Mills College Art Lecture Series 2011-2012

Mills College Art Museum
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland, CA 94613
510.430.2164
mcam.mills.edu

Museum Hours:
Tuesday-Sunday 11 am - 4 pm
Wednesday 11 am - 7:30 pm
Closed Monday
Admission is Free

Lecture Information:
All lectures take place at 7:00 pm
in Danforth Hall in Aron Art Center
unless stated otherwise.
Lectures are free and open to the public.

For more information visit
mcam.mills.edu
millslectureseries.blogspot.edu
For directions call 510.430.3250


Martha Wilson ** Oct 26
Martha Wilson: Staging the Self (Transformations, Invasions and Pushing Boundaries)
Martha Wilson will trace her work as a performance artist, activist, and the founder and ongoing Director of Franklin Furnace. She will begin in 1971 with her early “body art” in Nova Scotia, Canada, followed by her move to New York in 1974, where she continued to work as an artist. In 1976 she founded Franklin Furnace, the famous New York-based alternative art space that has for 35 years championed temporal art: artists’ books, installations, and performance art.
Lecture will be held in Lisser Theatre.

Camille Utterback *** Nov 9
Camille Utterback creates spaces for kinesthetic discovery and play using video tracking software or other sensors to react and respond to human movement and gesture. In her installation Text Rain (1999), participants use their bodies to catch and play with projected lines of a poem. In her External Measures series (2001–2007) Utterback explores the possibilities of interactive painting systems. She will also discuss her large-scale public commissions, such as Aurora Organ (2009), City of St. Louis Park, Minnesota and her recently completed commission for the Sacramento Airport. Utterback’s extensive exhibit history includes more than fifty shows on four continents. Awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009), a Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award (2005), and a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship (2002).

Leslie Shows * Nov 16
Leslie Shows reinvigorates the practice of landscape painting with large, materially rich pieces that conflate a vast continuum of geological and human change. Through broad gestures and intricate details, she articulates a world in which we are but fleeting specks. She has won numerous awards including an Artadia Award; Eureka Fellowship, Fleishhacker Foundation; SECA Art Award, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tournesol Award, Headlands Center for the Arts; and the Cadogan Award. Her work has been exhibited widely including four solo shows at Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco.

Frances Stark Dec 7
Frances Stark is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer who completed her MFA at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA and is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. Through performance, writing, and visual art, Stark addresses the conditions of creative labor, producing candid and affecting work about the nature of artistic practice and the corresponding yet integral banality of the everyday. She has had numerous national and international exhibitions, including solo exhibitions at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Portikus, Frankfurt; Secession, Vienna; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Kunstverein, Munich.
Presented in conjunction with Frances Stark: The whole of all of the parts as well as the parts of all the parts, on view at the Mills College Art Museum September 15 to December 11, 2011

Trevor Paglen * Jan 25
Trevor Paglen’s work deliberately blurs lines between science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. His work has been widely exhibited from the Tate Modern to the Istanbul Biennial 2009, as well as published in The New York Times, Wired, Vanity Fair, and Artforum. Paglen has received grants and awards from the Smithsonian, Art Matters, Artadia, the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, and the Aperture Foundation. He holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley, an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from UC Berkeley. In 2011-2012, Paglen is an artist-in-residence at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and at MIT, Cambridge.

Jennifer Steinkamp *** Feb 8
Jennifer Steinkamp is a Los Angeles-based artist who uses computer animation and new media to create projection installations that explore architectural space, motion, and phenomenological perception. Her digitally animated works show the interplay between actual and illusionistic space. Steinkamp’s recent projects and exhibitions include Five in Istanbul at the Borusan Muzik Evi in Istanbul, Turkey; Madame Curie at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and set design for Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung at the New York City Opera. In November 2011, she will participate in Prospect New Orleans, Louisiana.

Apsara DiQuinzio * Feb 15
Apsara DiQuinzio is currently assistant curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she has organized solo exhibitions with Felix Schramm, Paul Sietsema, Mai-Thu Perret, Vincent Fecteau, and R. H. Quaytman. She organized the 2008 SECA Art Award Exhibition, as well as the forthcoming 2010 iteration, and Abstract Rhythms: Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart. Formerly she worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art where she organized the exhibitions Burgeoning Geometries: Abstract Constructions and Skin Is a Language. In 2010 she received a curatorial research fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. DiQuinzio has an M.A. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute Chicago (2001), and a B.A., cum laude, from Colgate University (1998).

Laurel Nakadate * Mar 14
Laurel Nakadate is a New York-based photographer, video artist and filmmaker. Her first feature film, Stay the Same Never Change (2009), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was featured in New Directors/New Films at The Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center. Her second feature film, The Wolfe Knife, premiered at the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival and was nominated for a Gotham Independent Film Award and Independent Spirit Award. Her work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and The Reina Sofia, Madrid; and her 2011 ten-year survey exhibition Only the Lonely was on held at MoMA P.S.1.

Lectures made possible with the generous support from the:
*Herringer Family Foundation
**Jane Green Endowment for Studies in Art History and Criticism
***LEF Foundation

Walking Backwards Forward, An Exhibition of New Work By Mills College Graduate Students

Exhibition Dates:
May 1–29, 2011

Opening Reception:
Sat, April 30, 6:00-8:00 pm

Panel Discussion:
Sat, May 7, 5:00-7:00 pm


Oakland, CA—March 24, 2011. The Mills College Art Museum is proud to present Walking Backwards Forward, the thesis exhibition for the 2011 Master of Fine Arts degree recipients. The exhibition showcases works by a promising group of emerging artists created during their graduate program in the Mills College MFA studio program. The exhibition is curated by Stephanie Hanor, Director of the Mills College Art Museum.

Walking Backwards Forward features work by Alexa Alexander, Sholeh Asgary, Sohyung Choi, Hilary Galián, Sarah Hirneisen, Amy M. Ho, Emily Hoyt, David Johnson, Danielle Lawrence, Chelsea Pegram, David Sleeth and Alexander Treu.

According to Hanor, “Walking Backwards Forwards demonstrates not only the high quality of the work produced by the Mills MFA candidates, but also their dedication to continually pushing themselves to stretch and test their artistic capabilities.”

David Sleeth explores his interests in archeology through experimentation with materiality and form. His aim is to manipulate the perceived context of objects allowing the viewer to re-imagine their understanding of the world around them and their place within it. Using the metaphor of a knot, Sarah Hirneisen’s sculptures explore heritage, human relationships, and memory, creating logical connections between complicated systems.

In a climate of porous borders, Hilary Galián paints real and unreal places to investigate the condition of connectedness and belonging. David Johnson wants you to know that the world is made up of all sorts of ordinary things, but most importantly, it is made up of the interactions between these things. Through various time-based methods, he examines these interactions in order to better grasp the sum and the parts of the past, present and future. Sholeh Asgary is interested in exploring how memories are a fusion of fact and subjective filter. Through memory, the abstract and representational aspects of our experiences become intertwined, and in her mixed media works, she attempts a literal representation of this phenomenon.

Danielle Lawrence playfully investigates the perception of both formal and psychological space within traditional and hybrid offerings of representation. The resulting videos, paintings and sculptures explore illusions of security in our ever-changing social and environmental landscapes. Emily Hoyt questions how we can see the world fully when our emotional perspective is constantly changing. She creates installations using light, shadow, and linear forms as a way to frame the surroundings, underscoring our limited ability to grasp them in their entirety. Through her sculptural work, Chelsea Pegram explores a visceral mode of perception in which line and space are sensed and tactilely navigated as a way to reconsider our methods of making meaning.

Re-appropriating found photography, Alexa Alexander investigates how photographs are viewed and remembered. By physically dissecting and fragmenting photographs, she redirects the viewer’s focus to the act of looking while emphasizing recollection. Amy M. Ho builds video and spatial installation works that bring attention to the duality of our existence as both physical and psychological beings.

Every consumer product has a story about its origin, a story that reveals an alternative history of our lives. Through mixed media installations, Alexander Treu demonstrates his obsession with the food industry’s manipulation of our minds and bodies. Sohyung Choi’s large-scale, multimedia installation works explore self and cultural identity.


Special Events (please visit our website for updated details):

Sat, April 30, 6:00-8:00 pm
Art Museum
Opening Reception for Walking Backwards Forward

Sat, May 7, 5:00-7:00 pm
Art Museum
Panel Discussion with the MFA Artists moderated by Glen Helfand

Stephanie Syjuco Lecture 4/6

Wednesday, April 6th 7:00pm - 8:00pm, Danforth Lecture Hall

STEPHANIE SYJUCO's recent work uses the tactics of bootlegging, reappropriation, and fictional fabrications to address issues of cultural biography, labor, and economic globalization. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials. This has included starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods; presenting a parasitic art counterfeiting event, "COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone" for Frieze Projects, London (2009); and “Shadowshop,” an alternative vending outlet embedded at SFMOMA exploring the ways in which artists are navigating the production, consumption, and dissemination of their work (2010).www.stephaniesyjuco.com

Sharon Lockhart Lecture 3/31

Thursday March 31st @ 7:00 pm Mills College, Fine Arts Annex 106

Los Angeles-based artist Sharon Lockhart creates films and photographs that are at once rigorously formal and deeply humanistic, meticulously observing the details of everyday life while also exploring the limits and intersections between the two mediums. Her work has been exhibited at major museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Kunsthalle Zürich, and the Vienna Secession. Her project Lunch Break, 2008, is currently the subject of a solo show at Gio Marconi in Milan and will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in October 2011. Sharon teaches undergraduate photography and is a member of the MFA Core Faculty at the University of Southern California Roski School of Fine Arts in Los Angeles.

This lecture has been generously founded by the LEF foundation.

Bill Brown Lecture 3/16

The Mills College Art Lecture Series presents Bill Brown
Wednesday March 16, 2011 at 7:00 pm,
Danforth Lecture Hall in the Aron Art Center
Lecture made possible by the Herringer Family Foundation

Bill Brown is a filmmaker from the “Paris of the Plains,” Lubbock, Texas. He has made several short experimental documentaries about the dusty corners of the North American landscape. His work has screened at museums and festivals around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, Rotterdam, and Sundance. Along with Sabine Gruffat, he has created Bike Box, a roving, mobile media bicycle library that allows cyclists to explore the urban soundscape.

All lectures are free and open to the public

Marie Watt Lecture

Mills College Art Lecture Series presents Marie Watt
February 23, 2011 7:00 pm
Danforth Lecture Hall in the Aron Art Center
Lecture made possible by the Herringer Family Foundation

Marie Watt is a multidisciplinary artist who was born in Seattle in 1967 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her approach to art-making is shaped by the proto- Feminism of Iroquois matrilineal custom, a discourse on social practice, as well as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Like Jasper Johns, she is interested in "things that the mind already knows." Unlike the Pop artists, she use a vocabulary of natural materials (stone, cornhusks, wool, cedar) and forms (blankets, pillows, bridges) that are universal to human experience (though not uniquely American) and noncommercial in character.

All lectures are free & open to the public