SHANA MOULTON - Tues. Feb 05 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

SHANA MOULTON creates evocatively oblique narratives in her video and performance works. Combining an unsettling, wry humor with a low-tech Pop sensibility, Moulton plays a character whose interactions with the everyday world are both mundane and surreal. As her protagonist navigates the enigmatic and possibly magical properties of her home decor, Moulton initiates relationships with objects and consumer products that are at once banal and uncanny. Growing up near Yosemite, California, she earned her BA from University of California, Berkeley in Art and Anthropology and her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. She has exhibited or performed at The New Museum, SFMoMA, MoMA P.S.1, Performa 2009, The Kitchen, Electronic Arts Intermix, Art in General, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Palais De Tokyo in Paris, The Migros Museum in Zurich and the Times Museum in Guangzhou.

CHARLES ATLAS - Tues. Feb 12 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

CHARLES ATLAS has been active as a filmmaker and video artist since the 1970s. He has made pioneering media/dance works, multi-channel video installations, feature-length documentaries, video art works for television and live electronic performances. His recent projects include the solo shows: The Illusion of Democracy at Luhring Augustine Bushwick and Discount Body Parts at De Hallen Museum in Holland; live performance/installations: In Residence at the 2012 Whitney Biennial and The Pedestrians, in collaboration with Mika Tajima/New Humans at The South London Gallery; and Ocean, a film of Merce Cunningham’s epic dance at the Walker Art Center. Atlas has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, three “Bessie” (New York Dance and Performance) Awards and was the 2006 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Art’s biennial John Cage Award.

TEHCHING HSIEH - Tues. Feb 19 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

2013 Jeff Pan Lecturer

TEHCHING HSIEH was born in Taiwan in 1950. He did his first performance “Jump Piece” in 1973 and broke both ankles. Trained as a sailor, he arrived in Philadelphia in 1974, jumped ship, and stayed in the states as an illegal immigrant for fourteen years until granted amnesty in 1988. From 1978 to 1999, Hsieh did five One Year Performances and the Thirteen Year Plan in New York City. The first four One Year Performances made him a regular name in the art scene; the last two, in which he intentionally retreated from the art world, set a tone of sustained invisibility. Since 2000, Hsieh—released from the restriction of not showing work during the Thirteen Year Plan—has lectured and exhibited worldwide, including MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Liverpool Biennial, the Gwangju Biennial, and the Sao Paulo Biennial. He received the United States Artists award in 2008.

DIANA AL-HADID - Tues. Feb 26 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

DIANA AL-HADID was born in Syria in 1981 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her sculptures—made from crude materials such as plaster, Styrofoam, wax and cardboard—take “towers” as their central theme. Drawing together a variety of associations—power, wealth, technological and urban development, progress and globalism— they are also symbols of cultural difference and conflict. Al-Hadid received her BFA in sculpture and art history from Kent State University in 2003, MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2005, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. She has been the recipient of a USA Rockefeller Fellowship and several grantst. Her work is included in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and The Saatchi Collection, London. She has an upcoming two-person exhibition with Medardo Rosso during the 2013 Venice Biennale.

OTTO PIENE - Tues. Mar 05 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

Lepper Lecturer

OTTO PIENE was born in Germany in 1928. His father was founding principal of a progressive Gymnasium/academic high school. At the age of 15, Piene was drafted in the heat of the intensifying air war. Discharged from British POW camps in 1946, he returned home to finish school and attend the art academies in Munich and Düsseldorf while also studying philosophy at the University of Cologne. In 1957, out of a ruinous studio in Düsseldorf, he founded the Night Exhibitions with friend Heinz Mack. The resulting international Group Zero spread throughout the world, including New York City, and advanced light art, kinetic art and notably “SKY ART.” He became a professor at MIT and Director of the MIT CAVS, where he co-founded the MSVisS graduate program and directed five International Sky Art Conferences. Piene continues painting with fire, as in the early Zero days.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS - Tues. Mar 26 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

During the past twenty-five years, CARRIE MAE WEEMS has worked toward developing a complex body of art that has employed photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation and video. Her work has led her to investigate family relationships, gender roles, the histories of racism, sexism, class and various political systems. Currently, her work is the focus of a major retrospective, Carrie Mae Weems: 3 Decades of Photography and Video on view now at The Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville. It will travel to the Portland Art Museum in Oregon; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. A new video, Lincoln, Lonnie and Me-a Story in 5 Parts, is on view at the Mattress Factory. She is represented in collections around the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA and The Williams College Museum of Art.

PYUUPIRU - Tues. Apr 02 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

2013 Jeff Pan Lecturer

PYRUUPIRU is an artist in Tokyo who works in a wide range of fields such as art direction, character and costume design, acting and writing. Her artwork is characterized by its process—absorbing opposing concepts such as “life and death,” “men and women,” “one and other,” and “hurt and damage” and assimilating these ideas through her own experiences. They are then sublimated into higher concepts and given concrete form as installations, movies, performances, portraits and sculptures. Her documentary film Pyuupiru 2001–2008 was shown at more than twenty international film festivals and received high praise. Pyuupiru has exhibited at the Yokohama Triennale, the Yokohama Museum of Art and the New Benaki Museum. Her performance and installation work has been commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum.

*CANCELED* ALLAN SEKULA - Tues. Apr 09 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

RELATED PROGRAMMING:

GOLAN LEVIN: Interactive Art, Computational Design, Critical Making

Thurs. Feb 7 / 5pm, McConomy Auditorium

co-presented by CMU School of Design Lecture Series "Design the Future" and School of Architecture's "[En]Coding Architecture" Symposium

GOLAN LEVIN is Associate Professor of Computation Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. Through interventions, artifacts, and environments, often created with a variety of collaborators, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines and make visible our ways of interacting with each other. His work has spanned themes such as gestural robotics; the tactical uses of digital fabrication; novel aesthetics of non-verbal interactivity; and information visualization as a mode of arts practice. At CMU, Levin also directs the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a laboratory for atypical, anti-disciplinary and inter-institutional research across the arts, science, technology, and culture. 

GUERILLA GIRLS: What Are Museums For?

Wed. Mar 20 / 7pm, Carnegie Lecture Hall

presented by the Carnegie Museum of Art

A limited number of free tickets for CMU Students will be available at the School of Art Office. Tickets required. $10 students / $12 museum members / $15 non-menbers More information: 412.622.3288 or www.cmoa.org 

GUERILLA GIRLS, an anonymous group of feminists fighting sexism in the art world, will stage a multimedia performance in full jungle drag. The artists will illustrate their history of creating posters, books and actions to expose discrimination in areas including art, film and politics. Carnegie Museum of Art Director, Lynn Zelevansky, will engage in a dynamic exchange of ideas with The Guerrilla Girls about the evolving role of women in the art world. The Empowering Women exhibition will be open from 5–9pm at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

CAMILLE UTTERBACK - Tues. Sept 11 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

Fall 2012 Kraus Visiting Professor of Art

CAMILLE UTTERBACK is an internationally acclaimed artist whose interactive installations and reactive sculptures engage participants in a dynamic process of kinesthetic discovery and play. Utterback’s work explores the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to human movement and gesture in layered and often humorous ways. Her work focuses attention on the continued relevance and richness of the body in our increasingly mediated world. Utterback’s extensive exhibit history includes more than fifty shows on four continents. Recent awards include the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award, Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship and a Whitney Museum commission for their ArtPort website. Recently completed public commissions include works for the City of St. Louis Park, Minnesota, the City of San Jose, California and the City of Sacramento.

NICHOLAS VAN WOERT - Tues. Sept 18 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

Interested in destruction as a form of alchemy and how it has been used throughout history as a means to regain a sense of identity, NICHOLAS VAN WOERT'S work makes reference to the iconoclasm during the 16th century Bildersturm in Europe, the breaking of stocking looms in England by the Luddites, burning billboards by Edward Abbey’s fictional characters in “The Monkey Wrench Gang” and the industrial sabotage of the underground radical environmentalists, EarthFirst. Each of these groups developed a relationship to ordinary objects and materials that drastically changed their original meaning. By slightly altering the context of a material they were able to turn something typically associated with convenience into a catastrophe. A darkness is revealed behind the familiar suggesting that the comfort a material provides may only be camouflage for the violence underneath. Van Woert has exhibited extensively, including solo shows in Paris, Amsterdam and New York.

JULIE HEFFERNAN - Tues. Sept 25 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

JULIE HEFFERNAN uses a process called image streaming to create open narrative paintings. Her work endeavors to see more deeply inside to those myriad selves that accumulate over time; hence the titles: Self-Portrait as Wreck and Self-Portrait as Random Perfect Being. She looks for forms and structures that contain complexity—in buildings with many cubicles, or trees with nesting boughs—to function as spaces of the psyche. Heffernan is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She received her MFA at Yale School of Art and Architecture and was inducted into the National Academy Museum in 2011. She has exhibited her paintings since 1988 and is represented by PPOW Gallery in New York City, Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles and Megumi Ogita Gallery in Tokyo. Heffernan is the recipient of numerous prizes including a NEA Grant and a NYFA Fellowship.

GRAHAM HARMAN - Tues. Oct 23 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

Co-Presented by Center for the Arts in Society

GRAHAM HARMAN is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Provost for Research Administration at the American University in Cairo. His work is engaged with the development of what he calls an object-oriented philosophy. Starting with the tool-analysis of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, Harman calls for a new metaphysics of things which emphasizes the autonomous existence of objects. He is the author of ten books including Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures, Circus Philosophicus, The Quadruple Object, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE and Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy.

CHARLES ATLAS - *POSTPONED TIL SPRING 2013*

CHARLES ATLAS has been a filmmaker and video artist since the 1970s. He has made pioneering media/dance works, multi-channel video installations, feature-length documentaries, video art works for television and live electronic performances. His recent projects include solo shows: The Illusion of Democracy at Luhring Augustine Bushwick and Discount Body Parts at De Hallen Museum in Holland; live performance/installations In Residence at the 2012 Whitney Biennial and The Pedestrians, in collaboration with Mika Tajima/New Humans at The South London Gallery and “Ocean,” a film of Merce Cunningham’s epic dance which premiered at the Walker Art Center. Atlas has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, three “Bessie” (New York Dance and Performance) Awards and was the 2006 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Art’s biennial John Cage Award.

MOYRA DAVEY - Tues. Nov 6 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

MOYRA DAVEY is an artist and writer. She has been making photographs since the late 1970s, and more recently has produced three narrative videos. The most recent, Les Goddesses, began as an inquiry into the validity of story-telling—specifically telling one’s own story—and the ambivalence surrounding this drive. The “story,” or some part of it, is finally enabled by the discovery of a series of coincidences that connect the lives and writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters, and Davey’s five sisters via a series of portraits she made of them in the early 1980s. Unexpectedly, the vicissitudes of photography, as practiced by the artist over the last thirty years, becomes a central theme of Les Goddesses.

KIMSOOJA - *CANCELLED* Tues. Nov 13 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

KIMSOOJA is an internationally acclaimed, Korean-born, multi-media artist who lives and works in New York City, Paris and Seoul. Her work combines performance, video, and installation, addressing issues of the displaced self. Kimsooja brings together a conceptual, logical and structural investigation of performance through immobility that inverts the notion of the artist as the predominant actor. Besides taking us on her journey, Kimsooja’s work is an invitation to question our existence, and the major challenges we are facing in this era. Kimsooja has exhibited internationally, and has been featured in many biennales, solo-site-specific projects and group shows, including major exhibitions at the Hirshhorn, LACMA, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia, MIT and Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Sweden.

RELATED PROGRAMMING:

ZACKARY DRUCKER & RHYS ERNST - Thurs. Oct 18 / 4:30p, Porter Hall 100

Presented by Center for the Arts in Society

Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst are a Los Angeles-based couple whose individual and collaborative work addresses, respectively, trans-feminine and trans-masculine experience. Drucker and Ernst will present recent films and projects, including their new experimental film collaboration, SHE GONE ROGUE, which premiered at the Hammer Museum's first Los Angeles Biennial, Made in LA 2012.

Rhys Ernst is a writer/director who positions his filmmaking in a "New Trans Cinema" that complicates gender representation in narrative cinema and places queer and transgender characters within larger narratives. He has screened work at Sundance, Oberhausen, Chicago International Film Festival, Chicago MOCA, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Hammer Museum, REDCAT, LACE and Outfest.

Zackary Drucker is a multi-media artist working in performance, film/video, photography, and spoken language. Drucker has exhibited her work at MOMA PS1, Deitch Projects, Leo Koenig Projekte, and Invisible Exports in New York; Hammer Museum, REDCAT, LACE, Steve Turner Contemporary, Human Resources, and Luis De Jesus in Los Angeles; and numerous international venues including the 54th Venice Biennale (Swiss Off-site Pavilion), Moscow International Biennale For Young Art, Les Recontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/ Madrid, and Lucca Museum of Contemporary Art in Italy.

WAFAA BILAL - Tues. Jan 24 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

Iraqi-born artist WAFAA BILAL, assistant arts professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, specializes in on-line performative and interactive works. His current project, the 3rdi, features a camera surgically implanted on the back of his head transmitting images to the web. Bilal’s 2010 work “…And Counting” had his back tattooed with a map of Iraq and dots representing casualties. For 2007’s Domestic Tension, Bilal spent a month in a gallery with a paintball gun that people could shoot at him over the internet – a statement on the Iraq war. Bilal fled Iraq in 1991 and came to the U.S. after two years in refugee camps.

KATRIN SIGURDARDOTTIER - Tues. Feb 7 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

KATRIN SIGURDARDOTTIER's work examines distance and memory and their embodiments in architecture, urbanism, cartography and traditional landscape representations. Sometimes there is a mnemonic aspect to the work, i.e. making the work is a process of spatial recall. Places created are frequently based on real places, points of departure, arrival or passage, places as minute at their spatial and temporal distance as the models she makes of them. Her most recent solo exhibitions include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Suburban, Chicago, Eleven Rivington, New York, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, Galeria Leme Sao Paulo, Brazil and FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon, France. She has received numerous fellowships and awards, including from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Rema Hort Mann Foundation and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Die Zeit, Vogue, Modern Painters, Flash Art and Kunstforum International.

ALI MOMENI - Tues. Feb 14 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

Momeni is a new Assistant Professor of Art at the School of Art in SIS (Sculpture Installation Site-Work)

ALI MOMENI is a builder, composer and performer interested in the poetics of gesture, affect and timing. His work makes use all manners of technology to explore the social lives of objects and their embedded performative qualities. His creative output ranges from kinetic sculptures and sound installations, to urban interventions and music theater performance.

STUART COMER - Tues. Mar 6 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

Orville M. Winsand Lecture

STUART COMER is Curator: Film at Tate Modern. He oversees film and video work for the Tate Collection and Displays and organizes an extensive programme of screenings, performances and events. He has contributed to numerous periodicals, including Artforum, Frieze, Afterall, Mousse, Parkett and Art Review. He is editor of Film and Video Art (Tate Publishing, 2009) and has contributed essays on artists including Andrea Fraser, David Lamelas, Sharon Lockhart, among others. He was co-curator of the 2007 Lyon Biennial. Comer has participated in symposia, talks and events at numerous international venues. He has been a member of juries for the 2010 Venice Film Festival, the 2006 BFI Sutherland Trophy at the The Times BFI 50th London Film Festival, the International Jury for the Oberhausen 52nd International Short Film Festival 2006, the Derek Jarman Award for artists' film and video (2008), and the inaugural Magic of Persia Contemporary Art Prize (2009).

LISA SANDITZ - Tues. Mar 20 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

LISA SANDITZ makes paintings that examine the absurdities that occur in the built environment. Whether painting malls, farms, highways, abandoned housing developments or factories in China, Sanditz interprets these locations with a range of formal gestures tailored to capture the particular feeling of the location. She has had solo shows in New York at CRG Gallery, in Brussels at Jansen Galerie, in Kansas City at The Kemper Museum and most recently in Los Angeles at ACME Gallery, where she is represented, as well as by CRG. A Guggenheim Fellow in 2008, Sanditz has a BA from MacCalaster College and MFA from Pratt. She is currently living and working in Tivoli, NY, where she is a Visiting Professor at Bard College.

BRODY CONDON - Tues. Mar 27 / 5:00pm, McConomy Auditorium

BRODY CONDON is an American artist currently based in New York. Concerned with the over-identification with fantasy in contemporary culture, Condon’s process often finds its final form in performative situations and video installation. The work often modifies existing pop culture, historical events, as well as other artworks. Steeped in dark humour and a unsypathetic gaze into his own unreliable post traumatic memories, the work directly engages with various modes of “projection of self” into other spaces via computer and live roleplaying games, religious experience, psychoactive substances, and dissociative disorders. Condon graduated with an MFA from the University of California San Diego, and attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Rijkakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Recent US exhibitions and performances include Greater New York at PS1, The New Museum, and MoMA in New York, as well the Hammer Museum and LACMA in Los Angeles.

***CANCELED*** WANGECHI MUTU - Tues. Apr 17 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born artist who currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. With a deep investment in female subjects and issues that pertain to the picture of a post-colonial African, the female body is a primary site of engagement and provocation in her work: elegantly horrific figures lurk in a hybrid world, trapped between consciousness and unconsciousness, silences and noises, life and death, real and unreal. Her signature aesthetic severs and blends a multitude of sources - medical diagrams, glossy magazines, anthropological and botanical texts, pornographic materials and traditional African arts, travel postcards, mechanical and hunting publications, glitter, faux pearls, packing tape, rhinestones, synthetic and real hair - achieving a prototypical form of visual mythography. Raised and educated in Nairobi, Mutu received her International Baccalaureate from the United World College of the Atlantic, Wales, came to New York in the 1990s where she focused on Fine Arts and Cultural Anthropology at the New School for Social Research and Parsons School of Art and Design, and went on to earn her BFA from the Cooper Union in 1996, and MFA from Yale University in 2000. She was the recipient of Deutsche Bank’s first Artist of the Year award (2010) and has exhibited at major institutions around the world.

SHARY BOYLE - Thurs. Apr 24 / 5pm, Kresge Theatre

SHARY BOYLE is a Toronto-based visual artist recognized internationally for her drawing, sculpture and painting and for her audio-visual performances. Her work is characterized by the deeply personal and psychologically moving content of her imagery, which explores social anxiety, desire and bittersweet fantasy through a darkly feminist lens. Critical, enchanting and at times humorous, Boyle's work is raw with human vulnerability and dysfunction.
 Shary Boyle is the winner of the 2009 Iskowitz Award and the 2010 Hnatyshyn Foundation Award and her work is exhibited and collected internationally. A solo exhibition of her work, entitled Flesh and Blood, recently toured from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2010), to Galerie de L'UQAM, Montreal (2011), and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2011). She will complete a major commission for the Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 2012.

RELATED PROGRAMMING:

OUT OF RUBBLE: SUSANNE SLAVICK - Tues. Jan 17 / 5pm, McKenna Pater Wright Room, University Center

Presented by CMU Center for Arts in Society, exhibition "Out of Rubble" on view at SPACE Gallery, Pittsburgh, through Jan. 29. 2012

Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art Susanne Slavick discusses her recent book and curatorial project on the aftermath of war. OUT OF RUBBLE (Charta 2011)
presents international artists who consider its causes and consequences, its finality and future, moving from decimation and disintegration to the possibilities of regeneration and recovery.

MAYA LIN - Fri. Feb 10 / doors 5pm, lecture 6pm, Carnegie Music Hall, Carnegie Museum of Art

2012 Robert Lepper Distinguished Lecture in Creative Inquiry, co-presented by CMU School of Art and the Carnegie Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibition "Maya Lin" on view in the Heinz Architectural Center, CMOA, Feb. 11 - May 13, 2012.

Ranging from room-sized installations evoking mountainous topography to delicate wall installations of silver pins tracing the flow of American rivers, Lin's works evoke her own unique experience of the environment while encouraging visitors to consider the physicality of the world in which we live and our sympathetic existence with nature.

MELISSA RAGONA - Tues. Sept 13 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

MELISSA RAGONA’s critical work focuses on sound design, film theory and new media practice and reception. By forging approaches from the disciplines of film studies, art history, and new media technologies, her work has sought to present a more complex aesthetic, theoretical, and historical foundation for the analysis of contemporary time-based arts. Her essays and reviews have appeared in October, Frieze, Art Papers and in the edited collections Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound, eds. J. Beck and T. Grajeda (U of Illinois Press, 2008), Women’s Experimental Cinema, ed. Robin Blaetz (Duke University Press, 2007), and Andy Warhol Live (Prestel, 2008), among others. She is currently completing a book on Andy Warhol’s tape recordings tentatively titled Readymade Sound: Andy Warhol’s Recording Aesthetics, forthcoming from University of California Press, Berkeley. She is an Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Art History in the School of Art at Carnegie-Mellon University.

PAULINE OLIVEROS - Tues. Sept 20 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

PAULINE OLIVEROS, composer, performer and humanitarian is an important pioneer in American Music. Acclaimed internationally, for four decades she has explored sound — forging new ground for herself and others. Through improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation she has created a body of work with such breadth of vision that it profoundly effects those who experience it and eludes many who try to write about it. Pauline Oliveros is the founder of "Deep Listening," which comes from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. Pauline describes Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. "Through Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening I finally know what harmony is.... It's about the pleasure of making music." John Cage 1989

NOBUHO NAGASAWA - Tues. Sept 27 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

Co-Sponsored by the Office of Public Art, a partnership between the City of Pittsburgh and the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, and Point Park University

In the field of public art, NOBUHO NAGASAWA has been commissioned for more than 25 projects internationally, and received numerous awards. Most recently she has been selected to work on a project in downtown Pittsburgh, which makes a connection between the Mon Wharf and Point Park University campus. An interdisciplinary artist, whose site-specific work explores the places, politics, ecology and psychological dimensions of space and people, her art involves in-depth research into cultural history and memory, and extensive community participation. Based in New York City since 2001, Nagasawa was born in Tokyo, raised in Europe and Japan, and received her MFA at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. An invitation from California Institute of the Arts brought her as a visiting scholar to the US in 1986, where she studied visual art, critical theory and music.

Nagasawa’s international exhibition record is extensive, including: the Royal Garden of the Prague Castle (Czech Republic), Ludwig Museums (Germany and Hungary), Rufino Tamayo Museum (Mexico), Alexandria Library (Egypt), the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities (US), Asian Art Biennial (Bangladesh, 2002), International Art Biennial (Egypt 2002,04,05), Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates 2003), Echigo-Tsumari Triennial (Japan 2003), and Sinop Biennial (Turkey 2006).

STELARC - Wed. Oct 5 / 4:30pm, Rashid Auditorium

co-sponsored by the Department of Human Computer Interaction

Stelarc has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality, systems, the Internet, and biotechnology to explore alternate, intimate, and involuntary interfaces with the body. His Prosthetic Head is an embodied conversational agent that speaks to a person who interrogates it. His surgically-constructed Ear on Arm will be internet enabled. Stelarc was appointed Honorary Professor of Art & Robotics at CMU in 1997. In 2010 he received a grant from the Australia Council to develop a micro-robot and wasalso awarded a Prix Ars Electonica Hybrid Arts Prize. He is currently Chair in Performance Art, School of Arts, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, and a Senior Research Fellow and Visiting Artist at the MARCS Auditory Labs at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.

SIMON LEUNG - Tues. Oct 11 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

The work of Los Angeles-based artist SIMON LEUNG serves as a companion guide for examining the dislocation and disparities that are left in the aftermath of war. Pulling inspiration from objects, people, and writing that have been removed from their origins—through the effects of time, circumstance or historical violence—Leung recombines these parts to form new allegories that challenge the received meanings of his source material. Using video, performance, and other media, Leung obliquely reinvents the war stories of our time. A professor at the University of California, Irvine, Leung has exhibited at the Guangzhou Triennial (2008), Luleå Biennial (2005), Venice Biennale (2003), Whitney Biennial (1993), the Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, 1a Space (Hong Kong), NGBK (Berlin). His exhibitions in 2011 include “91 92 93” at the MAK Center (Los Angeles), “Regress Progress” at the Ujazdowski Castle (Warsaw), and a solo exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation (NYC).

CAROLEE SCHNEEMAN - Tues. Oct 18 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

A pioneer of performance art, CAROLEE SCHNEEMAN works in a wide variety of media including performance, assemblage, photography, film, video, and installation. Throughout her career, her work has found its loci in discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. Several of her most important early pieces include the multimedia performances Meat Joy (1964), Interior Scroll (1975) and her films, Fuses (1964-67) and Viet Flakes (1965). Her installation Up To And Including Her Limits (1973-76)—influenced by Jackson Pollock in which she draws-in-trance while suspended from a harness—was recently featured at The Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Her work has been shown at innumerable venues around the world including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC; Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, Barcelona, and Vienna; New Museum of Contemporary Art , NYC (major retrospective),  MOCA, LA; Stadtische Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf, Germany; Venice Biennale, Italy; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

EVA & FRANCO MATTES - Tues. Oct 25 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

EVA & FRANCO MATTES are the Brooklyn-based artist-provocateurs behind the infamous website www.0100101110101101.ORG. Pioneers of the net.art movement, they are renowned for masterful subversion of public media such as an unauthorized Nike advertising campaign, a fake Vatican website and a radioactive children playground made with scrap metal from Chernobyl.  Eva and Franco Mattes works have been shown internationally including: Collection Lambert, Avignon; Fondazione Pitti Discovery, Florence, Postmasters Gallery, New York; Lentos Museum of Modern Art, Linz; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; ICC, Tokyo; Manifesta4. They received the Jerome Commission from the Walker Art Center, and they are among the youngest artists to ever participate to the Venice Biennale.

CAROL CONDE & KARL BEVERIDGE  - Thurs. Nov 3 / 5pm, Kresge Theatre

co-sponsored by the Department of the History of Art & Architecture, University of Pittsburgh

CAROL CONDE and KARL BEVERIDGE are a Toronto-based duo who have an amazing track record of socially concerned and politically committed art making, which usefully contributes to interpretations of Contextual Practice. The artists will present "Documentary Fictions", an overview of their photographic projects depicting environmental issues, health care, the economy, and cultural production. Since 1975, their work has presented stories about labor, resistance and its representation. Most often working in collaboration with members of the communities depicted in their photographs,  Condé and Beveridge create narrative series via staged reconstructions employing detailed sets, collage and digital technology. Their work also references various art historical and cultural practices to create a critical commentary on the function and understanding of contemporary cultures. They have exhibited internationally in community spaces, art galleries, and museums: most recently in exhibitions at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland, a survey exhibition at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario, and the Noorderlicht Photofestival, Groningen, Holland. Condé and Beveridge have been active in several labor arts initiatives including the Mayworks Festival in Toronto and the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton, Ontario.

RELATED PROGRAMMING:

Art && Code "Making Stuff With Depth Cameras" Symposium / Oct 21-23

Presented by the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry

Art && Code 3D is a festival-conference about the artistic, technical, tactical and cultural potentials of 3D scanning and sensing devices — especially (but not exclusively) including the revolutionary Microsoft Kinect sensor. This highly interdisciplinary event will bring together, for the first time, tinkerers and hackers, computational artists and designers, industrial game developers, and leading researchers from the fields of computer vision, HCI and robotics. Half-maker’s festival, half-academic symposium.

GOLAN LEVIN - Tues. Jan 18 / 5pm, McConomy Auditorium

GOLAN LEVIN’s work explores new modes of interactive expression and nonverbal communication. Through performances, responsive artifacts, and virtual environments, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines and expand the vocabulary of human action. Levin has spent more than 20 years as an artist immersed in high-technology research environments, including the MIT Media Laboratory, Ars Electronica Futurelab, and the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology. His work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, and has been recognized with grants from Creative Capital, the Rockefeller MAP Fund, Arts Council England, and others. Levin is presently Associate Professor and Director of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.

TOM SACHS - Tues. Jan 25 / 5pm, Kresge Theater

TOM SACHS is a sculptor known for his elaborate recreations of Modern icons and masterpieces of engineering and design out of everyday materials. His work has been shown widely including at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Sperone Westwater, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Kunsthaus Graz, X Initiative, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, and The New Yorker. Sachs studied at the Architectural Association, London, received a BA from Bennington College and currently lives in New York.

MARINA ZURKOW - Tues. Feb 15 / 5pm, Kresge Theatre

MARINA ZURKOW makes psychological, animated narratives about humans and their relationship to animals, plants and the weather. With a painterly aesthetic, her work has taken the form of multi-channel videos, customized multi-screen computer pieces, cartoons, and interactive mobile works. Since 2000, Zurkow has exhibited at The Sundance Film Festival, The Rotterdam Film Festival, The Seoul Media City Biennial, Ars Electronica, Creative Time, The Kitchen, The Walker Art Center, The National Museum for Women in the Arts, Eyebeam, and other venues. She has been a NYFA Fellow, a Rockefeller New Media Fellow, a Creative Capital grantee, and a MacDowell Colony Fellow. Zurkow is faculty as NYU’s Interactive Technology Program (ITP), lives in Brooklyn, NY, and is represented by Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery.

JAMES ACORD - Tues. Mar 1 / 5pm, Kresge Theatre

IN MEMORY OF THE ARTIST and world’s first nuclear materials sculptor who passed away in early 2011, WE WILL SCREEN A VIDEO OF HIS LAST KNOWN LECTURE – a rather remarkable talk where he announces that, for the first time, he has successfully produced plutonium.

JAMES ACORD is the only private individual in the world licensed to work with radioactive material. The world’s first nuclear sculptor has spent years learning how to execute modern alchemy: the conversion of radioactive waste into inert material and subsequently into sculptures. The development of his artistic process, from the simple discovery that granite is mildly radioactive, to moving to live on the outskirts of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States, where Plutonium was first isolated, is part of a 20-year-long living performance which turns the overlooked remains of the Cold War machine into art and poetry. He currently lives and works in Seattle.

ADAM ZARETSKY - Tues. Mar 15 / 5pm, Kresge Theatre

ADAM ZARETSKY is an artist, court jester, mad-scientist and misbehaving ethicist working in the world of bioart. The materials Zaretsky has recently worked with include surgically manipulated pheasant embryos and a preserved turd of the deceased writer William S. Burroughs. Adam was banned from leading a workshop at the 2010 Ars Electronica Festival where members of the public would have used a “gene-gun” to alter the evolutionary trajectory of otherwise normal zebrafish. Zaretsky’s work pulls from art history, philosophy, science and pop-culture in order to make us question the very notion of categories. Zaretsky is currently completing his PhD in Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

AMY FRANCESCHINI - Tues. Mar 22 / 5pm, McConomy Auditorium

co-sponsored by CMU Human Computer Interaction Institute

AMY FRANCESCHINI is an artist who uses various media to encourage exchange and production, often in collaboration with other practitioners. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature. She often provides a playful entry point for an audience to participate in and initiate change in the places we live. Amy founded the artist collective and design studio, Futurefarmers, in 1995 and co-founded Free Soil in 2004. Her solo and collaborative work has been included in international exhibitions at ZKM, the Whitney Museum, the New York Museum of Modern Art and Walker Art Center. She is the recipient of the Artadia, Cultural Innovation, Eureka Fellowship, Creative Capital and Guggenheim Fellowships. Receiving her BFA from San Francisco State University and her MFA from Stanford University, Amy is currently a visiting artist at California College of the Arts and Stanford University.

LISA SANDITZ  - Tues. Apr 5 / 5pm, Kresge Theatre

LISA SANDITZ makes paintings that examine the absurdities that occur in the built environment. Whether painting malls, farms, highways, abandoned housing developments or factories in China, Sanditz interprets these locations with a range of formal gestures tailored to capture the particular feeling of the location. She has had solo shows in New York at CRG Gallery, in Brussels at Jansen Galerie, in Kansas City at The Kemper Museum and most recently in Los Angeles at ACME Gallery, where she is represented, as well as by CRG. A Guggenheim Fellow in 2008, Sanditz has a BA from MacCalaster College and MFA from Pratt. She is currently living and working in Tivoli, NY, where she is a Visiting Professor at Bard College.

CYNTHIA LIN - Tues. Apr 12 / 5pm, Kresge Theatre

CYNTHIA LIN was born in Taiwan and is based in Brooklyn, NY, where she is working on a series of large graphite drawings of skin, orifices, and scars based on computer scans. Her work has been shown at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, the DeCordova Museum, The Drawing Center, Dallas Museum of Art, Bronx River Art Center, The National Academy of Design, and the ISE Cultural Foundation. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, Lin has also been awarded residencies at Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, Djerassi, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Visiting Artists and Scholars Program at the American Academy in Rome. She received a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, MFA from The University of Iowa, and teaches at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Brooklyn College.

RELATED PROGRAMMING:

OpenFrameworks Pioneers Presentation Series / Jan 10-14, Adamson Wing

Each weekday, 5-6pm (Baker Hall 136A)
Presented by the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry

In association with the first international OpenFrameworks World-Wide Developers Meeting, some of the world’s leading computational artists and designers will be encamped at CMU’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry to work on the next version of OpenFrameworks, a toolkit for new media education and creative coding. Each evening two or three of these pioneers will discuss their work at the intersection of arts and computer science.

Featuring presentations by:
Zachary Lieberman
Theodore Watson
Arturo Castro
Mehmet Akten
Todd Vanderlin
Anton Marini
Damian Stewart
and many others!

wats:ON? Festival, SPEED / Mar 16-19, CFA

More info

Notions of speed in contemporary culture are often tied to technology and its impact on everyday life. Information dissemination and interactions are accelerating, and with it hopes and fears of the future change with every new invention or discovery. Our culture of speed harnesses energies beyond our comprehension, while calling into question the nature of our everyday reality.