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.