Visiting Artists & Scholars Series

Theorist-in-Community
“One More Try, or Teacher, There Are Things that I Don’t Want to Learn”
Monday, June 15, 6:00–7:30 p.m.    

The loss of a teacher, or mother, or friend, or anyone you love isn’t something you can or really should move on from. There is no escaping loss or grief, since losing is a constitutive part of living and loving. This talk stages a return to the scene of a classroom some time ago as a return to the braided questions of melancholia and the weighty inheritance of queer-of-color loss. Drawn from a larger project on unfinished grief, it weaves together performance theory, queer theory, Asian American studies, and Black studies to consider the fraught, always incomplete, and risky work of loving, losing, grieving, and living on as a practice and process of living together and living with loss. Joshua Chambers-Letson is the chair of Performance Studies and professor of Performance Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. JCL is the author of Unfinished Grief: Queer Love and Loss (NYU Press, 2026) as well as After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America and co-editor of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown with Tavia Nyong’o. 

TBA

Tala Madani (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran) makes paintings and animations whose indelible images bring together wide-ranging modes of critique, prompting reflection on gender, political authority, and questions of who and what gets represented in art. Her work is populated by mostly naked, bald, middle-aged men engaged in acts that push their bodies to their limits. Bodily fluids and beams of light emerge from their orifices, generating metaphors for the tactile expressivity of paint. In Madani’s work, slapstick humor is inseparable from violence and creation is synonymous with destruction, reflecting a complex and gut-level vision of contemporary power imbalances of all kinds. Her approach to figuration combines the radical morphology of a modernist with a contemporary sense of sequencing, movement, and speed. 

“Artivism”
Monday, June 22, 6:00–7:30 p.m.

Artivism is a portmanteau that describes the tradition of feminist and queer artists and artist collectives of color (and their intersections) engaging in direct political action as a part of their art practices. Defined by public protest, rule-breaking, rebellion, and resistance to governmental and institutional abuse, direct-action artivism draws on the aims, radical spirit, and tactics of the civil rights and feminist movements and on the struggles for disability rights, queer rights, and immigrant rights to seek legal and social change. Yxta Maya Murray is a novelist, art critic, playwright, social practice artist, filmmaker, and law professor. The author of 12 books, her most recent are God Went Like That (Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books, 2023) and A History of Hazardous Objects (Nevada, 2024). Her work of nonfiction, We Make Each Other Beautiful: Art, Activism, and the Law was published by Cornell University Press in 2024. She has won a Whiting Award, an Art Writer's Grant, the 2024–2025 Blackwell Prize in Writing, and was a 2024–2025 fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her experimental film, Fieldwork AI, which was co-created with Paulina Sierra, was recently screened at the Experimental Film and Video Festival at South Korea's Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA). Her film The Good News, about the ICE attack on Pastor David Black, premiered at The Reef in Downtown Los Angeles in May.

“Reframing Collection-Based Exhibitions: Test Cases From the Whitney Museum”
Thursday, June 25, 6:00–7:30 p.m.

Museum curators at collecting institutions typically install exemplary art from their holdings following a long-term, steady state display format. These installations are often organized chronologically or by medium, and result from careful selection and sustained research. Looking at examples of recent exhibitions drawn from the Whitney's permanent collection, Jennie Goldstein examines a counter-model, in which collection exhibitions offer thematic, cross-medium approaches. These projects propose nuanced looks at 20th and 21st century American art and its histories, revealing underseen artworks and testing new narratives. Jennie Goldstein is the Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Curator of the Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has curated or co-curated numerous shows drawn from the Whitney’s collection, including High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100; Shifting Landscapes; In the Balance: Between Painting and Sculpture, 1965-1985; Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950-2019; and An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1945-2017. In 2018 she organized Christine Sun Kim: Too Much Future as part of the museum’s ongoing public art series. Other recent projects include Natalie Ball: bilwi naats Ga’niipci, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in New York. Building on previous work with Kim, Jennie also co-curated a multi-floor survey exhibition of the artist’s career-to-date called Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night. 

“Summer”
Monday, June 29, 6:00–7:30 p.m. 

During this talk, Germane Barnes of Studio Barnes will discuss what it means to build a practice while designing with, as opposed to for, communities. Germane Barnes is a Chicago-born, Miami-based licensed architect, designer, and founding principal of Studio Barnes, a research and design practice that investigates the connection between architecture and identity, examining architecture’s social and political agency through historical research and design speculation. His work has been exhibited in the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, and the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial. He is a winner of the Architectural League Prize and is a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He was selected in the inaugural cohort of The Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab created by Theaster Gates and sponsored by Prada. His work has also been featured and acquired to the permanent collections of international institutions, most notably San Francisco MoMA, LACMA, The New York Times, and The National Museum of African American History and Culture. His project, Griot, was widely published, as a participant in Biennale Architettura 2023: Laboratory of the Future. 

“As Much Intimacy As One Can Bear”
Monday, July 6, 6:00–7:30 p.m. 

Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh famously measured the success of struggle in terms of love exchanged and noted that through this effort, one could make significant contributions to the collective. He noted that out of love and willingness to act, strategies and tactics would arise naturally from the circumstances of the moment. In "As Much Intimacy As One Can Bear," indira allegra offers a path for a practice of studio that requires a diversity of means to meet a diversity of needs for love to be expressed through site-specific works across the country. Drawing from their interests in weaving, critical phenomenology, end-of-life care, Buddhist philosophy, performance, traditional ecological knowledge, and post-humanist thought, allegra will demonstrate how love can power a practice with a nondual relationship between process and presentation, broadening the scope of what one can perceive and receive from an artwork itself. indira allegra is a conceptual artist and founder of Cazimi Studio using weaving as a framework to collaborate with tension in psychological, spectral, and social spaces. allegra's work has been featured in The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Art Journal, BOMB Magazine, SF Chronicle, e-flux, All Arts, Topical Cream, and ARTFORUM and presented in exhibitions and performances at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY), Blaffer Art Museum (Houston, TX), KADIST (San Francisco, CA), Center for Craft (Asheville, NC), Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco, CA), and SFMOMA (San Francisco, CA), among others. allegra is the author of Tension Studies (2024) and Dispersal of a Feeling: Bloodnotes on Choreography and Illness (2024) and Blackout (Sming Sming Books, 2017). They have been the recipient of numerous awards including the Burke Prize, Creative Capital, United States Artists Fellowship, Gerbode Choreographer Award, and Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Creative Project Grant. 

“How to Launder Money Through Art Acquisition"
Thursday, July 9, 6:00–7:30 p.m. 

Maura Brewer presents an overview of her recent projects which explore the relationship between art, money, and crime. Maura Brewer is a video-essayist who makes work about the financialization of art. Brewer is a Guggenheim fellow, a MacDowell fellow, a recipient of the Creative Capital Award, and the Lens Award at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her work has been shown internationally at venues including MoMA, Art in General, the MCA and the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, and her projects have received press coverage in outlets including The Paris Review, The Guardian, and CBS News. Brewer received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 2011 and was a Whitney Independent Study Program fellow in 2015. In addition to her art practice, Brewer works as a private investigator in New York. 

"Rearview Mirror"
Monday, July 13, 6:00–7:30 p.m. 

Jes Fan (born Toronto 1990; raised in Hong Kong; lives and works in New York) makes works that explore the porousness of identity and challenge the limits of binary categorization. Jes Fan: Unbounded features sculptures that highlight the artist’s wide-ranging processes, from glassblowing to CT scanning and 3D printing, and their innovative approach to materials, including resin, glass, and silicone. Using an abstract language often based on the human form, Fan’s sculptures probe the changing nature of both embodiment and identity, sometimes incorporating biological traces of the body itself, such as melanin, estrogen, and testosterone. Since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design program in glass in 2014, Fan has gained widespread recognition and been included in numerous international group exhibitions, including Scientia Sexualis, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024); the Whitney Biennial (2024), in New York; the M+ Sigg Prize Finalist Exhibition, in Hong Kong (2023); the Venice Biennale (2022); the New Museum Triennial (2021), in New York; and the Sydney Biennial (2020). 

“I can’t make you love me”
Thursday, July 16, 6:00–7:30 p.m.

Brittany Nelson creates images, videos, and objects that draw parallels between space exploration and queer experience through shared themes of loneliness, isolation, and coded language. Collaborating with SETI Institute scientists, science fiction authors, and archivists, Nelson uses science and science fiction archives to explore how communication with distant non-human actors can function as a proxy for unrequited desires. Nelson (b. 1984, Great Falls, MT) uses science and science fiction archives to create images, videos, and objects that draw parallels between space exploration and queer experience through shared themes of loneliness, isolation, unrequited desires, and coded language. Nelson is an Artist in Residence with the SETI Institute and the recipient of a Trellis Art Fund Stepping Stone Grant (2025) and Creative Capital Foundation Grant (2015). She has recently presented works at the List Center for Visual Arts at MIT, Cambridge, MA; Luhring Augustine, New York; the Museum of Art São Paulo, Brazil; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki; Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Norway; Le CAP–Centre d’art Saint Fons, France. Her work has been featured in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Art In America, Frieze Magazine, Cultured Magazine, BOMB Magazine, and Camera Austria. 

Solo Performance: “Believe” (written, created and performed by Finley)
Monday, July 20, 6:00–7:30 p.m.

Karen Finley creates a series of artworks illustrating  mentors, teachers, and artists who "believed" in Finley and gave support with their encouragement. These supportive individuals had encounters with Finley—professionally, as friends, as teachers, celebrities, or who worked with, met, taught, or collaborated with Finley. Sometimes they were coincidental occurrences that shaped and influenced her journey. On stage, Finley sits at a table handling the works on paper artwork she created that illustrates the narrative while a live camera with a bird's eye view projects Finley's hands and artwork onto the screen simultaneously in real time. While the images are projected, Finley tells the story of each “believe” encounter. The artworks act as a storyboard creating intimacy, the private made public of supportive relationships. The artwork is projected onto the screen cinematically. Some of the artists: Louise Bourgeois, Kathy Acker, Danitra Vance, bell hooks, Sinead O'Connor, Linda Montano, Joan Rivers, David Wojnarowicz, Tony Fitzpatrick, and Lee Godie amongst others. Coincidentally, Finley as a student at the School of the Art Institute Young Artist Program walked past the infamous Hopper painting NightHawks. Finley would later have a studio in the Hopper boyhood bedroom in Nyack, NY. In addition, Finley will speak about Chicago artworks, the Art Institute, and Chicago artist encounters that made a difference in her practice. Karen Finley is an artist, poet, and performer. Born in Chicago, she received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her raw and transgressive performances have brought debate and controversy. Finley was part of the '90s culture wars; her NEA grant was denied along with three other artists, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller for the content of their work. Now known as the NEA4, they were plaintiffs for the Supreme Court case Finley v. NEA that challenged the decency provision in government grants to artists through the National Endowment for the Arts. Her performances and visual art have been presented internationally such as at The Barbican in London, Lincoln Center, The Steppenwolf, Museum of Modern Art, Bobino in Paris, and Art Basel amongst others. Finley is an ACLU ambassador. She is the author of 10 books, including her most recent, COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco (City Lights, 2025), Grabbing Pussy (OR Books, 2018) and the 25th anniversary edition of Shock Treatment by City Lights. A recipient of many awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is an arts professor in Art and Public Policy at New York University.