Curator and Critic Tour

Critical Conversations logo repeated in several pastel colors

The Ford Family Foundation, in partnership with the University of Oregon Department of Art’s Center for Art Research (CFAR), Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University bring prominent curators and critics to Oregon to engage with artists statewide.

The expanded partnership, which began in 2011, is made possible by a grant from The Ford Family Foundation’s Visual Arts Program, which honors interest in the visual arts by the late Mrs. Hallie Ford, a co-founder of The Foundation.

Critical Conversations brings professional curators and critics from outside the Northwest to conduct one-on-one studio visits with established artists, deliver lectures, and join in community conversations. The program aims to enhance the quality of artistic endeavors throughout the state.

Tina Rivers Ryan

Media Art’s Future, Present, and Past: Notes from the Field

Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University (PNCA)
Mediatheque
511 NW Broadway, Portland, OR

Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan is a curator, art historian, and critic whose work focuses on art since the 1960s. She also is one of the leading experts on art and technology, ranging from VR to NFTs and AI. In this entertaining talk, she will provide an overview of the current debates in the field, as well as a preview of where she thinks art and technology is headed in the years to come.

Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan is Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and an internationally recognized expert on the history of media art, including video and digital art. Her exhibitions at the AKG include 2021’s “Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art” (co-curated with Paul Vanouse and winner of the 2022 Award of Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators) and 2022’s “Peer to Peer” (the first U.S. museum survey of artists working with blockchain technologies). Her next exhibition, “Electric Op,” will examine the six-decade history of the relationship between geometric abstraction and electronic technologies. In addition to her curatorial work, she has been a regular contributor to Artforum for over a decade and has written commissioned essays for many of the world’s leading museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, the Museum Tinguely in Basel, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Dr. Ryan holds five degrees in art history, including a BA from Harvard and PhD from Columbia, and in 2022 received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and was named to Artnet’s Innovators List.

Dan Devening

In Conversation: Independent and Artist-Run Spaces

Postponed due to inclement weather

Ditch Projects
303 S 5th St #165, Springfield, OR 97477

How do artists approach creating exhibition spaces? Why do they get started? How do they keep going? 

Panel discussion with Dan Devening (Devening Projects, Chicago IL), Mike Bray (Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR), Derek Franklin (Converge45 and SE Cooper Contemporary, Portland, OR), and Sun You (Tiger Strikes Asteriod, NY.)

(b. 1958, Ft. Walton Beach, FL) Dan Devening is an artist, educator, curator, writer and gallerist based in Chicago. He’s currently Professor, Adj. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; was Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art Theory and Practice for 15 years and held full-time teaching positions at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of New Mexico. His paintings, works on paper and installations have been shown extensively including recent exhibitions in New York at Geary Contemporary, Launch F18, Apex Art and Printed Matter, Inc; at 65Grand, LVL3, Autumn Space, ebersmoore gallery, Roy Boyd Gallery and Julius Caesar in Chicago; and at Kinkead Contemporary in Los Angeles among other national venues. His recent international projects include exhibitions in Germany at Grölle Galerie in Wuppertal, Kunsterverein Recklinghausen, the Museum Kurhaus in Kleve, dok25a in Dusseldorf, Renate Schroeder Gallery in Cologne and galerie oqbo, Schau Fenster, Scotty Enterprises and Neues Problem in Berlin. He has also shown his work in Vienna, Brussels, Tokyo, Toronto, Monterrey, Budapest, Melbourne, and Amsterdam. He has curated exhibitions nationally and internationally including projects at oqbo in Berlin; dok25A in Dusseldorf; Hagiwara Projects in Tokyo; the Hyde Park Art Center and the Block Museum of Art in Chicago among many others. His essays and reviews have been featured in several recent publications including “Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy and Purpose” edited by Zoë Charlton and Tim Doud and “Clay Pop, What’s New in Clay.”

Devening currently owns and directs Devening Projects, a gallery project featuring exhibitions by emerging and established artists.

Dan Devening.

Aurora Tang

October 5, 2023 4:00 p.m.

University of Oregon, Lawrence Hall 115
1190 Franklin Boulevard, Eugene, OR 97403
Live Stream on UO College of Design YouTube

Aurora Tang is a curator and researcher, often working at the intersections of contemporary art, architecture, and landscape studies. In this lecture, Aurora will share recent curatorial and research projects, produced as an independent curator, as well as with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a non-profit arts and culture organization interested in exploring and understanding contemporary landscape issues in the United States.  

Aurora Tang has worked with the Center for Land Use Interpretation since 2009, and currently serves as its program director. As an independent curator, Aurora has organized recent exhibitions at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, MOCA Tucson, and Armory Center for the Arts. She has also worked at non-profit art and research organizations including the Getty Research Institute, Getty Conservation Institute, and High Desert Test Sites, where she was managing director from 2011–15, and has taught at schools including Otis College of Art and Design and the University of Southern California. She is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Research Fellowship. 

auroratang.net/

Aurora Tang

Photo credit: Elon Schoenholz

Rashida Bumbray

Sycoraxian Curation¹: When they go low, we go underground

June 22, 2023 6:00 p.m.

Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University (PNCA)
Mediatheque
511 NW Broadway, Portland, OR

Grounded in Caribbean Poet Kamau Brathwaite’s theories of the Sycoraxian aesthetic and Magical Realism, Bumbray will explore questions of strategy and visibility in art and curatorial practice, sharing recent projects across her work in curation, performance, and philanthropy.

This lecture is a study on self-determination, inspired by the counter-hegemonic cultural communities that Black people developed to navigate the “New World.” How can these practices be adapted to build platforms and structures that value improvisation, collectivity, interdependence, and subterfuge when the mainstream or the market fails us? 

Rashida Bumbray is a curator and choreographer. In 2022, she organized Loophole of Retreat: Venice, a transnational gathering focused on Black women’s intellectual and creative labor as part of Simone Leigh’s exhibition Sovereignty at the American Pavilion for the 59th Venice Biennale.  Bumbray began her curatorial career in 2001 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, where she coordinated major exhibitions including Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964–1984 with Kellie Jones. As associate curator at The Kitchen, Bumbray organized critically acclaimed commissions and exhibitions including the first New York solo exhibitions for many artists, including Simone Leigh, Leslie Hewitt, Adam Pendleton, Lauren Kelley, Jamal Cyrus, and Elodie Pong. She also commissioned new performance works by Kyle Abraham, Camille A. Brown, Derrick Adams, and Kalup Linzy, among many others. Bumbray was guest curator of Creative Time’s public art exhibition Funk, God, Jazz and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn in 2014.

Most recently, as Director of Culture and Art at the Open Society Foundations, Bumbray spearheaded the development of the foundations’ first global program dedicated to advancing diverse artistic practices and strengthening locally led cultural spaces around the world. Under her leadership, Open Society Foundations became one of the leading arts funders focused on the Global South and supporting socially engaged artists and cultural producers in diverse disciplines.

Bumbray is also a Bessie-nominated choreographer whose practice draws from traditional African American vernacular and folk forms. She is a 2019 United States Artist Fellow and an Inaugural Civic Practice Artist in Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her performances have been presented by Tate Modern, London; the New Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harlem Stage, Dancing While Black, and SummerStage, all in New York; and Project Row Houses, Houston. Her work Run Mary Run was named among the New York Times’s best performances of 2012 and is featured in Common’s short film Black America Again (2016), directed by Bradford Young.

In 2015, Bumbray was nominated for the ICI Curatorial Vision Award. And in 2018, she was honored among women leaders by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and received the Alchemist Award for Socially Engaged Art from A Blade of Grass. A graduate of Oberlin College, Bumbray also has an MA in Africana Studies from New York University. Her writing on contemporary art, cultural studies, and comparative literature is published in journals and exhibition catalogues.

¹Kamau Brathwaite’s Barabajan Poems, 1994, gives voice to Sycorax, the silenced African woman. A post-colonial interpretation of the Tempest, Brathwaite’s poems in this volume outline the history of the Caribbean through Sycorax’s eyes.

Rashida Bumbray.

Prem Krishnamurthy

“Department of Transformation”

February 27, 2023 6:30 p.m.

Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA)
15 NE Hancock Street, Portland, OR, 97232

How can art be transformative—for individuals, groups, and society? Prem Krishnamurthy explores these and other questions by sharing recent projects across design, writing, and experimental pedagogy. Taking each project as a rehearsal for the next—and as a way to explore different scales of transformation—his approach prototypes forms of connection and collaboration embedded within contemporary artistic practice. Using writing, music, movement, and conversation (+ karaoke!), this participatory event opens up polyvocal ways of working in and on the world.

Prem Krishnamurthy (b. 1977) is a designer, author, and educator. He received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015 and KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s “A Year With…” residency fellowship in 2018. His professional papers were acquired by Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies in 2019. In 2022, Domain Books published his book-length epistolary essay, On Letters, which was named one of Fast Company’s “Best Design Books of 2022”. Prem graduated with a B.A. in Fine Art from Yale College in 1999 and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany the same year.

He currently directs Wkshps, a multidisciplinary design studio, and organizes Department of Transformation, an itinerant workshop that practices collaborative tools for social change. In addition to leading design projects with artists, cultural institutions, and nonprofit organizations across the world, he has curated several large-scale exhibitions. These include Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, the 2022 edition of FRONT International, Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; Our Silver City, 2094 at Nottingham Contemporary; and Ministry of Graphic Design in Sharjah, UAE. Previously, Prem founded the design studio Project Projects and the exhibition space P! in New York. 

Prem Krishnamurthy.

Natasha Ginwala

“Between Waves And Sea Change”

October 11, 2022 4:00 p.m.

University of Oregon, Lawrence Hall 115
1190 Franklin Boulevard, Eugene, OR 97403
Live Stream on UO College of Design YouTube

In this practice-led presentation, oceanic affinities and crossings recur across exhibition sites andartistic voices leading into diasporic anchorages, poethical currents and saltwater histories that affirm asynchronous mappings of place, belonging, and subjecthood. Natasha Ginwala will address the ongoing multi-part project Indigo Waves & Other Stories: Re-navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora (conceived with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Michelangelo Corsaro); Sea Change – the sixth edition of interdisciplinary arts festival Colomboscope in Sri Lanka; and the photographic oeuvre of Akinbode Akinbiyi traversing coast to coast in the form of an epic series titled Sea Never Dry. This encounter will conclude with a DJ session with Hiba Ali, building off of their Indian Ocean Mixes series, they have previously conducted the Black Indian Ocean Series, a reading group and film series that visualizes the histories and futures of African-descent communities in the Indian Ocean region through curated film screenings and generative pedagogy.

Natasha Ginwala is Associate Curator at Large at Gropius Bau, Berlin; Artistic Director of Colomboscope in Sri Lanka and the 13th Gwangju Biennale with Defne Ayas (2021). Ginwala has curated Contour Biennale 8, Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium and was part of the curatorial team of documenta 14, 2017. Other projects include Indigo Waves and Other Stories: Re-navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora (with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Michelangelo Corsaro) at Zeitz MOCAA; Survey exhibitions of Bani Abidi, Akinbode Akinbiyi and Zanele Muholi at Gropius Bau. Ginwala was a member of the artistic team for the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 2014, and has co-curated The Museum of Rhythm, at Taipei Biennial 2012 and at  Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, 2016–17. Ginwala writes regularly on contemporary art and visual culture. Recent co-edited volumes include Stronger than Bone (Archive Books and Gwangju Biennale Foundation) and Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound (Columbia University Press).

Natasha Ginwala
Five black and white photographs hang on a wall painted with blue on a diagonal

Akinbode Akinbiyi, Sea Never Dry, 1980s – ongoing, installation view at Gropius Bau of Six Songs, Swirling Gracefully in the Taut Air (2020), photo credit: Muhammad Salah

Christian Rattemeyer

April 4, 2022 7:00 p.m.

Reed College Chapel

RSVP and proof of vaccination required

Independent curator, critic, and translator Christian Rattemeyer creates exhibitions and projects that privilege shared experiences and inquisitiveness over stylistic trends and the art market. His lecture will expand these and other concerns by elucidating his landmark exhibition Transmissions: Art from Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960-1980, which Rattemeyer co-curated at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2015. Rattemeyer’s examination will address, in his words, “the ways in which friendships, exchanges, and encounters among artists across different geographies can drive new ideas, conversations, and progressive art in unexpected ways, serving as tools for the expansion of writing global art history and presenting permanent collections.”

Rattemeyer will welcome questions at the conclusion of the lecture, moderated by visit organizer Stephanie Snyder, John and Anne Hauberg Curator and Director, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College.

Christian Rattemeyer is an independent curator, writer, and translator. He served as Executive Director of SculptureCenter in New York from 2019 to 2020, and as Associate Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 2007 to 2019. At MoMA, Rattemeyer curated and co-curated nine exhibitions, including SURROUNDS: 11 Installations (2019); Transmissions: Art from Eastern Europe and Latin America 1960-1980 (2015), Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan (2012), and Compass in Hand (2009). Previously, Rattemeyer worked as Curator at Artists Space (2003-2007) and has worked for Documenta 11 (2002), Documenta X (1997) and Documenta IX (1992) in Kassel, his hometown. Rattemeyer has taught at the MFA program and the Center for Curatorial Studies, both at Bard College, as well as Hunter College, Parsons School of Design, RISD, and SVA. He has published many essays and books on contemporary art, including Exhibiting the New Art: When Attitudes Become Form and Op Losse Schroeven, 1969, Afterall Publishers, 2010. Rattemeyer lives and works in upstate New York.

Christian Rattemeyer

Christian Viveros-Fauné

November 8, 2021 6:30 p.m.

Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University

Live on PNCA LiveVideo

The Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies at PNCA is thrilled to welcome Christian Viveros-Fauné to present a public talk, as part of The Ford Family Foundation Visual Arts Program’s Critical Conversations series, hosted by Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) at Willamette University.

Christian Viveros-Fauné (Santiago, Chile, 1965) has worked as a gallerist, art fair director, art critic, and curator since 1994. He was awarded the University of South Florida’s Kennedy Family Visiting Fellowship in 2018, a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Grant in 2009 and named Critic in Residence at the Bronx Museum in 2011. He co-founded The Brooklyn Rail in 1999, wrote art criticism for the Village Voice from 2008 to 2016, was the Art and Culture Critic for artnet news from 2016 to 2018, and has additionally served as Chief Critic for Artland and Sotheby’s in other words. He has lectured widely at institutions such as Yale University, Pratt University and Holland’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie. He currently serves as Curator-at-Large at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum. He presently writes for The Art Newspaper and the Village Voice 2.0. He is also the author of several books. His most recent, Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art, was published by David Zwirner Books in 2018.

Christian Viveros-Fauné

Lumi Tan

“Invisible Rooms: Performance and Institutions”

October 28, 4:00 p.m.

University of Oregon: Live on Zoom and on the Department of Art Facebook

Lumi Tan will speak about the ways in which performance practices shift institutional value systems through her work curating time-based art for the white cube gallery, black box theater, and most recently, the computer screen. Thinking of issues of process, intimacy, documentation, audience, and site, Tan will connect this current work to the historical context of The Kitchen and the role of small scale institutions in the contemporary art ecosystem.

Lumi Tan is Senior Curator at The Kitchen in New York, where she has organized exhibitions and produced performances with artists across disciplines and generations since 2010. Most recently, Tan has worked with Kevin Beasley, Baseera Khan, Autumn Knight, and Kenneth Tam. Previously she curated projects with artists including Gretchen Bender, Meriem Bennani, Liz Magic Laser, The Racial Imaginary Institute, Sahra Motalebi, Sondra Perry, Tina Satter/Half Straddle, Anicka Yi, and Danh Vo and Xiu Xiu. Prior to The Kitchen, Tan was Guest Curator at the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Nord Pas-de-Calais in France, director at Zach Feuer Gallery, and curatorial assistant at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Mousse, Cura, and numerous exhibition catalogues. She was the recipient of 2020 VIA Art Fund Curatorial Fellowship.

thekitchen.org

Peter Eleey

September 2021

Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College

Peter Eleey is an independent curator. He was previously Chief Curator of MoMA PS1, where he organized more than forty exhibitions between 2010 and 2020, including premier presentations of Ed Atkins, Darren Bader, Sascha Braunig, Ian Cheng, Devin Kenny, and Zheng Guogu; as well as surveys of Huma Bhabha, James Lee Byars (with Magali Arriola), Sue Coe, Simon Denny, Lara Favaretto, Maureen Gallace, George Kuchar, Maria Lassnig, Mark Leckey (with Stuart Comer), Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Sturtevant, Henry Taylor (with Laura Hoptman), and Cathy Wilkes. Sturtevant: Double Trouble, which he organized at The Museum of Modern Art, traveled to The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Eleey has curated a number of major group exhibitions, including September 11, organized on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, and the last edition of Greater New York, in 2015, for which he led the curatorial team of Douglas Crimp, Thomas J. Lax, and Mia Locks. Eleey most recently co-organized Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2011 with Ruba Katrib. He is the coordinating curator for MoMA PS1’s upcoming presentation of Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well, originated by Stephanie Snyder at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, and is preparing exhibitions with Barbara Kruger and Deana Lawson (with Eva Respini). Before joining MoMA PS1, Eleey served as Visual Arts Curator at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and as a curator at Creative Time in New York.

Peter Eleey

David Ayala-Alfonso

Critical Conversations with David Ayala-Alfonso: An Anecdoted Topography of Chance: Collecting as creation and as destruction

April 21, 2021 6:30 p.m.

Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University: Live on Zoom 

This talk will reflect on exhibition and (institutional) collecting practices, and how they determine narratives, meaning and importance. The act of organizing a collection carries with it simultaneous gestures of creation and destruction, by producing a stage or context of appearance, but at the same time by eroding the material ecology of the sites from where the collected objects are sourced. The idea is to look into the ecology of information, matter and stories that surrounds these practices but which is left behind, for technical, ideological, or political reasons. What new threads can be open when we revise works that look critically into collecting and exhibition practices? Borrowing both the title and the methodology from Daniel Spoerri and Robert Fillou’s book, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, the talk will look into cases I have studied as a curator and as an author in the past five years, and rehearse ideas on how we can dismantle, expand or reframe given conceptions about value and relevance in the histories of collecting and of the creation cultural and scientific institutions and knowledge.

David Ayala-Alfonso is an artist, curator and researcher that works between Bogotá, New York and London. He is currently guest curator for the Independent Curators International’s itinerant exhibition program. He is also editor for the Journal of Visual Culture, editor in chief of {{em_rgencia} magazine and Film and New Media associate editor for Cultural Anthropology. He is the author of several articles and books chapters in the fields of visual studies, critical urbanism, art and education, intervention arts and institutional critique. He has received numerous accolades, including the Fulbright Scholarship, the ICI-Dedalus Award in Curatorial Research and the AICAD Association of Independent Art and Design Schools postgraduate teaching scholarship. Ayala–Alfonso has an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a specialization in Arts Education from the Colombian National University and has undertaken several curatorial residencies in France, Colombia, USA and Germany.

David Ayala-Alfonso

Hamza Walker with Mahfuz Sultan

March 4, 2021 

University of Oregon in Eugene

Hamza Walker is the director of the Los Angeles nonprofit art space LAXART and an adjunct professor at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to joining LAXART in 2016, he was director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society, a non-collecting contemporary art museum in Chicago, for 22 years where he organized numerous shows and public programming and wrote extensively on the field of contemporary art.

Notable shows at the Renaissance Society include “Suicide Narcissus” (2013), “Black Is, Black Ain’t” (2008) and “New Video, New Europe” (2004). In addition to his work at the Renaissance Society, Walker also co-curated the Made in L.A. 2016 biennial. He has won the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement in 2014 and the prestigious Ordway Prize in 2010 for his significant impact on the field of contemporary art.

Mahfuz Sultan is an architect, writer, and founder of CLOCKS, a research and design practice based in Los Angeles.

Hamza Walker
Hamza Walker and Mahfuz Sultan

Julia Rodrigues Widholm

“Expanding the Canon: A Call for Curatorial Activism in 21st Century Museum”

November 21, 2019

Director and Chief Curator DePaul Art Museum, Chicago
University of Oregon in Eugene

Hamza Walker

Julie Rodrigues Widholm is Director and Chief Curator of DePaul Art Museum where she leads the strategic and artistic vision to promote equity and interdisciplinary education in art museums. Prior to taking the helm at DPAM in September 2015, she was Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art. She has organized more than 100 solo and group exhibitions, including Julia Fish: bound by spectrum, Brendan Fernandes: The Living Mask, Barbara Jones-Hogu: Resist, Relate, Unite, Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks, Doris Salcedo, Unbound: Contemporary Art after Frida Kahlo, Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City, which have been presented at museums across the U.S. such as DePaul Art Museum, MCA Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Perez Art Museum Miami, the Nasher Museum at Duke University, MIT List Visual Arts Center, among others. She grew up in Brazil, Mozambique, Portugal, Germany, and across the U.S.

resources.depaul.edu

Hamza Walker and Mahfuz Sultan

DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL.

Allie Tepper 

July 21, 2019

Portland Institute for Contemporary Art

Allie Tepper is a curator and writer currently based between New York and Minneapolis, MN. Her curatorial practice bridges the disciplines of visual art and performance, with a focus on commissioning new work. She is concerned with voicing global social movements and struggles as they relate to personal experience, articulating life in motion, and centering marginalized perspectives. Allie is currently the Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellow at the Walker Arts Center where she works in both the Visual Arts and Performing Arts Departments. Previously, she has held curatorial positions at the Whitney Museum, SculptureCenter, and MoMA. She is also the former Assistant Director of the magazine and arts venue Triple Canopy. Her recent exhibitions include Rabih Mroué: Again we are defeated (Walker Art Center, 2018-19), Derek Fordjour: Half Mast (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018), Not for Everybody: Hadi Fallahpisheh, Baseera Khan, and Gloria Maximo (Simone Subal Gallery, 2018), Running Towards the Sun: Guadalupe Maravilla, Grace Rosario Perkins, & Efraín Rozas (315 Gallery, 2018), and In Practice: Another Echo (SculptureCenter, 2018). Tepper is currently coediting a publication on artist collectives active during the 1960s—early ‘80s, forthcoming through the Walker Art Center in October 2019. She is also assisting in editing and producing the catalogue Nick Mauss: Transmissions, co-published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale University Press, and Dancing Foxes Press, forthcoming in the fall of 2019.

Allie Tepper

Jamillah James

April 2, 2019

Portland State University

Portland Art Museum, Whitsell Auditorium

Jamillah James is Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA). With Margot Norton, she is curating the 2021 edition of the New Museum Triennial. Prior to joining ICA LA in 2016, James was Assistant Curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, working in collaboration with the nonprofit Art + Practice. She has held curatorial positions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Queens Museum, Flushing, New York; and independently organized many exhibitions, performances, screenings, and public programs at alternative and artist-run spaces throughout the US and Canada since 2004.
Jamillah James

Julia Bryan-Wilson

“Bruce Nauman: Queer Homophobia”

November 8, 2018

University of Oregon in Eugene

Julia Bryan-Wilson is the Doris and Clarence Malo Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley; she is also the Director of the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (2016); and Fray: Art and Textile Politics (2017), which was awarded the 2018 Robert Motherwell Book Prize. Bryan-Wilson’s influential writings on feminist and queer theory, craft histories, and contemporary art in the Americas have been widely published in venues that include Afterall, Artforum, Art Bulletin, Bookforum, differences, Grey Room, October, Oxford Art Journal, and Parkett, and she is the cocurator of the traveling exhibition Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen.

Julia Bryan-Wilson

Bruce Nauman, Run from Fear, Fun from Rear, 1972, Neon, Part a: 8 × 46 × 2 1/4 in. part b: 7 1/4 × 44 1/2 × 2 1/4 in.

Hamza Walker and Mahfuz Sultan

Robin Reisenfeld

“Telling Stories: Resilience and Struggle in Contemporary Narrative Drawing”

July 19, 2018

Portland State University and the Portland Art Museum

Dr. Reisenfeld is Curator of Works on Paper at the Toledo Museum of Art. During her visit to Oregon from July 16 through 20, she will meet selected artists specializing in prints, drawings, collage, or book arts, and will present two public lectures on the theme of “Resilience and Struggle in Contemporary Narrative Drawing.”

In this lecture, Dr. Reisenfeld will explore the primacy of drawing as a medium in the work of Amy Cutler (Poughkeepsie, New York), Robyn O’Neil (Los Angeles), and the late Inuit artist Annie Pootoogook (Cape Dorset, Canada). These artists rely on inventive mark-making and distinctive approaches to rendering space in drawings that chronicle the complexities of modern human relationships. Analyzing the artists’ idiosyncratic subject matters and formal choices, Dr. Reisenfeld will discuss how Cutler, O’Neil, and Pootoogook incorporate strategies of resilience in imaginative stories in which the notion of an individual self within the framework of a larger community is a recurring concern.

Robin Reisenfeld

Paddy Johnson

April 12, 2018

Pacific Northwest College of Art

Paddy Johnson will discuss the blog Art F City and online publishing, the legacy and importance of preserving the history of artist run projects and the rise of the art podcast. Expect swears.

About Paddy Johnson Paddy Johnson is the founding Editor of Art F City. In addition to her work on the blog, she has been published in magazines such as New York Magazine, The New York Times and The Economist. Paddy lectures widely about art and the Internet at venues including Yale University, Parsons, Rutgers, South by Southwest, and the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2008, she became the first blogger to earn a Creative Capital Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital Foundation. Paddy was nominated for best art critic at The Rob Pruitt Art Awards in 2010 and 2013. In 2014, she was the subject of a VICE profile for her work as an independent art blogger.

Paddy also maintains an active presence as a curator. In 2011 she has curated Graphics Interchange Format, a survey of animated GIFs for Denison University and in 2016 created the sequel to that exhibition, Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies for Providence College and GRIN Gallery. In 2015 she curated Mimic, a show about imitation and illusion and Floating Point, an exhibition showcasing the work of 49 columbia MFAs at Judith Charles Gallery and in 2015 and 2016 created shows for the Satellite Art Fair. She is currently working on a retrospective of the feminist artist Carol Cole with curator Emily Stamey at the Weatherspoon Gallery in North Carolina.

Paddy Johnson

Jan Verwoert

“Live Through This: The Fate of Public Voices”

November, 8, 2017

Portland Art Museum

November 14, 2017

University of Oregon in Eugene

Jan Verwoert will address the existential condition of critical writing. “The model of one person passing judgment on others has become ridiculous,” he says. “Art, life, politics—we’re in it together after all, even and especially now that societies are forcefully split. What does it take for a voice to articulate intuitions and observations in a manner that allows for very different people to relate to a public thinking process? Urban satire can do it. Is this because laughing at the state of the world awakens a sense of grotesque, yet fateful connectedness?”

Jan Verwoert is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory, based in Berlin. His writing has appeared in different journals, anthologies and monographs. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam. He is a professor for theory at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and guest professor at the UdK Graduate School, Berlin. He is the author of Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, MIT Press/Afterall Books 2006, the essay collection Tell Me What You Want What You Really Really Want, Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute 2010, together with Michael Stevenson, Animal Spirits — Fables in the Parlance of Our Time, Christoph Keller Editions, JRP, Zurich 2013, a second collection of his essays Cookie! published by Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute 2014 and editor of the anthology on artistic knowledge No New Kind of Duck — Would I know how to say what I do?, Diaphanes & UdK Graduate School, Zurich-Berlin 2016.

Jan Verwoert

Claire Tancons

July 11, 2017

Pacific Northwest College of Art

Trained as a curator and art historian, Claire Tancons practices curating as an expanded field and has experimented with the political aesthetics of walking, marching, second lining, masquerading and parading in large-scale public. performances. She has curated for established and emerging international biennials including Prospect New Orleans (2008); the Gwangju Biennale (2008); the Cape Town Biennial (2009); Biennale Bénin (2012) and the Göteborg Biennial (2013). Since 2012, she has initiated a series of collaborations tackling different aspects of public ceremonial culture, civic rituals, carnival and processional performance including Far Festa: Nuove Feste Veneziane, about contemporary civic rituals inspired by the former Venetian Republic (with curatorial collective CAKE AWAY; IUAV University and Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, summer 2013), Public Practice, about New Orleans’ processional culture (with Delaney Martin; New Orleans Airlift, Fall 2014) and EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean (with Krista Thompson; CAC New Orleans, 2014-15 and ICI New York 2016-18).

Tancons was more recently a guest curator for the BMW Tate Live Series at Tate Modern (2014) and the artistic director of Tide by Side, the opening ceremony of Faena Forum Miami Beach in Fall 2016. She is currently the artistic director of etcetera: a civic ritual for Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse, France, as well as one of the curators for the 2017-18 season at National Sawdust in New York. Tancons is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship (2008), a Prince Claus Fund Artistic Production Grant (2009), two Curatorial Research Fellowships from the Foundation for Art Initiatives (2007, 2009) and an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award (2012) among others. She was selected by Artsy as one of the “20 most influential young curators in the United States” in 2016.

Claire Tancons

Diana Nawi

April 12, 2017

Oregon College of Art and Craft, Portland

Oregon College of Art and Craft is pleased to present Diana Nawi of Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) as the 2017 speaker. Nawi will give a lecture that explores the importance of context, place, and history in creating a museum program, including a discussion of Nawi’s recent exhibitions and how they relate to larger questions of institution building.

Nawi is Associate Curator at PAMM, where she has curated exhibitions including John Dunkley: Neither Day nor Night, Nari Ward: Sun Splashed, Iman Issa: Heritage Studies, and Adler Guerrier: Formulating a Plot. Nawi has organized newly commissioned projects with artists such as Yael Bartana, Nicole Cherubini, LOS JAICHACKERS, Shana Lutker, and Matthew Ronay.

Prior to joining PAMM, Nawi was the assistant curator for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s Abu Dhabi Project. In this role, she was centrally involved in the research and planning of the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a contemporary art museum in the United Arab Emirates. Nawi has a wide-ranging knowledge of contemporary art, with a particular expertise in art of the Americas and larger Middle East.

Nawi also served as the Marjorie Susman curatorial fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and a fellow at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2016, she curated EXPO Chicago’s popular IN/SITU sector, which brought large-scale installations and site specific works to the fair on Navy Pier and the surrounding Chicago area.

She completed her MA at the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art and concurrently served as a curatorial fellow at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams. She received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a major in art and a minor in art history and Chicana and Chicano Studies.

Photo courtesy of PAMM.org

Diana Nawi

Ruba Katrib

“Sculpture as Substance”

November 10, 2016

University of Oregon in Eugene

November 13, 2016

University of Oregon in Portland

Following artists who explore the malleability of materials and their implications—from the scientific to the social and political—this talk responds to the emergence of new material concerns in current art, grounding the discussion in the works of a key group of historical and new artists who use active substances in their works. The inclusion of living materials and sensory elements in contemporary artworks reflects a blurring of boundaries within the field of sculpture that challenges its definition in terms of site and scale, and focuses less on the subject depicted or content engaged, and more on the potential of its material makeup.

Ruba Katrib is curator at Sculpture Center in Long Island City, New York, where she has produced the group shows The Eccentrics (2015), Puddle, Pothole, Portal (2014) (co-curated with artist Camille Henrot), Better Homes (2013) and A Disagreeable Object (2012). Recent solo shows include exhibitions with Rochelle Goldberg (2016), Anthea Hamilton, Gabriel Sierra, Magali Reus, Michael E. Smith and Erika Verzutti (all 2015). Katrib’s previous post was as associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), North Miami, she organized several acclaimed solo and group exhibitions.

Ruba Katrib

Herb Tam

“Chinese Americana: Curating from an Archival History”

April 5, 2016

Oregon College of Art and Craft, Portland

During this free presentation, Tam will describe the challenges and rewards of curating from a unique cultural and historical point of view. Attendees will learn how Tam’s rigorous analysis and investigation can serve the curatorial process.

Herb Tam is the Curator and Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), New York. He recently curated the “Waves of Identity: 35 Years of Archiving ” exhibition, which explores the construction of Chinese American identity through MOCA’s archival materials. In 2012 he curated “America through a Chinese Lens,” a photographic survey of America by contemporary artists and non-professional photographers of Chinese descent. Tam has previously served as the Associate Curator at Exit Art and the Acting Associate Curator at the Queens Museum of Art. While at Exit Art, he curated “New Mirrors: Painting in a Transparent World”; and co-curated “Summer Mixtape Volume 1,” an exhibition exploring the role of pop music in the work of emerging artists. In 2007, Tam curated “A Jamaica, Queens Thing” exhibition about the intersection between hip hop and the crack cocaine epidemic. He has also curated solo exhibitions with artists Lee Mingwei, Rafael Sanchez, and Regina Jose Galindo; and worked on historical exhibitions about urban planner, Robert Moses, and alternative art spaces in New York. Tam was born in Hong Kong and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied at San Jose State University and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts, New York.

Herb Tam

Steven Matijcio

“Based on a True Story: Misbehaving Memory”

November 15, 2015

University of Oregon in Portland

November 18, 2015

University of Oregon in Eugene

Steven Matijcio is the curator of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. Prior to this position he served as Curator of Contemporary Art at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Matijcio is a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York (MA) and the University of Toronto (HBA). He has held positions in a number of institutions including the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the National Gallery of Canada. In 2012 he curated the 4th edition of the Narracje Festival in Gdansk, Poland. Matijcio’s 2013 essay “Nothing to See Here: The Denial of Vision in Media Art” was accepted into the RENEW: Media Art Histories Conference in Riga, Latvia.

Steven Matijcio

Sarah O’Keeffe

“Surround Audience”

August 24, 2015

Reed College Chapel, Portland

A special lecture on the methodologies and practices of the 2015 New Museum Triennial by participating curator Sara O’Keeffe.

Sara O’Keeffe, assistant curator at the New Museum, was part of the curatorial team that organized the 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, along with New Museum Curator Lauren Cornell and artist Ryan Trecartin. Surround Audience featured fifty-one artists from over twenty-five countries and pursued numerous lines of inquiry, including: What are the new visual metaphors for the self and subjecthood when our ability to see and be seen is expanding, as is our desire to manage our self-image and privacy? Is it possible to opt out of, bypass, or retool commercial interests that potentially collude with national and international policy? How are artists striving to embed their works in the world around them through incursions into media and activism? O’Keeffe will discuss these conceptual threads, as well as the process of producing the New Museum Triennial—for which a third of the works were commissioned—and discuss the Triennial’s numerous research and production residences for international and local artists.

Sara O’Keeffe also worked on the “The Great Ephemeral” (2015); “Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module” (2014); and “Kelly,” the exhibition of Wynne Greenwood, co-presented with Reed College’s Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery (2015). Previously, she served as Curatorial Assistant at the Guggenheim Museum where she was a curatorial liaison for the Young Collectors Council, a patrons group and acquisitions committee that focuses on the work of emerging artists. Between 2012 and 2013, she served as coordinator of Critical Practices’ La Table Ronde conversation series—an intimate forum for the discussion of contemporary social and cultural issues. O’Keeffe graduated from Reed College with a degree in art history in 2010.

Sara O'Keeffe

Caryn Coleman

“Contagious Allegories: art, film, horror, and spectatorship”

May 21, 2015

University of Oregon in Portland

Caryn Coleman is a New York-based curator and writer whose curatorial practice explores the intersection of cinema and visual art with a focus on horror film’s influence on contemporary artists. She is currently the Senior Film Programmer at Nitehawk Cinema and co-editor of the philosophy journal Incognitum Hactenus. Her blog on horror and contemporary art, THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, received the 2012 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Art Writers Initiative grant. Recent film programs include the monthly Art Seen series, Journalists in Film with VICE News, Summer Doc Initiative with the Tribeca Film Institute, Committed: the mental institution in film, and the annual Nitehawk Shorts festival. Recent curatorial projects include Empty Distances at Mark Moore Gallery, Film as a Social Art for the 2013 New York CAA conference, and Keep Moving: objects and architecture in the apocalypse at the Power Plant Gallery.

Coleman was the Curator for the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts’ Art & Law Residency (2011 & 2012). She owned the art gallery sixspace in Los Angeles (2002-2008) and in Chicago (1998-2000). She has worked in the Education Department at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and provided exhibition/publication research to Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery. In addition to founding the seminal art. blogging.la, her writings have appeared in Fangoria.com, OneplusOne Journal, VICE. com, Brighton Photo Fringe, LUX, Rue Morgue, the Modernist, Art Review online, Beautiful Decay, and Los Angeles Weekly.

She received her MFA in Curating, with distinction, from Goldsmiths College.

Caryn Coleman

Michael Ned Holte

“Closer-than-close: Notes on Some Exhibitions and (at least) One Performance”

December 6, 2013

University of Oregon in Portland

Michael Ned Holte is a writer, independent curator, and educator based in Los Angeles. His texts have appeared in publications including Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970-1983 (Routledge); Seven Films by Paul Sietsema (Mousse/MCA Denver); Kathryn Andrews: Special Meat Occasional Drink (Museum Ludwig); In the Shadow of Numbers: Charles Gaines Selected Works from 1975-2012 (Pomona College Museum of Art/Pitzer Art Galleries); Richard Hawkins—Third Mind (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale); and Roy McMakin: When is a Chair Not a Chair (Skira/Rizzoli). He is a frequent contributor to print and online periodicals such as Afterall, Artforum International, Art Journal, East of Borneo, Kaleidoscope, Pin-Up, and X-tra. Holte is codirector of the Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts. Previously he taught at the University of Southern California and was a visiting faculty member of the Core Program at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Holte has organized numerous exhibitions including “TL;DR” (2014) at Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand; “Temporary Landmarks & Moving Situations” at Expo Chicago (2012); “Support Group” at Thomas Solomon at Cottage Home, Los Angeles (2010); “Laying Bricks” at Wallspace Gallery, New York (2007); and “Celine and Julie Go Boating” at Anna Helwing Gallery, Los Angeles (2005). In 2008, he was a member of the curatorial team for “Present Future” at Artissima 15 in Torino, Italy. Along with Connie Butler, he was co-curator of the 2014 edition of “Made in L.A.” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Michael Ned Holte

Eric Fredericksen

“Dedicated to You, But you Weren’t Listening”

July 29, 2014

University of Oregon in Portland

Eric Fredericksen is the Waterfront Program Art Manager for the City of Seattle, developing art commissions and cultural projects for the city’s central waterfront. He is also an independent curator and writer, and an adjunct lecturer at the University of Washington School of Art. Previously he was director of Western Bridge, an exhibition space of the Ruth and William True Collection in Seattle, and an editor and writer for The Stranger and Architecture. He has organized exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Artspeak, and the Or Gallery, Vancouver; at Open Satellite, Bellevue, WA, and the Noorderzon Festival, Groningen, the Netherlands.

Eric Fredericksen

Michael Darling

“Photography Shoots Itself: The Objectification of the Photograph from Jiro Takamatsu to Camille Henrot”

April 29, 2014

University of Oregon in Portland

April 30, 2014

University of Oregon in Eugene

Michael Darling is the James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, where he has organized the exhibitions Pandora’s Box: Joseph Cornell Unlocks the MCA Collection, The Language of Less (Then and Now), IAIN BAXTER&: Works 1958-2011, Ron Terada: Being There, David Hartt: Stray Light, Phantom Limb: Approaches to Painting Today, and Think First, Shoot Later: Photographs from the MCA Collection. Forthcoming exhibitions include Isa Genzken: Retrospective and Anne Collier.

Previously, Darling was the Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). His exhibitions at SAM included Kurt, Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78, Thermostat: Video and the Pacific Northwest, along with exhibits on the work of Su-Mei Tse, Nicolas Provost, Geoff McFetridge, Enrico David, Oscar Tuazon and Eli Hansen. Prior to SAM, Darling was associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, where he curated the exhibitions Roy McMakin: A Door Meant as Adornment, Sam Durant, Painting in Tongues, and The Architecture of R.M. Schindler. He also organized Superflat in collaboration with the artist Takashi Murakami. Darling received his BA in art history from Stanford University, and his MA and PhD in art and architectural history from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Darling frequently serves as a panelist, lecturer, and guest curator on contemporary art and architecture.

Michael Darling

Anne Ellegood

“Rethinking Engagement”

October 8, 2013

Oregon Arts Summit
Hosted by Oregon Arts Commission
Oregon Convention Center, Portland

Ellegood will also participate as a keynote speaker for the 2013 Oregon Arts Summit “Re-Thinking Engagement” on October 8, 2013. The Oregon Arts Summit, hosted by the Oregon Arts Commission, features presentations by leading national experts and Oregon leaders—within and outside the Arts sector to deepen the exploration of this year’s theme, “Re-Thinking Engagement.”

Since joining the Hammer in 2005, Ellegood has co-organized two large-scale exhibitions-All of this and nothing (2011) and the Hammer’s inaugural biennial of Los Angeles-based artists, Made in LA 2012, a city-wide effort that included 60 LA-based artists working in all different mediums.
 


Prior to joining the Hammer, Ellegood was Curator of Contemporary Art at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., since 2005. Previously, she was the New York-based Curator for Peter Norton’s collection of over 2,400 works of international contemporary art. From 1998-2003, she was the Associate Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.
 


While at the Oregon Arts Summit, Ellegood will also participate in an afternoon break-out session focusing on Oregon’s Visual Arts Ecology. She will join Tom Manley, President of Pacific Northwest College of Art and Portland artists Tad Savinar and Jon Raymond to talk about the forces that allow a community of artists to thrive.

Ellegood’s visit to Oregon is sponsored by The Ford Family Foundation’s Visiting Curator and Critic Program, organized by the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts in partnership with The Ford Family Foundation.


Anne Ellegood

John Spiak

Curator tour: Oregon artist studios

September 2013

John D. Spiak was appointed Director/Chief Curator of California State University Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center (GCAC), Santa Ana in September of 2011.

His curatorial emphasis is on contemporary art and society, with focus on works in social practice and video. Through the GCAC Artist in Residence initiative, Spiak hosts national and international artists at the center as they develop projects, most recently Adriana Salazar (Bogota, Colombia) and Carmen Papalia (Vancouver, BC).

Prior to his appointment at GCAC, he was Curator at the Arizona State University Art Museum, joining that staff in 1994. Spiak was acting curator in charge of the ASU Art Museum residency initiative series Social Studies, which featured solo social practice community projects. In 1997, he founded and was acting director for fifteen years of the annual ASU Art Museum Short Film and Video Festival.

Spiak has curated over 100 solo and group exhibitions over his career, working directly with artists including Pipilotti Rist, Shirin Neshat, Brent Green, Tony de los Reyes, Jillian Mcdonald and Adam Chodzko. His projects have received support from such prestigious organizations as The British Council, Metabolic Studio, Polish Cultural Institute, National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), CEC ArtsLink and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

John Spiak

Buzz Spector

Curator tour: Oregon Coast

May 2013

Buzz Spector is an artist and critical writer whose artwork has been the focus of exhibitions in such museums and galleries as the Art Institute of Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI. Spector’s work makes frequent use of the book, both as subject and object, and is concerned with relationships between public history, individual memory, and perception.

Spector’s poetry and experimental writing has been published in various journals and reviews since the 1970s, including Benzene, Café Solo, and River Styx. He was a co-founder of WhiteWalls, a magazine of writings by artists, in Chicago in 1978, and served as the publication’s editor until 1987. Since then Spector has written extensively on topics in contemporary art and culture, and has contributed reviews and essays to a number of publications, including American Craft, Artforum, Art on Paper, Dialogue, Exposure, New Art Examiner, and Visions. A volume of selected interviews with Spector, plus new page art, Buzzwords, is newly in print from Sara Ranchouse Publishing, Chicago, and Spector is also the author of The Book Maker’s Desire, critical essays on topics in contemporary art and artists’ books (Umbrella Editions, 1995), and numerous exhibition catalogue essays, including Ann Hamilton: Sao Paulo – Seattle (University of Washington Press, 1992), Dieter Roth (University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1999), and The Hybrid Book (University of the Arts, Philadelphia, 2009).

Spector earned his B.A. in Art from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1972, and his M.F.A. with the Committee on Art and Design at the University of Chicago in 1978. In 2005 he was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Artists’ Books. Among his other awards are a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship in 1991 and National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowships in 1982, 1985, and 1991. Spector is the Jane Reuter Hitzeman and Herbert F. Hitzeman Jr. Professor of Art and Dean of the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Buzz Spector

Jan Schall

“Inside / Outside: Integrating Art, Architecture, and the Landscape”

December 2, 2012

University of Oregon in Portland

The Bloch Building of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri opened in June 2007. Designed by award-winning architect Steven Holl, it doubled the museum’s footprint and expanded gallery space by two-thirds. At the same time, it radically changed the north and east sections of the museum’s Kansas City Sculpture Park. Before the first shovel of earth had turned, the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art and museum designers were deeply immersed in the task of reinvention. Dr. Schall will discuss how plans, elevations and architectural models provided the framework within which imagination and experimentation took flight. While mathematics, measurement and engineering assured structural integrity, the museum’s collection settled lightly into the new interior and exterior spaces. A perfect fit.

Jan Schall, the Sanders Sosland Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, holds a doctorate in art history from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree in art history from Washington University in St. Louis. In 2000, Schall organized the National Endowment for the Arts Millennium Projects exhibition Tempus Fugit: Time Flies and produced both its accompanying catalog and award-winning website. Additionally, she curated the Museum’s 75th Anniversary exhibition Magnificent Gifts for the 75th, Kiki Smith: Constellation, Inventing the Shuttlecocks and the seven-part Re:Installation series. She cocurated Sparks! The William T. Kemper Collecting Initiative, the five-part New Media Projects exhibition and 9 prints and drawings exhibitions.

Schall oversaw the renovation and reinstallation of the Museum’s Kansas City Sculpture Park and developed and implemented both the program and installation of the modern and contemporary collection in the expanded Museum. She was a contributing author to (Im)Permanence: Cultures in/out of Time (Carnegie Mellon University), The Sublimated City (University of Missouri), Zhi Lin: Crossing History/Crossing Cultures (Frye Art Museum), and other publications. Formerly a professor of art history at the University of Florida, Gainesville, Schall’s research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Jan Schall

Suzanne Ramljak

Wake Up Call: The Critic as Cultural Caffeine”

October 14, 2012

University of Oregon in Portland

Suzanne Ramljak’s lecture, “Wake Up Call: The Critic as Cultural Caffeine,” will address the importance of criticism as social stimulant. “Criticism serves a vital cultural role, helping to stimulate the public body and awaken minds to new perspectives” says Ramljak. “Yet critics are now becoming an endangered species. Recent firings of film critics at many major newspapers, along with the waning pull of critical judgment on popular opinion, are symptoms of this demise. ‘Wake Up Call: The Critic as Cultural Caffeine,’ will make a case for the value of critics as invigorating agents of awareness and change.”

Ramljak is a renowned art historian, writer, curator and editor specializing in contemporary art and functional objects. She is currently editor of Metalsmith magazine and curator at the American Federation of Arts. She is former editor of Sculptor and Glass Quarterly magazines, and associate editor of American Ceramics.

Ramljak’s visit to Oregon is the third professional tour of the series. In the fall of 2011, UCLA art historian and art critic George Baker presented lectures and visited artist studios in Portland, Salem and Eugene. In the spring of 2012, Helen Molesworth, curator of The Institute of Contemporary Art | Boston visited artists in Portland and Eugene; she delivered her lecture in conjunction with the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago exhibit, “This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s.” A fourth visit is slated to take place in November 2012 with Jan Schall, curator of modern and contemporary art at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

“Early response to prior visits by out-of-state curators indicates that Oregon artists very much value the opportunity to talk about their work and receive feedback from experienced art professionals,” stated Norm Smith, president of The Ford Family Foundation. “This fall we have planned two additional tours to reach artists living in Eastern and Southern Oregon since the two earlier visits focused primarily on the Portland Metro and Lane County areas.”

Suzanne Ramljak

Helen Molesworth

This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s

March 6, 2012

The George and Mathilda Fowler Endowed Lecture, University of Oregon in Eugene

March 8, 2012

University of Oregon in Portland

Helen Molesworth is the current chief curator at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. She has served as the head of the department of modern and contemporary art at The Harvard Art Museums where her exhibitions included “Long Life Cool White: Photographs by Moyra Davey” and “ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987-1993.” She is also known for her work organizing Hauser & Wirth’s reinterpretation of Allan Kaprow, Yard happening with William Pope. L, Josiah McElheny, and Sharon Hayes.

Prior to joining Harvard, Molesworth was chief curator of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for Arts in Columbus, Ohio. She holds a PhD in the history of art from Cornell University.

A distinguished scholar, writer and curator, Molesworth will present her lecture, “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s” to audiences in both Eugene and Portland. “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s” is an exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and guest curated by Molesworth. The exhibit at the MCA Chicago opens on February 11, 2012 and is timed to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the first HIV/Aids deaths. Today’s political climate also seems an apt backdrop for the show, explains Molesworth.

“The crash of the market, the recession being the result of massive deregulation that began in the 1980s, and this raging battle for the conservative soul of America–they’re all redolent of things that happened in the 80s,” says Molesworth. Her lecture will further illuminate this parallel as well as bring to the forefront the art of the exhibit which Molesworth describes as “very melancholic.”

Molesworth has been called “a curatorial force…[who] combines keen intelligence, insight, scholarship and a distinctive vision for the history of and future for contemporary art.” She is lauded for her ability to inspire and delight art audiences and her propensity to connect audiences with art, ideas, history, and the joy of discovery.

Helen Molesworth

George Baker

Paul Thek: Notes from the Underground”

November 3, 2011

University of Oregon in Portland

November 7, 2011

The Hogue-Sponenburgh Art Lecture
College of Law, Willamette University, Salem

November 10, 2011

University of Oregon in Eugene

George Baker is a professor of art history at UCLA, where he has taught modern and contemporary art and theory since 2003. A New York and Paris-based critic for Artforum magazine throughout the 1990s, he also works as an editor of the journal October and its publishing imprint October Books. He regularly offers courses on all aspects of modernism and the historical avant-garde, on the history of photography in the 19th- and 20th-centuries, and on specialized topics in post-war and contemporary art history.

Baker received his PhD from Columbia University, and is a graduate of the art history program at Yale University and the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Professor Baker is the author, most recently, of The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (MIT Press, 2007), and several other books including James Coleman: Drei Filmarbeiten (Sprengel Museum, 2002), and Gerard Byrne: Books, Magazines, and Newspapers (Lukas & Sternberg, 2003).

He has published essays on a variety of postmodern and contemporary artists including Robert Smithson, Robert Whitman, Anthony McCall, Louise Lawler, Andrea Fraser, Christian Philipp Müller, Tom Burr, Rachel Harrison, Paul Chan, Martin Kippenberger, Richard Hawkins, Mike Kelley, and Knut Åsdam. In 2007 and 2008, his essay on the artist Paul Chan was published in a catalog that accompanied Chan’s major exhibition of the project The 7 Lights at the Serpentine Gallery in London and the New Museum in New York. Baker subsequently published an interview with Chan for the recent anti-war issue of October.

Currently, he is working on disparate projects including a revisionist study of Picasso’s modernism and a shorter book on the work of four women artists–Zoe Leonard, Tacita Dean, Moyra Davey and Sharon Lockhart–to be entitled Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography. The latter is part of a larger project that Baker has termed “photography’s expanded field,” detailing the fate of photography and film works in contemporary cultural production.

George Baker

About Critical Conversations: Curator and Critic Tours and Lectures

The Ford Family Foundation and the University of Oregon Department of Art’s Center for Art Research (CFAR), partner with the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University in a multiyear program to bring prominent curators and critics to Oregon to engage with artists statewide.

The expanded partnership, which began in 2011, is made possible by a grant from The Ford Family Foundation’s Visual Arts Program, which honors interest in the visual arts by the late Mrs. Hallie Ford, a co-founder of The Foundation.

Critical Conversations brings professional curators and critics from outside the Northwest to conduct one-on-one studio visits with established artists, deliver lectures, and join in community conversations. The program aims to enhance the quality of artistic endeavors throughout the state.

 

The Ford Family Foundation Visual Arts ProgramAbout The Ford Family Foundation

The Ford Family Foundation was established in 1957 by Kenneth W. and Hallie E. Ford. Its Mission is “successful citizens and vital rural communities” in Oregon and Siskiyou County, California. The Foundation is located in Roseburg, Oregon, with a scholarship office in Eugene.