Carnegie Mellon University
January 14, 2014

Press Release: Carnegie Mellon School of Art's Lecture Series Features Diverse Media, Artists and Critics From Around the World

Series Includes Carnegie International Exhibitors

Contacts: Lauren Goshinski / 412-268-1533 / laurengo@andrew.cmu.edu
                Pam Wigley / 412-889-6238 / pwigley@andrew.cmu.edu

PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art announces its Spring 2014 Lecture Series, featuring internationally renowned artists and critics whose diverse, multidisciplinary work spans animation, code, videogame design, performance, film, video, drawing, painting, sculpture and installation.

This series is especially robust, including artists currently exhibiting in the 2013 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, and CMU's DRAW2014 Symposium (Feb. 27 — March 1).

All lectures are free and open to the public. Locations, times, and complete artist bios are posted at www.cmu.edu/art/lectures. Questions about the series can be directed to 412.268.2409 or laurengo@andrew.cmu.edu. The schedule and artist briefs follow.

Jan. 21 (5 p.m., Kresge Theater): Emily Cheng uses painting and drawing as her medium. According to Ken Johnson of The New York Times, her "delicate and inventive play with symbols, styles mark-making, and translucency creates semiotic reveries."

Feb. 4 (5 p.m., Kresge Theater): Elika Hedayat is an Iranian artist who mixes personal accounts and experimental documentary — drawing inspiration from Iranian folk art — to question identity, origin, complexity and cultural schizophrenia to update the collective history of a generation living under war and oppression.

Feb. 15 (5 p.m. Kresge Theater): David Joselit, the Orville M. Winsand Lecturer, is a scholar and critic who writes frequently about contemporary art and media. He has covered pivotal moments in modern art ranging from the Dada movement of the early 20th century to the emergence of globalization.

Feb. 25 (5 p.m., McConomy Auditorium): Eddo Stern is an artist and game designer born in Tel Aviv, Israel. Living in Los Angeles, his work explores the uneasy and otherwise unconscious connections between physical existence and electronic simulation, surrounding the subject matters of violence, fantasy and historical memory.

Feb. 27 (6 p.m., Carnegie Lecture Hall, Carnegie Museum of Art): Amy Sillman will give the Lepper Lecture, co-presented by DRAW2014. Her paintings, drawings and animations activate diverse procedures and forms — moving freely and engaging between figuration and abstraction, using both language and image, a sense of humor and seriousness.

March 1 (1:30 p.m., McConomy Auditorium): Shahzia Sikander is the Jeff Pan Visiting Lecturer. The talk is co-presented by DRAW2014. She is a Pakistani artist who reinvents Indian and Persian miniature painting by imbuing imagery with personal histories, expanding its scale to the wall with murals and installation, and subverting stereotypes of the East through performance/experiments like wearing a veil in public, something she never did before moving to the United States.

March 4 (5 p.m., Kresge Theater): Dinh Q. Lê is a Vietnamese artist who developed an innovative multidisciplinary technique that combines traditional Vietnamese craft with modern truths to examine contradictory topics, such as the legacy of the Vietnam War and the marketing of Vietnam as a tourist's paradise. He also is the co-founder of the Vietnam Foundation for the Arts, which initiates artistic exchanges between Vietnam and the West.

March 25 (5 p.m., Kresge Theater): Nina Paley is an animator who creates work around the topics of freedom of expression, political remix and dissonance. Her adventures in our broken copyright system led her to join QuestionCopyright.org, where she produced a series of animated shorts about intellectual freedom.

April 1 (5 p.m., McConomy Auditorium): Eric Dyer is an artist, filmmaker, experimental animator and educator whose award-winning work has been screened and exhibited around the world. As a member of the Visual Arts faculty at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, he teaches animation and brings students and symphony orchestras together to create music visualizations and animation performances.

RELATED PROGRAMMING:

Trans-Q TV Presentations 4:30 p.m., Feb. 11, STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
Life and Belief- Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War: Discussion w Dinh Q Le + curators 6:30 p.m., March 5, Carnegie Museum of Art Theater

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