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.
Doreen Garner
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. Garner has exhibited at a number of venues, including Abrons Arts Center, Pioneer Works, Socrates Sculpture Park, The National Museum of African American History in Washington, D.C., Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art in Brooklyn, and Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia.
Edgar Heap of Birds
The artworks of Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds include multi-disciplinary forms of public art messages, large scale drawings, neuf series acrylic paintings, prints, works in glass and monumental porcelain enamel on steel outdoor sculpture.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 based between Montréal, New York, and Omaha, NE, where she is the Curator-in-Residence 2019–2021 at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She was Executive/Artistic Director of La Biennale de Montréal (2013–2017), Executive Director/Editor of ART PAPERS in Atlanta (2004–2012), and Curator of Manif 5 – the 5th Québec City Biennial (2010). She frequently contributes to numerous periodicals, including Artforum International, ART PAPERS, C Magazine, and Flash Art International, and her critical texts have been published in many catalogues, readers, and anthologies.
Stephen Powers
Stephen Powers was a key figure in the transition of graffiti writing into street art. He first attracted attention under the name ESPO for his tags on the streets of Philadelphia. Powers abandoned graffiti in 1999, taking enamel on metal art into the studio and creating a practice that includes sign painting. One of his hallmarks is graphic lettering, which he often incorporates into his murals around the world. These murals are like love letters to the cities in which they reside.
Matt Wedel
Having grown up around his father’s pottery studio, ceramic artist Matt Wedel has long understood and respected both the intrinsic properties of the material and the element of chance that accompanies the process of firing and glazing the clay. Stepping away from the notion of ceramics as a functional craft, 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. Seemingly representational and highly rendered imagery such as forests or figures merge jarringly with the abstract. Pulling from an array of art historical and cultural references, Lapin uses a chimeric vocabulary to investigate how the image of a painting comes to be; a process that occurs simultaneously in the back of the mind through memory, and in the front of the mind through the experience of seeing.