Visiting Artists and Speakers
Students in the Department of Visual Art are exposed to a steady stream of visiting artists and scholars. Below are some of the guest artists and art professionals who spend days in the department, giving students further opportunities to work with experts in the field who offer inspiration, new perspectives, and career advice.
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Below are our Fall 2026 Visiting Artists...
Michael Jones McKean
Artist Talk: Thursday, September 17 | 6PM | Marvin Hall ForumMICHAEL JONES MCKEAN (b. Micronesia, lives/works Richmond, Virginia) is a sculptor whose work explores the nature of objects in relation to folklore, technology, anthropology, and geography. His work engages an interest in deep time, timescales and their collapse, in the process de-centering anthropocentric registrations of events, distances, and meaning. Through his working process he challenges stable definitions such as real and replica, natural and synthetic, past and future, employing matter as diverse as ancient meteorites, of-the-moment technologies, raw clay, psychotropic medicines, decaying boats, prismatic rainbows, and the earth itself. Michael's work is featured in Digital Prairie, a group exhibition curated by Visual Art faculty Poppy DeltaDawn and Steve Gurysh, currently on view at the Charlotte Street Foundation, Aug 15 - Sept 26.
Jeanine Oleson
Artist Talk: Thursday, September 24 | 6PM | Marvin Hall ForumJEANINE OLESON is an interdisciplinary artist working with images, materiality and language, which she forms into complex and humorous objects, instruments, images, videos and performances through a queer and feminist lens. Oleson has published two books about performance projects, “What?” and “The Greater New York Smudge Cleanse,” both in 2012, and “Conduct Matters,” published by Dancing Foxes Press in 2019. She has also been a lead collaborator since 2013 on a participatory project, Photo Requests from Solitary that provides images to people in solitary confinement in US prisons.
Oleson teaches at Rutgers University and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Jeanine's work is featured in Digital Prairie, a group exhibition curated by Visual Art faculty Poppy DeltaDawn and Steve Gurysh, currently on view at the Charlotte Street Foundation, Aug 15 - Sept 26.
Resident Artists Present: KU & Lawrence Arts Center
Monday, October 5 | 6PM | Lawrence Arts CenterShort talks by:
Taylor Fentz, Stanionis Resident in Metalsmithing & Jewelry, KU
Hibiki Miyazaki, Printmaking Resident, Lawrence Arts Center
Sarah Knight, Interdisciplinary Ceramic Research Center Resident, KU
Grace Edwards, Interdisciplinary Ceramic Research Center Resident, KU
Reece Henderson, Ceramics Resident, Lawrence Arts Center
Omer Wasim, Lance Williams Resident in the Arts & Sciences, KU
JUANA ESTRADA HERNÁNDEZ
Artist Talk: Monday, October 26 | 6PM | Marvin Hall ForumJUANA ESTRADA HERNÁNDEZ is a Mexican artist and Assistant Professor of Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her artwork centers on socio-political issues related to immigration, particularly for communities affected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—a United States immigration policy that provides administrative relief from deportation and work permits for some immigrants who arrived as minors without legal resident status. Her work is visually informed by a love of drawing, her family’s intergenerational migration stories, cultural traditions, foods, and language. It interrogates the false promises, limitations, and contradictions of the ‘American Dream.’
Jacklyn Brickman
Artist Talk: Monday, November 9 | 5:30PM | Marvin Hall ForumJACKLYN BRICKMAN is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work entangles science fact with fiction to address social and environmental concerns by employing natural entities, processes, and technology. Her work spans installation, video, and performance, with a special interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration and social engagement. Environments might range from immediate urban landscapes, and municipal land, to wilderness. Her practice is rooted in the observation and examination of natural forms (especially plants) and their processes as a means of understanding, drawing similarities, and speculating possibilities for the future.
Chris E. Vargas
Artist Talk & Book Signing: Tuesday, November 10 | 7PM | Liberty HallCHRIS E. VARGAS is a video maker & interdisciplinary artist currently based in Los Angeles, CA whose work uses humor and performance with mainstream idioms to explore the complex ways that queer and trans people negotiate spaces for themselves within historical & institutional memory and popular culture. Vargas is also the Executive Director of MOTHA, the Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art, a critical and conceptual arts & hirstory institution highlighting the contributions of trans art to the cultural and political landscape. Vargas is the co-editor, with David Evan Franz and Christina Linden, of Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects (Hirmer, 2023), a project of the Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art. Talk & Book signing presented by KU Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Past Visiting Artists & Speakers
Doreen Garner is an American sculptor and performance artist. Her art practice explores where history, power, and violence meet on the body via beauty or medicine.
Edgar Heap of Birds
Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds artistic creations and efforts as an advocate for indigenous communities worldwide are focused first upon social justice and then the personal freedom to live within the tribal circle as an expressive individual.
Sylvie Fortin
Sylvie Fortin is an independent curator, researcher, critic, and editor. She frequently contributes to numerous periodicals, and her critical texts have been published in many catalogues, readers, and anthologies.
Stephen Powers
Stephen Powers has been a central figure in the graffiti movement since the late 1980s, painting in his native West Philadelphia and in New York City where he now lives and works.
Matt Wedel
Wedel’s art enters the realm of mythological creation stories. Intent on recreating the world from mud or clay, he intricately models vegetation, minerals, and animals—all of which, while familiar, suggest they have roots in the unknown.
Annie Lapin
Annie Lapin’s paintings reside in a world of multiplicities; digital histories and analog mark making come together to form trompe l’oeil spaces that abide neither to the rules of the virtual nor to the physical.
Sydney Pursel
Sydney Jane Brooke Campbell Maybrier Pursel (yeah, its a mouthful) is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in socially engaged, activist, performance, video and new media arts. Through art she explores personal identity drawing from her Indigenous and
