the 2004 Hiroshima Freedom Prize and the 2006 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. Neshat is currently completing a film based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s book Women Without Men (2004).

Monday, February 23 — 7:30pm
Laura Owens
Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Painting Fellow

Painter Laura Owens combines abstract with representational elements to create a highly personal painting vocabulary that translates into an elaborate, elegant, and quietly exuberant whole. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (which then traveled to a number of museums across the US), the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York City, and Galerie Gisela Capitain in Cologne (Germany). She has been part of group exhibitions at such venues as MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Owens’s works have been acquired by such museums as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Friday, February 27 — 7:30pm
Yto Barrada

Tangier-based photographer Yto Barrada was born in Paris in 1971 and educated in Tangier. Her photos capture the rapidly changing coastline of postcolonial Morocco, where tourism, consumerism, and resort development are rapidly destroying beaches, historic buildings, and forests. Her recent exhibitions include such venues as Witte de With in Rotterdam (The Netherlands), La Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, MoMA in New York City, and the Jeu de Paume in Paris. In 2006, she was awarded the first Ellen Auerbach Award in Berlin and was short-listed for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. She then participated in the 2007 Venice Biennial. Her book A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project was published in 2004. She is the artistic director and cofounder of the Cinémathèque de Tanger. Barrada’s work is included in the group exhibition Face of Our Time: Four Shows—Yto Barrada, Guy Tillim, Judith Joy Ross, Leo Rubinfien at SFMOMA, opening 31 January 2009. www.ytobarrada.com

Monday, March 9 — 7:30pm
Fabian Marcaccio
Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Painting Fellow

Born in Rosario de Santa Fe, Argentina, Fabian Marcaccio addresses the formal issues of classical modern painting and American abstract expressionism through critical and personal lenses. He has devised his own particular painterly form: “paintants” comprise massive curving canvases through which a new artistic paradigm that quotes and critiques numerous twentieth-century painting traditions is sought. He has had solo exhibitions at such venues as BravinLee Programs in New York City, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, the Miami Art Museum (Florida, USA), and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (MoMA) in New York City. He has been part of group exhibitions at such venues as Lehmann Maupin and the Chelsea Art Museum, both in New York City. Marcaccio participated in Documenta 11 in Kassel (Germany). http://paintants.com

Monday, March 23 — 7:30pm
Boris Groys

An internationally acclaimed expert both on late-Soviet postmodern art and literature and on the Russian avant-garde, Boris Groys is a philosopher, essayist, art critic, and media theorist. His writing intermixes the disparate traditions of French poststructuralism and of modern Russian philosophy. Professor of Aesthetics, Art History, and Media Theory at the Center for Art and Media (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie [ZKM]) in Karlsruhe (Germany) and Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, he is the author of many books, including The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond and Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment. He has curated and organized numerous international art exhibitions and conferences. In his lecture at SFAI, Groys will discuss the group exhibition Medium Religion—on view at ZKM through 19 April 2009—which looks at mediated iterations of religious belief. www.zkm.de/mediumreligion

Wednesday, March 25 — 7:30pm
Julia Christensen

Julia Christensen is an artist and writer currently based in Oberlin (Ohio, USA). Her work treads the fine line between art and research. She is the author of Big Box Reuse, which is a product of an ongoing investigation into how communities are renovating and reusing abandoned big-box buildings. She has had solo exhibitions at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg (Pennsylvania, USA) and at the Green Building Gallery in Louisville (Kentucky, USA); she also recently completed two net-art commissions for turbulence.org. Her new media, video, and installation works have been exhibited at such venues as the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA), and the Dumbo Art Center in Brooklyn (NYC). Christensen is the Luce Visiting Assistant Professor of the Emerging Arts at Oberlin College, where she teaches both in the Studio Arts and in the Technology in Music and Related Arts (TIMARA) departments. www.bigboxreuse.com

Wednesday, April 1 — 7:30pm
James Welling
Pilara Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellow

Born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut (USA), James Welling earned both a BFA and an MFA at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia (California, USA), where he studied with, among others, Dan Graham (see above). He emerged in the 70s as an artist for whom photographic norms and the representational field itself were (and remain) not so much the given as a locus for contestation and for what he named the ventriloquism—the many different formal languages—of photography. Recent venues at which he has exhibited include David Zwirner and the 2008 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; Regan Projects and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; and Galerie Nelson-Freeman in Paris. Retrospectives of his work have been held at David Zwirner in 2008 and at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus (Ohio, USA), among other venues, in 2000. The cover photographer for Sonic Youth’s seminal 1985 album, Bad Moon Rising, Welling currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Wednesday, April 15 — 7:30pm
Isaac Julien
Pilara Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellow

Born in 1960 in London, where he currently lives and works, Isaac Julien graduated from Saint Martin’s School of Art in 1984, having studied painting and fine art film. Early work includes the poetic documentary Looking for Langston, Young Soul Rebels, and Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001 for The Long Road to Mazatlán and for Vagabondia. Formerly a visiting lecturer at Harvard University’s Schools of Afro-American and Visual Environmental Studies, he is currently a visiting professor at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. He received MIT’s Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts and the Frameline Lifetime Achievement Award. Recent solo shows include such venues as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami (Florida, USA). Julien is represented in the collections at the Tate Modern in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim in New York City, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC. www.isaacjulien.com

Saturday, April 25 — 7:30pm
Manohla Dargis
SFAI Film Department
Restating Cinema Lecture

Formerly a film writer at The Village Voice, a film critic for the Los Angeles Times, and an editor of the film section at LA Weekly, Manohla Dargis is currently one of the chief film critics at The New York Times. In addition, Dargis has written for a number of other publications, including Film Comment and Sight and Sound. Her talk will concern Hollywood's onscreen abandonment of women, contending that over the past two decades, major Hollywood studios have severely cut back on the number of movies they make about adult women. Most Hollywood movies are now overwhelmingly made by men, about men, and for men. The recent phenomenon of the so-called bromance, for example, consists in movies in which the primary onscreen relationships are homosocial (rather than homosexual), that is, either between two straight men (I Love You, Man) or among straight male friends (Superbad and Knocked Up). Effectively, the romance film, a genre historically associated with women, has become in recent years, Dargis will argue, a genre in which women play an increasingly marginal role.

Monday, April 27 — 7:30pm
Peter Saul
Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation
Distinguished Visiting Painting Fellow

Known for his acid-hued paintings that meld cartoon imagery with biting social and political commentary, Peter Saul was inspired in the 50s and 60s as much by comic books as by the surrealists, becoming an unrelenting critic of various aspects of American culture. A student in the early 50s at SFAI (then named the California School of Fine Arts), he went on in the 60s to be associated with a group of artists in Chicago, the Hairy Who, who repudiated the various New York styles and schools then in fashion in favor of anti-authoritarianism and intense political critique. He has exhibited internationally in a number of galleries, including MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and Musée Paul Valéry in Sète (France). A retrospective of Saul’s work was organized and exhibited by the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach (California, USA) in 2008.

Monday, May 4 — 7:30pm
Julia Scher

Exploring the dynamics of social control within the public sphere, Julia Scher’s research and artwork have issued in interactive installations, reformulated surveillance, site tours, interventions, performances, photography, writing, web work, linear video, and sound. Along with inclusion at the 1995 Venice Biennial and the 1989 Whitney Biennial, her work has been exhibited at such venues as the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus (Ohio, USA), the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA), El Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, SFMOMA, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (Germany), and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. She has taught and lectured at such institutions as MIT, the Cooper Union, UCLA, USC, Harvard University, Columbia University, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, and Rutgers University. While teaching in the department of Film and Video at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in the mid-90s, Scher inaugurated the first art surveillance studies class taught in the United States.

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 and the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. The Distinguished Visiting Painting Fellowships are funded by the Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation, and the Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellowships are funded by the Pilara Foundation. Additional funding for the Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series has been provided by Bob and Betty Klausner and the Artur Walther Foundation. Yan Pei-Ming: YES! is also supported by Galleria Massimo De Carlo in Milan, David Zwirner in New York, and the Cultural Services of the Consulate General of France in San Francisco. Dan Graham’s lecture is cosponsored by the department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. Yto Barrada’s lecture is supported by the Cultural Services of the Consulate General of France in San Francisco. Manohla Dargis’s lecture is cosponsored by SFAI’s Film department. Julia Scher’s lecture is cosponsored by the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium at UC Berkeley’s Center for New Media.