Events: Lectures

VISTING ARTIST LECTURE SERIES
Sabrina Gschwandtner
October 16, 2007
6:30 p.m.
Meadows Museum

Sabrina Gschwandtner is a New York-based artist who works with film, video, photography, performance, sewing, crochet and knitting. After studying at Harvard University and the Sommerakademie fur Bildende Kunst, she received her BA in art/semiotics from Brown University, and an MFA from Bard College. Her artwork has been exhibited at various international museums and galleries, including the Museum of Arts and Design, SculptureCenter, Artists Space, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Anthology Film Archives, and is currently on view at Extreme Crafts at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania and Common Threads at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, Prince Edward Island, Canada. In 2002, she founded KnitKnit, a limited edition arts journal dedicated to the intersection of fine art and handcraft. She has curated and organized numerous exhibits and events around the themes and issues raised by the publication. Sabrina Gschwandtner’s visit is sponsored by the Student Art Association.

Michael Smith
April 9, 2007
6:30 pm
Meadows Museum

Michael Smith received his B.A. from The Colorado College and attended The Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York City. Smith has taught at numerous art schools and universities including University of California at Los Angeles, California Institute of the Arts, Cranbrook, Art Center, University of Illinois at Chicago, The Royal Danish Academy, Pratt Institute, and Yale University. He has exhibited extensively around the US, Canada and Europe at a variety of venues from museums and galleries to nightclubs and television. His works are in the permanent collections of The Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Museum of Radio and Television in New York City. Since 1997 he has collaborated with Joshua White on several large-scale installations that were shown at The New Museum and the Christine Burgin Gallery in New York City, The Vienna Kunsthalle, Art Metropole in Toronto, the Hales Galley in London and at the Basel Art Fair. In addition to his collaborative work with Joshua White, Smith has had recent solo exhibitions at Dunn and Brown Contemporary in Dallas, Galleria Emi Fontana in Milan and at Ellen de Bruijn Projects in Amsterdam. In the fall of 2007 “Mike's World: Michael Smith & Joshua White (and other collaborators)” a retrospective of 30 years of Smith’s work will be on view at the Blanton Museum in Austin, TX. He will be included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

COMINI LECTURE SERIES IN ART HISTORY
Complicity and Engagement: Whither Collecting
November 8, 2007
5:30 p.m.
Meadows Museum

Dr. Johanna Drucker, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and Professor in the Department of English, addresses the basis for thinking about contemporary art in relation to aesthetic theory by examining a handful of case studies, including work by Iona Rozeal Brown, William Wiley and Robert Longo. The talk is both a critique of high modernist theory as a foundation for contemporary work, and an outline of principles that emerge from critical engagement with contemporary art.

Johanna Drucker has published and lectured extensively on topics related to the history of typography, artists' books, and visual art. She is currently the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia where she is Professor in the Department of English and Director of Media Studies. Her scholarly books include: Theorizing Modernism (Columbia University Press, 1994), The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art (University of Chicago Press, 1994); The Alphabetic Labyrinth (Thames and Hudson, 1995), and The Century of Artists' Books (Granary, 1995). Her most recent collection, Figuring the Word, was published in November, 1998, (Granary Books).

In addition to her scholarly work, Drucker is internationally known as a book artist and experimental, visual poet. Her work has been exhibited and collected in special collections in libraries and museums including the Getty Center for the Humanities, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Marvin and Ruth Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry, the New York Public Library, Houghton Library at Harvard University, and many others. Recent titles include Narratology (1994), Prove Before Laying (1997), The Word Made Flesh (1989; 1995) The History of the/my Wor(l)d (1990; 1994), Night Crawlers on the Web (2000), Nova Reperta.(JABbooks, 1999), Emerging Sentience (JABbooks 2001), the last two in collaboration with Brad Freeman. A Girl's Life, a collaboration with painter Susan Bee, is forthcoming from Granary Books in Spring 2002.