Visiting Artists Program: 2000-2005

2005

States of Art Criticism Symposium: What do art critics do?
This series of lectures, seminars, workshops, and roundtables represents a major international event focused on art criticism featuring some of the world's most important art critics and theorists.

Lectures
James Elkins: Conditions of Art Criticism (listen to the podcast)
Hélène Cixous: Arts of Escaping: Simon Hantai, Roni Horn and Other Writers (listen to the podcast)
James Panero: Why Critics Are Not Your Friends
Dave Hickey: Art After Criticism (listen to the podcast)

Public Round Table
Ariella Budick, James Elkins, Dave Hickey, Stephen Melville, Michael Newman, James Panero 
(listen to the podcast)

Panel Discussions
Reaction: A Response to States of Criticism Round Table
Michelle Grabner, Kathryn Hixson, Lane Relyea, Hamza Walker
(listen to the podcast)

Criticism in the State: Nuts & Bolts, Hopes & Fears of Local Art Criticism
Moderators: Michelle Grabner, Kathryn Hixson
Elijah Burgher, Ruth Lopez, Deb Wilk
(listen to the podcast)

Thick Design
This lecture series describes the work of artists and designers who explore the denseness of space, time, networks, text, and material in their projects. Notions of ThickSpace, ThickWare, ThickThought, ThickProduction, and ThickPractice will be explored. Lead Corporate Sponsor: Sara Lee Foundation.

Individual Lectures

2004

/ Mapping / Culture / Border / Hacking /
This lecture series examines the work of artists, artist-collaboratives, and film/video makers whose work addresses or proceeds from shifts in articulations of global culture, politics of the border and dilemmas of transnational or diasporic identities as a spatial concern. Special attention is given to artists who use the gesture and organizational logic of mapping, cartographic sciences and the grid to locate identity as well as its displacements. Lead Corporate Sponsor: Sara Lee Foundation.


Noon-hour Talks
This series of lunch box talks address the increasing number of artists responding to issues such as uneven development, gentrification, and the increasing privatization of public, intellectual and creative space. Using acts of mapping, these contemporary forms of intervention challenge the spatial and political norms of organization and representation. SAIC staff, faculty, students and alumni have been asked to present their work, and the work of others, to help foster institutional dialogue.

Mapping Chicago
Mess Hall

Confronting Division and Difference: Artistic Practice in Eastern Europe and the European Union
Elena Jovanova and Paige Sarlin

Landscapes and Monuments
Deborah Stratman and Ellen Rothenberg

Artist as Urban Planner
Emily Forman and Eric Triantafillou

Un-Framed
In an effort to reclaim some space for artists (and art making) outside of, or beyond, the production of a narrative or framing structure, the Visiting Artists Program is theme-less for the spring 2004 season.

Chicago Critics Caucus: The Critic Speaks
This lecture series features Chicago-based art correspondents for Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, Sculpture, New City, Fiberarts, the Chicago Sun-Times, GLASS, Bridge, tema celeste, Aperture, Metalsmith, Frieze, American Craft, panel-house.com, Art & Auction, and more. assessing the role and relevance of art criticism in Chicago today. Among the topics to be addressed are the changing role of art criticism in contemporary art, the possibilities of regional art criticism, the responsibilities of critics to their community, and the viability of print and magazine criticism in an increasingly diversified media environment. Co-sponsored by the Chicago Art Critics Association.

Panel Discussion
Moderator: James Yood
Susan Snodgrass, Michael Workman, Terence Hannum, Polly Ullrich, Margaret Hawkins

Amazwi Abesifazane: Voices of Women
Several representatives from South Africa will discuss the embroidered and beaded artworks called "memory cloths" created by South African women to document their lives during and after apartheid and featured in the Amazwi Abesifazane: Voices of Women, exhibit at the Betty Rymer Gallery. A project of the Durban-based organization Create Africa South, the Chicago presentation of this exhibition marks the 10th anniversary of the end of apartheid. Supported in part by the South African Consulate, William Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Lectureship in Fiber and Material Studies, and the Sara Lee Foundation.

Panel Discussions
Moderator: Carol Becker
Andries Johannes Botha, Promise Tholakele Zuma, and Lindiwe Baloyi

Near: Alternative Models for Creative Practice
This panel discussion looks specifically at projects and artists that engage directly with community to create a space for dialogue, community empowerment, and social history.

Carol Becker, Maria Benfield, Pat Guy, Michael Piazza, and Amazwi Abesifazane project representatives

Marketing Memory/Collecting Culture
This gallery talk is presented by Lisa Stone in the Betty Rymer Gallery.

Experimental Narrative Films from India
These film screenings feature two contemporary Indian filmmakers exploring the boundaries of documentary and fiction. Co-presented by SAIC's Conversations at the Edge.

Individual Lectures

*Screening.
**Artist-in-Residence, Iberê Camargo Foundation Grant.
**CEC Artslink Fellow.
***Co-sponsored by Performing Arts Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

2003

Call and Response: Art in the Age of Hip-Hop Culture

This lecture series explores the influence of hip-hop music and culture on global art making and art discourse. In keeping with the "call and response" nature of hip-hop music, many of the events will be in the form of discussions or dialogues which examine the impact that hip-hop culture has had on contemporary art making as well as art historical scholarship.

Panel Discussions
Local Round-Up
Moderator: Raymond Codrington
Miguel Aguilar, Max King Cap, and Dzine

Deconstructing God
This lecture series includes artists whose work employs and also critiques traditional religious doctrine, imagery, and ideology, with a special emphasis on exploring feminist or womanist revisions of established religious doctrine.

Individual Lectures

*Co-sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
**Co-sponsored by Quimby's Bookstore.

2002

A Particular Time and Place: 1980's East Village Art
This lecture series highlights the phenomenon of art production in New York's East Village during the 1980s, and explores the intricacies of this particular art scene. Featuring artists, critics, and historians who will expand upon Artforum's 1999 lament, and reframe the East Village art phenomena in terms of community, relationships to irony, and pop culture.

Panel Discussion
Local Round-Up: 1980s East Village Art
Moderator: Michelle Grabner
Lisa Wainwright and Jerry Saltz

After the End of History: Rethinking the Image of the Past
This lecture series features artists and scholars whose work addresses the problem of historical representation.

Panel Discussion
Local Round-Up: Representing History
Moderator: Dan Eisenberg

Technophilia: Media Interventions, Creative Technologies, and the Digital Influence on the Arts—Part 2
This lecture series explores the relationship of digital media and new technologies to various art fields and disciplines, intended to highlight the "new" interdisciplinary spirit, which often determines art practice in this decade of rapidly developing computer technologies.

Act/Art: Art with Community
This lecture series investigates how art programs can genuinely become integrated into various types of "communities" to serve social, educational, therapeutic, and aesthetic ends. Art practices that involve residents or constituents of local communities in the making of art are addressed and the timeless question about the role of the artist in society is posed, begging us to consider the import and impact of art making on the public sphere.

Stylistic Hybrids: Contemporary Indian Figurative Painting—Part 2
This lecture mini-series focuses on the significance of contemporary Indian figurative painting with two of India's most revered living artists and a well respected curator of Indian art.

Noon-time Lectures
These noon-time lectures, presented in conjunction with Stylistic Hybrids—Part 2, provide a grounding for the series.

India's Popular Painting Traditions and Contemporary Visual Culture
Barbara Rossi

Looking Back, Moving Forward: Indian Painting in the 20th Century
Betty Seid

Cave and Court-Painting in Pre-colonial India
Michael Rabe

Maximum Impact: The Legacy of Minimalism—Part 2
This lecture series examines the powerful impact of minimalism on contemporary art, its steady influence on art practitioners, and our ironic relationship to its aesthetic and anti-aesthetic value. Despite its elite artistic valuation, minimalist art remains controversial; yet minimalism continues to provide young artists with the principles of objectivism, seriality, industrial finish, and new materials, and the minimalist ethic provides a context for some of today's most significant art.

Individual Lectures

2001

Maximum Impact: The Legacy of Minimalism—Part 1
This lecture series examines the powerful impact of minimalism on contemporary art, its steady influence on art practitioners, and our ironic relationship to its aesthetic and anti-aesthetic value. Despite its elite artistic valuation, minimalist art remains controversial; yet minimalism continues to provide young artists with the principles of objectivism, seriality, industrial finish, and new materials, and the minimalist ethic provides a context for some of today's most significant art.

Panel Discussion
The Legacy of Minimalism
Moderator: David Raskin

Technophilia: Media Interventions, Creative Technologies, and the Digital Influence on the Arts—Part 1
This lecture series explores the relationship of digital media and new technologies to various art fields and disciplines, intended to highlight the "new" interdisciplinary spirit, which often determines art practice in this decade of rapidly developing computer technologies.

Design Initiative: Cutting-Edge Issues in Contemporary Design
This lecture series explores issues ranging from the impact of technology to how design can act as a provocative art form, with a focus on how critical design can rework attitudes of contemporary material and visual culture.

Attack of the Killer Animation
This lecture series highlights the "new wave" of animation and its phenomenal infiltration of both popular culture and contemporary art. Animation as a cultural phenomenon amongst Baby Boomers and Generation Xers has given rise to significant cultural, social, and moral shifts in society. This series features artists working as animators and cartoonists, as well as other artists whose work incorporates animation, or the animation format, as a primary tool.

The Art of Club
This lecture series explores the intersection of sound and the visual arts. Since the 1960s, artists and musicians have collaborated in live performances, giving rise to aspects of early video and sound art, as well as significantly impacting the disciplines of sculpture, fashion, poetry, prose, and performance. Today, the widespread use of technologies has enabled an expansion of this tradition from the art museum into popular culture (dance halls, clubs, etc.). Through an investigation of the historical antecedents and present-day manifestations, this series demonstrates the intimate relationship between two seemingly disparate worlds.

*Wyrzykowski will stage a demonstration of his mixed-media extravaganza with his collaborator Mackiek Sienkiewicz as part of SAIC's participation in the Chicago Cultural Center's In Between: Art from Poland 1945–2000.

Individual Lectures

2000

Curators and Critics
This lecture series investigates the processes inherent in framing contemporary art from the perspectives of presentation and interpretation of work in concert with its critical analysis.

*Co-sponsored by The University of Chicago's Renaissance Society. 

Stylistic Hybrids: Contemporary Asian Art—Part 1
This lecture series investigates aspects of stylistic hybridity in the work of contemporary Asian artists. Providing a cross-section of artists from all regions of Asia including Vietnam, China, India, Korea, and Iran, these individuals have engaged in the migratory patterns of nomadic global citizen—their voices have been shaped not solely by the inherited culture of their birthplace, but also by geographic and cultural encounters.

Individual Lectures