Thursday, February 12, 6pm
SAIC Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Drive

Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989, performance, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Kelly & Massa Photography

Andrea Fraser's artistic approach can be placed in the traditions of feminist performance art and institutional critique. In her work, Fraser analyzes the functions of both art and art institutions from sociological, psychoanalytical, and feminist perspectives. Major projects include installations for the Venice Biennale (Austrian Pavilion, 1993), the Whitney Biennial (1993), the Generali Foundation, Vienna (1995), and the Bienal de São Paulo (1998).

Wednesday, February 18, 6pm
SAIC Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Drive

Courtesy Terry Eagleton

One of the world's leading literary critics, Terry Eagleton is an internationally celebrated scholar and cultural theorist, whose works include Criticism and Ideology (1976), Literary Theory (1983), The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), The Gatekeeper (2001), Holy Terror (2005), How to Read a Poem (2008), and Trouble with Strangers(2008).

Tuesday, March 3 6pm
SAIC Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Drive

Photograph by Lillian Askins

Writer and cultural theorist Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. His most recent book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30 (2008), addresses Bauerlein's concern that rather than deepening knowledge, digital media is doing the opposite by replacing learning with entertainment.

Wednesday, March 18, 6pm
SAIC Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Drive

Gareth James and Roe Ethridge, Hold. Hold. Don't go home., 2006 (detail), C print, 30 x 40 inches.

Based in New York, Gareth James is a British artist and writer whose work often addresses the physical and technological substructures of economic and political systems, of which Artforum says, "(James) seems less concerned with articulating meanings than with devising a way of making and representing that is commensurate with—and therefore perhaps capable of capturing and resisting—the diffuse, nonlinear, and extra-linguistic logic by which those systems operate."

Tuesday, April 7, 6pm
Fullerton Auditorium, 111 South Michigan Avenue
FREE Admission

Joe Zucker in studio. Courtesy Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Berlin

Klaus Kertess. Photograph by Billy Sullivan

For the past four decades, SAIC alumnus Joe Zucker (BFA 1964, MFA 1966) has made idiosyncratic and humorous paintings and drawings that have mined and remixed the territory between the formal achievement of modernism and the allegorical potential of postmodernism. Zucker will discuss his career with New York-based curator and writer Klaus Kertess, who founded the Bykert Gallery with John Byers in 1966 and served as its director until 1975, representing Chuck Close, Ralph Humphrey, Barry Le Va, Brice Marden, and Dorothea Rockburn, among others.

In collaboration with the SAIC Office of Development and Alumni Affairs & the Department of Painting and Drawing

Richard Tuttle, 2008. Photograph by Kerry Ryan McFate / Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. Photograph by Charles Bernstein

A leading artist of the post-minimalist generation, since the mid-1960s Richard Tuttle has adopted a direct and improvisational process to making art using nontraditional materials. Forty years after his first solo show, Tuttle's art continues to question concepts of composition and frame, to explore the balance between line and volume, and to merge the mystical with the material. Poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's work is known for its exploration of the complexities of cultural and political identity, and her volumes of poetry include Sphericity (1993), a collaboration with her husband Richard Tuttle, Endocrinology (1997) and Concordance (2006), collaborations with artist Kiki Smith, and numerous other titles.

In collaboration with the SAIC Writing Program & The Poetry Center of Chicago.