Visiting Artists & Scholars Series

Theorist-in-Community
Monday, June 17, 7:00–8:30 p.m. CT    

Jennifer Doyle is the author of Campus Sex/Campus Security, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire. With Jeanne Vaccaro, she is co-curator of Scientia Sexualis, a group exhibition opening in October at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is president of the board of directors at Human Resources Los Angeles, and a professor of English at University of California, Riverside. Doyle will deliver our inaugural Theorist-in-Community lecture, which sets the intellectual and affective tone for the Summer Residency that supports community building within and beyond the LRMFA program.

The First Hit is Always Free
Thursday, June 20, 6:00–7:30 p.m. CT

Hamza Walker is director of LAXART, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles. Prior to joining LAXART in 2016, he was director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a non-collecting contemporary art museum. Walker has curated dozens of exhibitions ranging from solo to thematic exhibitions, from the production of new work to career surveys. From a rearview mirror perspective, Walker will discuss exhibition-making and its relationship to the broader field of culture.

CTRL + F “Black”
Monday, June 24, 6:00–7:30 p.m. CT

Join Kimberly Drew for a discussion about her career in the arts field. Drew is a curator, cultural critic, and author with over a decade of experience in the art world. She has written for publications including Vogue, Vanity Fair, and, most recently, NY Magazine. Drew has also published two books, Black Futures, co-edited with J Wortham, and This is What I Know About Art, a young adult book about art and activism. Drew works on independent curatorial projects and recently joined the staff at Pace Gallery, where she works as a director on the curatorial team. 

TO BE RESCHEDULED
The Communal Online
Thursday, June 27, 6:00–7:30 p.m. CT

Dodie Bellamy is a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, personal essayist, and art journalist who has published a dozen books, including Bee Reaved, When the Sick Rule the World, and The Letters of Mina Harker. Her talk discusses her return to an abandoned novel, Fat Chance, which centers around an online affair that occurred in 1996, when the internet was just becoming popular with the masses.

Monday, July 1, 7:00–8:30 p.m. CT

Caroline Kent is a Chicago-based visual artist who explores the relationship between language, translation, and abstraction through an expanded painting practice. Developed through an ongoing archive of works on paper, the paintings build out of this context to exist in the multiple forms of drawings, paintings, sculpture, and performance. Kent labors to expand the discourse of abstraction to include alternative logics that move beyond surface and frame through each act of translation, from one medium to the next.
 

Sister Acts
Monday, July 8, 6:00–7:30 p.m. CT

Carmelita Tropicana (aka Alina Troyano) is a writer and performer who straddles the worlds of performance art and theater, using irreverent humor and fantasy as subversive tools to challenge cultural stereotypes and rewrite history from multiple perspectives. Ela Troyano is an interdisciplinary artist whose projects bring together different aesthetic histories and genres: downtown New York avant-garde film and performance, queer cinema, Cuban-American cinema-in-exile, and Latine film and video. This lecture will center on the long-time collaboration between two sisters, from their early childhood in La Habana, Cuba, and their rise in New York City’s downtown arts scene in the 1980s.

Imperfect Solidarities
Thursday, July 11, 6:00–7:30 p.m. CT

Aruna D'Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. Her work focuses on artists of the global majority and on art whose intersecting aesthetic and political possibilities allow us to imagine new, more just, more kind forms of life. Drawing from her newly released book, on building solidarity beyond empathy, D'Souza will talk about work by a range of artists including Shilpa Gupta, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Stephanie Syjuco, Jennifer Packer, and Simone Leigh to discuss the ways we can imagine building political solidarities without translating ourselves into a language that is our own, and without demanding that others do the same.

Monday, July 15, 7:00–8:30 p.m. CT

Michael Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American artist working at the intersection of problem-solving and troublemaking. His work has appeared in venues worldwide including dOCUMENTA (13), P.S.1, MoMA, MassMOCA, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Palais de Tokyo, the 16th Biennale of Sydney, the 10th and 14th Istanbul Biennials, Sharjah Biennial 8, Tirana Biennale, National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt, Transmediale 05, FRONT Triennial in Cleveland, and CURRENT:LA Public Art Triennial. He lives and works in Chicago. 

Toward an Integrated Art Practice
Thursday, July 18, 6:00–7:30 p.m. CT

Meredith Talusan is a multidisciplinary artist best known to the general public as an author and journalist. Her debut memoir, Fairest, was a 2020 Lambda Literary Award finalist and named a best book of the year by multiple venues. Her talk will ask viewers to query their relationship to every aspect of their life, and think through the possibilities for a practice that is joyful, sustainable, and fully integrated with their art.

The Beyond of the Essay Film
Saturday, July 20, 3:00–4:30 p.m. CT

Elaine Byrne is an interdisciplinary artist based between New York and Dublin. Her lecture draws on her doctoral research in Film & Media at Temple University, wherein she theorizes the multi-modal essay film: a new, mixed, or hybrid form that incorporates objects into the filmic element in order to subvert previous standards and open a way for more flexible and heterodox measurements of value and relevance. 

Carcerally Speaking: Fact Patterns and Practices of Speech Unfreedom
Monday, July 22, 6:00–7:30 p.m. CT

Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of Comparative Literature and chair of French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University. Her books include Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018), Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013), Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (co-edited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). Apter’s lecture will examine the force fields that shape current political struggles over free speech, due process, bodily autonomy, and racial pessimism.