Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series

We regret to inform you that Mickalene Thomas's public lecture at SFAI on Monday, November 5 has been POSTPONED due to travel complications. We are rescheduling this event and will have more information about the new date and time available soon. We apologize for this inconvenience and thank you for your continued interest in free, public events at the San Francisco Art Institute.

About the Lecture
SFAI fellow and painter Mickalene Thomas will discuss her elaborate, collage-inspired paintings embellished with rhinestones and bedecked with the bold colors and patterns of 1970s interior design. Informed by classical genres of portraiture, landscape, still life, and the female nude, with explicit references to artists including Edouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, Thomas’s work—often depictions of African American women—expands common definitions of beauty, power, and sexual identity.

This event is FREE and open to the public. But space is limited, and advance registration is recommended.

Artist Bio
Thomas earned her BFA from Pratt Institute and her MFA from Yale University. Her first solo museum exhibition, Origin of the Universe, premiered at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and is on view at the Brooklyn Museum from September 28, 2012–January 20, 2013. Thomas’s work is in significant museum collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Recent honors include the Artist-in-Residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Joan Mitchell Grant, and the Rema Hort Mann Grant. Thomas is represented by Lehmann Maupin, New York; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. Thomas is also a recipient of the Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation Distinguished Visiting Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Painting Practices at SFAI this semester. Visit Thomas's website at http://mickalenethomas.com

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About the Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series
SFAI’s Visiting Artists and Scholars (VAS) lecture series provides students and faculty—as well as the wider Bay Area public—with direct exposure to major figures in contemporary global art and culture. It creates an open forum through which SFAI’s students are challenged to go beyond basic canonical approaches to the study of art and to discover a global perspective that encourages conceptual and comparative approaches. In addition to the public lectures they give, visiting artists and scholars regularly engage with students in an immediate and active way, by teaching intensives or by participating in seminars, critiques, or colloquia.

All VAS lectures begin at 7:30 pm in the Lecture Hall on SFAI’s 800 Chestnut Street campus. For a complete schedule of SFAI's lectures and events, please visit www.sfai.edu/events 

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Thank You to Our Sponsors!
SFAI’s exhibitions and public programs—a component of which is the Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series—are supported in part by the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. The Winfred Johnson Clive Foundation Distinguished Visiting Fellowships in Interdisciplinary Painting Practices are funded by the Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation. The Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship is funded by the generosity of the family of Richard Diebenkorn.