Visiting Artists
The Department of Printmedia hosts a number of visiting artists, critics, and scholars for lectures, critiques and collaborations, providing opportunities for students to engage in a community beyond SAIC. The department also organizes annual graduate noon-time lectures in which students present their studio research to faculty and students from all disciplines.
These programs are organized in addition to the Visiting Artists Program (VAP) organized by SAIC.
2016
Carrol Dunham
Carroll Dunham has been exhibiting his work since the early ’80’s and making prints in all media since the mid-’80’s. Dunham’s lecture will be about my prints and how they relate to the rest of his studio practice.
Dunham has held solo exhibitions at the New Museum in New York and the Millesgarden in Stockholm, and has participated in the Whitney Biennials of 1985, 1991, and 1995. His work is held in the permanent collections of several museums, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He currently lives and works in New York.
Xu Bing
Xu Bing is a pioneering contemporary artist, known for making mixed media installations that subvert systems of language, meaning, and tradition. Originally trained in printmaking, Xu Bing has a conceptual practice that has taken many forms, including meaningless Chinese characters, an American font that looks "Chinese," a "language" made up entirely of emoticons, and giant phoenix sculptures made from construction debris. Currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, Wu Street (1993), made collaboratively with the artist Ai Weiwei, slyly questions the misunderstandings inherent within the internationalization of the art world as art history and artworks travel around the globe.
Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; British Museum, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas, among other major institutions. Additionally, Xu Bing has shown at the Venice Biennale, Biennale of Sydney, and the Johannesburg Biennale.
In 1999 Xu Bing was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of his "capacity to contribute importantly to society, particularly in printmaking and calligraphy." In 2003 Xu Bing was awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize, and in 2004 he won the first Wales International Visual Art Prize, Artes Mundi. In 2006 the Southern Graphics Council awarded Xu Bing their lifetime achievement award in recognition of the fact that his "use of text, language, and books has impacted the dialogue of the print and art worlds in significant ways." In 2015 he was awarded the 2014 Department of State-Medal of Arts for his efforts to promote cultural understanding through his artworks. He currently lives and works in Beijing and New York.
The talk is presented in partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Museum Education and SAIC's Visiting Artists Program.
2015
Eilza Myrie
Thinking through considerations of printmaking, surface/impression/transfer, I will present both print and sculptural works.The alliance/resemblance/intersection of the two disciplines is critical to the work I’ve made as the loss of/transfer of dimension/volume between the three dimensional complex world we live in and the two dimensional reflection of that reality in print is critical to the way I think about the work I make. What are the repercussions of the multiple? What is the effect of circulation and dissemination on the subject in the work? How do new technologies alter the consumption and editorialization of the printed image? What does the proliferation/decline of different modes of print media mean for our interactions?
Eliza Myrie was born in New York and currently lives and works in Chicago, IL. She received her MFA from Northwestern University and BA from Williams College. Myrie was an Artist-In-Residence at the University of Chicago in 2012 and a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2010. Select group exhibitions include Roots & Culture, Chicago (2014); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago (2012); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2011); Zora Space, Brooklyn, New York (2011); Applied Arts, Chicago (2011); Hyde Park Arts Center, Chicago (2010); Davidson Contemporary, New York (2010); and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston,
Illinois (2010).
Sarah Suzuki
The Print World: Mapping Contemporary Printmaking
Comprising a sprawling constellation of artists, publishers, printers, papermakers, dealers, collectors, scholars, and curators, the print world occupies one circle in the ever-expanding Venn diagram of global contemporary art. In some arenas, there is perhaps a perception that this constituency is sited on the margins, removed from the center of activity, preoccupied with the minutia of connoisseurship, or the technical distinctions between aquatint grounds. It is true that printed art has its own trajectories and specific histories that both align with and deviate from the mainstream arc of art histories, and that the print world protects and preserves these legacies, ensuring their continuation. But this isn't a moribund effort. In fact, printmaking is currently experiencing a stealth renaissance, finding ways of insinuating itself into the larger activities of contemporary art without necessarily announcing itself as doing so. The conceptual concerns of printmaking—collaboration, process, copy/original, reproduction, and sequence and seriality—are wholly present in work across disciplines, resulting in exciting new projects, both print (made and distributed within the realm of the print world) and printed (incorporating aspects of printmaking, but within a broader, non-print-specific purview). This talk will examine some of the myriad ways in which the multivalent influence of printmaking is manifesting itself in a global context, and leaving its imprint on contemporary art at large.
Sarah Suzuki is Associate Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). At MoMA,Suzuki's exhibitions include Jean Dubuffet: Soul of the Underground (2014-15); The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec: Prints and Posters (2014-15); Wait, Later This Will All Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth (2013); Printin' (2011) with the artist Ellen Gallagher; "Ideas Not Theories": Artists and The Club, 1942-1962 (2010) and Rock Paper Scissors (2010) with Jodi Hauptman; Mind & Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940 to Now (2010); and Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities (2008), as well as solo exhibitions of Meiro Koizumi (2013); Yin Xiuzhen (2010); Song Dong (2009); and Gert and Uwe Tobias (2008). Among her publications are 2012 What is a Print?, as well as contributions to numerous books, catalogues, and journals. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia University, she has lectured widely and taught numerous courses on the subject of modern and contemporary art.
Aimee Lee
The State of Korean Paper
Korea was an early site of papermaking in global history, with hanji (Korean paper) beginning soon after paper's birth in China, and continuing to this day in an unbroken tradition. However, the old ways are highly endangered in the face of rising costs of labor and overhead, lack of natural resources, and a culture that values speed, low prices, and the newest technologies.
Despite its struggles, hanji has attracted more attention in the last several years and has become a reliable material for many artists. Aimee Lee, the leading US hanji scholar and practitioner, will present a talk about hanji through stories of its history and current state in Korea, complemented with slides, videos, and samples of paper and hanji objects.
Aimee Lee is an interdisciplinary artist who makes and works with handmade paper. She is the leading hanji researcher and practitioner in the United States and holds a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. She researched Korean papermaking and related arts as a Fulbright fellow and built the first and only Korean papermaking studio in North America in 2010 at the Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland. In 2012, The Legacy Press published her first book, Hanji Unfurled: One Journey into Korean Papermaking, the first English-language book devoted to the topic, recognized by the Eric Hoffer Book Award in 2013. In 2014, she launched the Eastern Paper Studio as the Morgan Conservatory's Artist-in-Residence and has been a resident artist at many residencies in the United States and abroad. She travels regularly to exhibit, teach, and lecture, and her work resides in numerous collections. For more information, visit aimeelee.net.
Christiane Baumgartner
German artist Christiane Baumgartner explores the convergence of speed and standstill through her monumental monochrome woodcuts taken from her own video stills. She combines the earliest and latest reproduction processes—woodcut and video. Speed and the passage of time are recurring themes throughout her work and the notion of "time" is embodied in her artistic process, which involves the lengthy and painstaking medium of handmade woodcut with all of its inaccuracies and mistakes. Compared to woodcut, the digital system of video is a calculable system. Digital information provides the means by which to order and simplify, and enables the production of endless identical images in different media. Through the use of a self-generated line grid, Baumgartner simulates this standardized information for use in her woodcuts. Central to her work is the relation between materiality and immateriality. The "original" image is one of several thousand neutrally generated digital images, not yet defined in size, color, and frequency. Through her selection and transformation of a video still, she creates a unique woodcut that brings experience and weight to an otherwise unexperienced moment.
Baumgartner's recent exhibitions include Alan Cristea Gallery, London; Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; Centre de la Gravure et de l'Image imprimée, La Louvière, Belgium; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK; and Städel Museum, Frankfurt, among others. Her work can be found in more than 40 public collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Baumgartner is the 2014 recipient of the Mario Avati-Academie des beaux-arts Printmaking award, Institut de France, Paris.
This lecture has been organized and sponsored by SAIC's Visiting Artist Program.
Nichole Maury
Patterns of Behavior
Maury explores how the stories we tell are purposefully incomplete. We become so entrenched in manufactured realities, romanticized and idealized, that we can no longer untangle what is real from what is not. She uses various systems of deconstruction to draw attention to our inability to construct a complete personal narrative.
Nichole Maury lives and works in Kalamazoo, MI where she is an Associate Professor of Art in the Printmedia Area at Western Michigan University. Having received her M.F.A. in Printmaking from the University of Iowa, her work explores the parallel relationship that exist within printmaking, drawing, and other process-based modes of working.
Maury has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally including The International Print Center New York, the Scuola di Grafica, Venice, Italy, The Chicago Cultural Center, and The Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI. Her work has been featured in the Midwest Edition of New American Paintings (vol 89) and Printmakers Today (Schiffer Publishing, 2010) and can be found in the collections of the Midwest Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Kala Art Institute.
2014
Wade Guyton
Wade Guyton makes objects, paintings, drawings, photographs, books, and posters. His work addresses the conditions of its own making, its reception, documentation, and distribution. The artist has become known for making works on linen that are produced with an inkjet printer from digital files. He utilizes information from webpages, marks drawn or typed in Microsoft Word, or scanned images. The works themselves record the process of their own making in the studio; composition and surface incident or pictorial effect are the result of multiple events and the convergence of information in digital and material form. The language of painting informs the stretched linen works, and the final forms are often determined by architectural or institutional constraints.
Guyton has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; Kunsthalle Zürich; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Portikus, Frankfurt; Secession, Vienna; Kunstverein in Hamburg; and La Salle de Bains, Lyon. His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including the 2013 Carnegie International, 2013 Venice Biennale, 2007 Biennale de Lyon, Greater New York 2005, and 2004 Whitney Biennial, among others. His work can be found in the permanent collections of major institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. With artist Kelley Walker he creates work under the moniker Guyton\Walker, and he is a member of the collaborative Continuous Project with Bettina Funcke, Joseph Logan, and Seth Price.
Wade Guyton will discuss his practice with Susan Tallman, an art historian who has written extensively on the history and culture of the print, as well as on issues of authenticity, reproduction, and multiplicity. She is Editor-in-Chief of the international journal and website Art in Print, and her writing has appeared in Art in America, Parkett, Public Art Review, Art on Paper, Print Quarterly, Arts Magazine, and many other publications. Her books include The Contemporary Print: from Pre-Pop to Postmodern (Thames and Hudson), The Collections of Barbara Bloom (Steidl), and numerous museum catalogues. Tallman currently teaches in the Departments of Printmedia and Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Rhys Himsworth
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Rhys Himsworth received his BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2003 and his MA in Printmaking from the Royal College of Art in 2009. Himsworth has presented at The Royal Computer Society in their annual symposium "Electronic Visualization and the Arts" and served as a panel member for "Fast Media/Slow Knowledge" at SGC Philigrafika, in Philadelphia, 2009.
As an artist he has exhibited extensively in Europe, North America, the Middle East and India, including solo shows at Reynolds Gallery, Richmond Virginia and "Entropy" in Doha, Qatar. He also took part in the biennial "Locws International" at the National Museum of Wales, UK, 2011. Himsworth has been a visiting lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and the University of Hertfordshire in the UK and The University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He also taught as an adjunct faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University and is currently the Director of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar.
In 2009 Himsworth was awarded the Conran Foundation Award.
Rhys Himsworth will present a lecture on his artistic practice from recent years. Working across a range of media, he mixes natural elements with the machine made to create hybrids that have a dialog between the new and the obsolete, the automated and the intuitive and the organic and systematic. His practice as an artist is a dialogue between new media and the language and philosophy that exists within printmaking at a watershed moment in the mediums history. His work often appropriates obsolete analogue printers and re-assembles them into installations involving live Internet feeds, recordings of organic beings such as birds in motion, or even live surveillance data drawn from the audience.
Himsworth's lecture will include an overview of his practice from recent years as well as a narrative on his methodology and research.
Sue Coe
Abolition of Meat Industrial Complex
Double parked on the highway of life. Artivist. Animal Rights Activist.
Sarah Kirk Hanley
Is Printmaking the Visual Language of the Digital Age?
Sarah Kirk Hanley is an independent print curator, writer and appraiser. She writes the INK blog for the Art in Print website and is a frequent contributor to the journal. She also teaches at the School of Continuing and Professional Studies at New York University and is a consulting expert for the Berlin-based online auction company Auctionata and the New York-based company Art Peritus. Hanley is currently organizing an exhibition of Enrique Chagoya's prints and multiples for the 2014 Mid America Print Council Conference in Detroit. She has held positions at Christie's, New York, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Lower East Side Printshop and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, ArtTable, and the College Art Association.
As our culture delves further into a digital identity, more and more artists are working with printmaking media. This is due not only to its ubiquity, but more importantly, to its direct relationship (as a mechanical, serial medium) to contemporary mass media culture and consumerism—a context that renders the handmade antiquated and quaint. The precedent is Warhol's, of course, but the use of printmaking in "high brow" contexts has been gathering steam over the past few decades and has been embraced by a new crop of artists, whether defining themselves as printmakers or not. Early examples by established artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Spero, Xu Bing, Félix González-Torres, Kara Walker, and Kiki Smith will be discussed alongside the work of a new generation, including Swoon, Nicola López, Rob Swainston, Ryan McGinness, Wade Guyton, and Matthew Day Jackson.
2013
Dylan Miner
Thoughts on Socially-Engaged Art in and with Indigenous Communities
Dylan Miner is an artist, activist, historian, and curator who holds a PhD in art history from The University of New Mexico. He has published and lectured extensively, with two forthcoming books on art and indigenous politics. To date, he has published more than forty journal articles, book chapters, review essays, and encyclopedia entries. In 2010, he was an Artist Leadership Fellow at the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian) for his project Anishinaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag (Native Kids Ride Bikes) . Since then, he has hung over a dozen solo exhibitions throughout the Americas and Europe. As a founding member of the artists' collective Justseeds, he was awarded the Grand Prix at the 28th Biennial of Graphic Arts in Slovenia, and installed a solo Justseeds exhibition at the 29th Biennial. Recently, he had a solo exhibition in Norway, collaborating with the Sámi people, as well as another at an artist-run centre in Canada. Miner teaches in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University
In this lecture, Dylan Miner will discuss his own artistic practice in relationship to larger issues of contemporary art, Indigenous sovereignty, settler-colonialism, and anti-capitalist politics. He will pay particular attention to three ongoing projects, Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag (Native Kids Ride Bikes), Dismantling the Illegitimate Border, and his most recent initiative Michin-Michif, Decolonizing Medicines. Over the past decade, Miner, an artist of Métis descent, has worked directly with Indigenous communities and artists throughout the US, Canada, Mexico, Norway, and Australia. Throughout his practice, Miner employs collaboration as of dismantling hierarchical social relations. He will also discuss contemporary Native art and how he navigates working with Indigenous and immigrant communities that he is not a member of.
Gabe Fowler
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Comic Books
Gabe Fowler runs the store and imprint Desert Island in Brooklyn NY, publishes and edits the free quarterly anthology of comics and illustration Smoke Signal, and is the founder of both the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival and Comic Arts Brooklyn—fun, free events celebrating comics and cartoon art for an international community.
In his lecture, Gabe will discuss his art practice since graduating from SAIC in 2002, which has evolved from making conceptually-driven projects to opening a store for comics and artists' books, editing and publishing a free comics and illustration newspaper, and starting a few festivals related to similar material. He will discuss how and why he did it, and whether such activity can be construed as an art practice.
Buzz Spector
Speed (of) Reading
Buzz Spector is an artist and critical writer whose art 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 art criticism has appeared in a number of publications, including American Craft, Artforum, Art on Paper, Exposure, and New Art Examiner. Buzzwords, a book of selected interviews with Spector, plus new page art, was published in 2012 by Sara Ranchouse Publishing, Chicago. Spector is represented by Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, and Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis. He is Dean of the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.
From flip books to livres deluxe, reading is a matter of speed and handling as well as comprehension. The text/image and associated visual strategies of artists' books supplement the cognition of language with picture (or symbol) reading. Artists use the armature of page-turning as itself another order of grasping meaning. Dieter Roth's "most speedy" themes and variations, Sol LeWitt's drawn or photographed categorical sets, or Xu Bing's subtly pictorial "translations" each invite a pace of scrutiny as well as an intellectual "adding up." Artist and critic Buzz Spector will talk about and show examples of the ways of reading artists' books, reflecting on how books transmogrify the reader's experience as one of passing pages as well as time.
Hamanishi Katsunori
Hamanishi Katsunori is a world-renowned artist whose long and successful career has focused on the production of mezzotint prints, perhaps the most demanding of all printing techniques. The artist revels in the ability to get a multitude of gray shades from this process using a two-dimensional metal plate to describe the most detailed three-dimensional forms. Hamanishi's subject matter has ranged from steel rods bound with cloth and twigs tied with ropes to abstract shapes in color. In recent years he has focused more on Japanese subjects of forms that tie and fold such as traditional paper and cord decorations, as well as kimono. Hamanishi gave a live demo on his process of creating these exquisite mezzotints.
The visit was organized in conjunction to his exhibition The Mezzotints of Hamanishi Katsunori that was installed at the Japanese print gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago. The visit was made possible by the Asia Art Council and the Department of Printmedia.
Miller and Shellabarger
Miller & Shellabarger are a 2009 recipient of the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, 2008 recipient of an Artadia Award, and a 2007 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Their work is in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Gallery of Canada in Ontario. In 2010 they showed a major selection of work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine, participated in the Time-Based Arts (TBA) festival in Portland, Oregon and had a solo exhibition in 2011 at the Illinois State University Galleries in Normal, Illinois. Their work has been written about in Artforum.com, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, Art Pulse, TimeOut Chicago, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger also maintain separate artistic practices. They live and work in Chicago.
Ellen Alderman
Owner of Alderman Galleries, Chicago
Karsten Lund
Curatorial Assistant at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Kevin Haas
Kevin Haas grew up in the rust belt of the Midwest, inspired by the abandoned industrial areas of St Louis, Chicago, and Gary, IN. He earned his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a MFA from Indiana University where he studied printmaking and digital media. He is currently a Professor at Washington State University where he coordinates the printmaking area. Since 1995 his work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across the US and in Canada. He has been included in exhibits at OHGE Ltd. and Davidson Galleries in Seattle, the Jundt Museum in Spokane and Deluge Contemporary Art in Victoria, BC.. He is a recipient of the Artist Trust Fellowship and the Seattle Print Arts: Larry Sommers Fellowship, and was an artist in residence at the Frans Masereel Center in Belgium in 2010 and 2012.
2012
Dimitry Samarov
Virgil Marti
Robbie Conal
Andrew Blackley
Clare Rojas
Chris Ware
2011
Sonnenzimmer
Duncan MacKenzie
Paul Coldwell
Chad Kourie
Jenn Schmidt
Santiago Zujlillo
In the recent past:
Nicola Lopez
David Nichols
Sandow Birk
Paul Mullowney
Brett Colley
Harmen Liembourg
Mark zaffron
Tom Huck
Endy Poskovic
Jay Ryan
Teresa Cole
Lisa Bulawsky
