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Artists
Now! is a new Wednesday evening lecture series designed for a broad
audience with an interest in contemporary visual art. The first season
presents a diverse group of artists working across traditional, hybrid
and emergent disciplines. Join these nationally
and internationally recognized practitioners as they explore and expand
the boundaries of creative visual practice today.
All lectures take
place on Wednesdays at 7 pm in the Arts Center Lecture Hall, 2400
E. Kenwood Blvd. on the UWM campus, unless
otherwise noted.
The lectures are free and open to the public.
Artists Now! is supported
in part by the Frederick R. Layton Fund, the John Colt Memorial
Art Fund, CASA, Object, Inova, the Department
of Film and the Center for International Education.
According
to Lee Ann Garrison, chair of the Department of Visual Art, Artists
Now! was a logical way to maximize visual art resources
in
the Peck School. “The department has had an active residency
program with the visiting Inova artists for the past two years,
and most areas within the department host their own guests. Rather
than
limit these guest activities to a small group of students within
a particular class or area, we chose to create a forum on contemporary
art open to students, faculty, staff and the general public in
which all guests could participate.”
1.30.08 DEB SOKOLOW
The
Trouble with People You Don’t
Know
2.04.08 RACHELLE THIEWES
Reflections
of the Desert
2.20.08 KANISHKA RAJA
Picturing
Time: Making Paintings Outside the Xbox
2.27.08 PEREGRINE HONIG
All A Girl
Could Dream Of!
3.05.08 CLAIRE PENTECOST New Date!
In
Media Res
3.12.08 JANA BREVICK
Investigating Jana Brevick:
The Research and Resulting Creations
3.26.08 ADELHEID MERS
An Organogram of the Peck School
of the Arts
4.02.08 MICHAEL BANICKI
Nicholas Frank Interviews Michael
Banicki
4.09.08 PATRICK RYOICHI
Nagatani Desire for Magic
4.16.08 SARA VELAS
On the Velaslavasay Panorama
4.23.08 DAN ANDERSON
How I Got from Hudson, Wisconsin
to Where I Am Today in Edwardsville, Illinois
4.30.08 RENATO UMALI
What Is a Divine Mind?
January 30, 2008
Deb Sokolow The Trouble with People You Don’t Know
Chicago, IL
Drawing
Deb Sokolow inaugurates the series with a talk in conjunction with The
Flight of Fake Tears at Inova/Kenilworth. She discusses the evolution
of her studio practice, the development of the paranoid narrative,
and the search for the nefarious. Sokolow makes large-scale, text-heavy,
diagrammatic drawings on paper that feature the obsessive inner dialogue
of a paranoid, nameless narrator, an alter  ego of sorts. This narrator,
referred to throughout the work as "you,” allows for the
possibility of a viewer to assume the role of the paranoid narrator
and experience each of Sokolow’s stories as the central character.
With great suspicion, Sokolow’s narrator speculates on the
circumstances and hidden connections among individuals such as neighbors
and co-workers in an immediate environment as well as political figures,
movie stars, drug lords, pirates, and terrorists in the world at
large. For Deb Sokolow & The Flight of Fake Tears: Large-Scale
Narrative Drawing at Inova/Kenilworth (January 25-March 14), Sokolow
will create a new “choose-your-own-adventure”-style drawing
installation about the inner workings of a chain bookstore entitled “The
Trouble with People You Don’t Know.”
Sokolow is a Chicago-based artist whose work has been included in
exhibitions at Northern Illinois University Art Museum, Rudolph Projects
in Houston, Texas, and in Chicago at 40000, Hyde Park Art Center,
and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where her 48 foot-long drawing, “Someone
tell Mayor Daley the pirates are coming” was recently on view.
She is currently working on a site-specific project for the Kemper
Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. Sokolow is a recipient
of a 2007 Frankel Anderson Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center
and a 2005 Visual Arts Fellowship Grant from the Illinois Arts Council.
Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Chicago. She received her MFA in 2004 from the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign in 1996.
February 4, 2008 (Note: this lecture takes place on a Monday at
4 pm)
Rachelle Thiewes Reflections of the Desert
El Paso, TX
Jewelry and Metalsmithing
When Rachelle Thiewes moved from Chicago to El Paso, the monumental
landscape provided new insight into volume, form and light. She talks
about the ways in which landscape defines her work.
 Rachelle Thiewes has been a professor of Art Metals at the University
of Texas at El Paso since 1976. She balances her academic life with
an active career as a studio artist. Her jewelry has been widely
exhibited both nationally and internationally, and is in the permanent
collections of the American Craft Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago,
the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, the National
Museums of Scotland, and the Royal College of Art, London.
February 20, 2008
Kanishka Raja Picturing Time: Making Paintings Outside the XBox
New York, NY
Painting
Kanishka Raja creates complex psychological interiors in which traditions
of Western perspectival space and the conventions of pictorial design
in Indian miniature painting collide. His recent work references
visual and historical repetition and our persistent political and
cultural amnesia.
Kanishka Raja received his BA from Hampshire College and his MFA
from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX. In 2000, he attended
the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, ME.
In October 2007, Raja created a two part solo project titled In
The Future No One Will Have A Past at Envoy and Tilton galleries in New
York. His paintings have been featured in Counterparts: Emerging
Artists and Their Influences at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia
and Fables at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. His
work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker,
The Village Voice, Art In America, Tema Celeste and The
Boston Globe,
among others. In 2006, Raja was an artist in residence at the International
Studio and Curatorial Program in New York and at the Civitella Ranieri
Center in Umbertide, Italy. In 2004, Raja received the Digitas /
ICA Artist Prize which included a solo exhibition at the Institute
of Contemporary Art, Boston. Kanishka Raja was born in Kolkata, India
and lives and works in New York City.
February 27, 2008
Peregrine Honig All A Girl Could Dream Of!
Kansas City, MO
Printmaking
Peregrine Honig explores dark motives and inappropriate behavior
in her Father Gander prints, a four-year project based on reinvented
children’s stories. “The piece is formal. Seven to ten
plates of color, a woodcut forest, and carefully placed cut silk
present a captivating delicacy that is inviting and disturbing. Each
situation is a fragile tragedy placed gently in a forced set. The ‘Forest’ shifts
through seasons or light to reveal the possible lives of familiar
situations. Red Riding Hood is shrouded in Turkish brocade, burdened
by the gestation of her loveless matrimony. Snow White is an addict
and Hansel and Gretel lean forward, Arbus angels, barely obscuring
their disarming bond. Fairytales are posed to prepare tender ears
for uncomfortable situations and resolve them to champion fear. Father
Gander represents edited moments of adult projection and human conflict.”
Peregrine Honig’s recent solo exhibitions include Pretty
Babies at Geschiedle, Chicago (2007); Whiskers
for Prada at Aruba Ballroom,
Las Vegas (2006); and Patriot Acts at Acuna-Hansen Gallery, Los Angeles
(2004). Over the past decade, she has exhibited work in a range of
media in group exhibitions at universities, galleries and museums
throughout the United States. Her work was included in Remarkable
Women at Milwaukee’s Peltz Gallery in 2004. Honig is a contributing
writer and illustrator for Review Magazine and in 1997 she co-founded
Celsius Smith Gallery in Kansas City, a gallery committed to exhibiting
works by female artists. Celsius is a “sister gallery” to
Fahrenheit Gallery, a gallery for emerging artists that Honig owns
and directs. Honig’s work is in the collections of the Chicago
Art Institute; the Fogg Art Museum; the Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas
City; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the National Museum of Women in the
Arts, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York, among others.
March 5, 2008 - New Date!
Claire Pentecost In Media Res
Chicago, IL
Photography
Claire Pentecost considers the great tradition of drawing and its
current place as a mediator between self and the social.
Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer, engaging a variety of media
to interrogate the imaginative and institutional structures that
organize divisions of knowledge. Having spent years tinkering in
a conceptual laboratory for ideas about the natural and the artificial,
her recent projects concentrate on industrial and bioengineered agriculture,
the alternatives and the trade regimes that force one over the other.
She is currently work-shopping a beta phase of VisibleFood: an open
content database and website exposing the hidden costs of the global
corporate system that produces our food. Pentecost is Associate Professor
in the Photography Department at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago, where she teaches photography, drawing, critical theory
and interdisciplinary seminars. Pentecost’s work will be on
view in The Flight of Fake Tears: Large-Scale Narrative Drawing at
Inova/Kenilworth (January 25-March 14).
March 12, 2008
Jana Brevick Investigating Jana Brevick: The Research and Resulting
Creations
Seattle, WA
Jewelry and Metalsmithing
Jana Brevick blurs the boundaries between jewelry and conceptual
art. Her interactive and collaborative works—conceptual projects
that manifest themselves as objects—are redefining the role
of the jeweler.
“Jana Brevick cannot remember a time when she was not involved in making
some kind of art, whether it was building projects in the garage of her childhood
home or creating clothing from vintage pieces and apparel she designed herself.
Trained as both a jewelry artist and an apparel designer, Brevick’s ideas
about art are anything but conventional. She blurs boundaries between jewelry
and conceptual art and whatever interests her becomes the intellectual foundation
for a new body of work. She has made jewelry based on mathematical formulas,
robots, computer technology and spoofy James Bond-style spy gadgets. Brevick
likens some of her break-down-the-walls approach to jewelrymaking to punk rock,
and when you look at a piece such as her Everchanging Ring, you can see why.” --Ornament
Magazine, Winter 2006
March 26, 2008
Adelheid Mers An Organogram of the Peck School of the Arts
Chicago, IL
Visual Artist
Adelheid Mers unveils her diagram of the Peck School of the Arts
made for Adelheid Mers & Indexical Frontiers at Inova/Kenilworth
(March 28-May 11) and talks about her work as an artist who maps
her readings of ideas, metaphors, organizations and other systems
she encounters. During her Inova residency, Mers will create an organogram,
a detailed but whimsical diagram enumerating the people, positions,
procedures, foundations and economic conditions that make up a functioning
university arts program—in this instance, the Peck School of
the Arts. Mers’s diagrams can be read simultaneously as art
object and information. What she produces is not a critique, but
a projection; not an objective analysis, but a visualization of the
network supporting creative production (in this case, the art making
and art educating of the Peck School) that also reveals the artist's
bias as she gives shape to a visual report of what she has observed.
The emphasis of Mers’s artistic practice is on process: connecting
with a group of people and hacking her way—with them—through
the underbrush of their assumptions to help them find new ways of
thinking about their institutions.
Adelheid Mers is a visual artist living in Chicago. Born in Düsseldorf,
Germany, she graduated with an MFA from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
She moved to Chicago with a stipend from the German Academic Exchange
Service to attend the University of Chicago, has exhibited and lectured
widely, curated and co-organized exhibitions, and received grants
from the DAAD, the British Council, the NEA , the IAC, the SAIC and
the City of Chicago. She is currently an Associate Professor at the
School of the Art Institute, Chicago, where she teaches in the Arts
Administration and Policy program. She serves on the editorial board
of WhiteWalls.
April 2, 2008
Michael Banicki Nicholas Frank Interviews Michael Banicki
Chicago, IL
Painting
Michael Banicki rates things, usually what tends to be overlooked
or underappreciated by a society that runs at a much faster pace
than the artist himself. These ratings, of moths, bats, jazz trumpeters,
farm tractors, small towns, and other subjects too numerous to mention
(or pay much attention to, for the rest of us) are compiled into
brilliantly-colored paintings, many of which appear as shimmering,
abstract color grids, and register as information only on close inspection.
Curator Nicholas Frank asks Banicki if his Americana is a form of
nostalgia for what has been trampled over by the great economic engine,
or an implicit critique of the throwaway consumerist culture.
Michael Banicki has had numerous solo and group shows, particularly
at Feature, Inc. in New York, and at the Whitney Museum of American
Art, Downtown at the Federal Reserve Plaza, New York, the Forum for
Contemporary Art in St. Louis, the Shedhalle in Zürich, Switzerland,
the List Center for the Visual Arts at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, and
Tweed Museum of Art in Duluth. His work has been written about in
the New York Times, Village Voice, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader and New
Art Examiner. Banicki lives in Chicago. His work will be
on view in Indexical Frontiers at Inova/Kenilworth, March 28-May
11.
April 9, 2008
Patrick Ryoichi Nagatani Desire for Magic
Albuquerque, NM
Photography
Patrick Nagatani, a consummate story teller, shows selected work
and attempts to demystify some of the narratives by revealing source
material from his readings and working processes.
Desire for Magic is the title for both this talk and the 30-year
survey of Nagatani’s work, slated to open as a traveling exhibition
at the University of New Mexico in March 2009 and to be published
as a book. Nagatani will show selected work from the 20X24 Polaroid
Collaborations, Nuclear Enchantment, Excavations, Chromatherapy and
his latest body of work, Tape-estries.
Patrick Nagatani is a professor emeritus in the Department of Art & Art
History at the University of New Mexico. He received his M.F.A. degree
from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1979. He is a past
recipient of two major National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist
Fellowships. Some of his awards include: The Aaron Siskind Foundation
Individual Photographer's Fellowship, The Kraszna-Krausz Award for
his book, Nuclear Enchantment, the Leopold Godowsky Jr. Color Photography
Award, the Eliot Porter Fellowship in New Mexico, and the California
Distinguished Artist Award from the National Art Education Association.
He is the recipient of the "Governor's Award for Excellence
in the Arts” from Governor Bill Richardson in New Mexico as
well as the Honored Educator Award from the Society of Photographic
Education (forthcoming). Nagatani has given numerous public lectures,
seminars and workshops and his work has been exhibited widely both
nationally and internationally.
April 16, 2008
Sara Velas On the Velaslavasay Panorama
Los Angeles, CA
Panoramic Painting
Sara Velas introduces the Velaslavasay Panorama, a Los Angeles exhibition
hall, theatre and garden dedicated to the production and presentation
of an art form that has been all but lost, overtaken by technological
advances and new forms of mass entertainment. Historically, the panorama
was an immersive 360-degree painted environment, often including
a three-dimensional faux terrain in the foreground of the painting
to enhance the illusion. The captivated public would visit these
paintings-in-the-round (early relatives of the motion picture) as
an entertainment or novelty. Drawing on the illustrious history of
the great panorama paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries, the
Velaslavasay Panorama produces and presents unusual visual experiences,
including those of the 360-degree variety. The panoramic exhibition
encircles the spectator; the vast painting, of a continuous surrounding
landscape, accompanied by sound stimulation and three-dimensional
elements, affords the viewer an opportunity to experience a complete
sensory phenomenon.
Sara Velas is a visual artist and the founder and director of the
Velaslavasay Panorama which recently unveiled a new 360-degrees panorama,
Effulgence of the North. A member of the International Panorama Council,
Velas has traveled throughout the world to experience the unique
immersive state offered by the panoramic art form in both its historic
and contemporary manifestations. Born in Panorama City, California,
she received her BFA from Washington University School of Art in
Saint Louis, Missouri and resides in Los Angeles.
April 23, 2008
Dan Anderson How I Got from Hudson, Wisconsin to Where I Am Today
in Edwardsville, Illinois
Edwardsville, IL
Ceramics
Dan Anderson considers a career as an artist and educator that spans
nearly 40 years.
Dan Anderson received his BS degree in Art Education from the University
of Wisconsin – River Falls in 1968 and his MFA degree in 1970
from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills Michigan. A
noted artist/educator, he headed the ceramic program at Southern
Illinois University Edwardsville from 1976 until August 2002, when
he retired after 32 years of teaching. A frequent workshop presenter,
Anderson has lectured and demonstrated at over 150 venues over the
past three decades, including: the Archie Bray Foundation, Haystack
Mountain School of Crafts, Penland School, Anderson Ranch, Peters
Valley Craft Center, Watershed and Arrowmont School. A multiple grant/award
recipient, he has received a NEA Artist Fellowship, twelve Illinois
Arts Council grants (including six Artist Fellowships) and a Ford
Foundation Grant. Major galleries represent Dan across the United
States and his work is in numerous private and permanent collections.
Dan currently serves as President of the Board of Directors of the
Edwardsville Arts Center and Vice-President on the Board of Directors
of the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana.
April 30, 2008
Renato Umali What Is a Divine Mind?
Milwaukee, WI
Media-making
Taking a quote from Borges’s essay, “The Mirror Of Enigmas,” as
his starting point, Renato Umali considers the importance of the “mundane” as
well as the impulse to collect and to re-collect. He touches on performance
ideas, John Cage, and the question, “Is list-making an art?”
 Renato Umali has born in Manila, Philippines and grew up in Jersey
City, NJ. He earned a BA in Music from Northwestern University and
received an MFA in Film and Video Performance from UW-Milwaukee.
Much of his current work is derived in some way or another from data
collected via a meticulous record keeping process, in which he records
various details about his life on spread sheets. His work takes form
in performance, video, and, more recently, digital archival prints.
He teaches in the UWM Film Department, and maintains a piano studio
for private instruction. Umali’s work will be on view in Indexical
Frontiers at Inova/Kenilworth, March 28-May 11.
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