The Visiting Artists and Scholars program brings nationally and internationally renowned artists, designers, and historians to OSU for lectures, workshops, critiques, and presentations of work. VAS presenters spend the day working with and speaking to art students, giving OSU students the opportunity to meet these working professionals and to find out what it takes to be a successful visual artist, designer, or scholar. VAS presenters also give an evening talk that is free and open to the public. Recent Visiting Artists and Scholars have included Hank Willis Thomas, Shoshana Weinberger, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Artemio Rodriguez, Nigel Poor, Sarah Krajewski, Ben Buswell, Martin Venezky, Sue Coe, Rebecca Mendez, Philip Pearlstein, Nancy Skolos and Tom Wedell, Harrell Fletcher, Lucille Tenazas, Mikon Van Gastel, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Ann Hamilton, Carol Ann Carter, GUM, Yoshiko Shimano, Elliott Earls, Marina Abramovic, Douglas Crimp, Rick Valicenti, Rebecca Belmore, Bill Viola, Do Ho Suh, Ursula von Rydingsvard, John Sexton, Luba Lukova, Michael Cherney, Andrew Stein Raftery, Wangechi Mutu, Matthew Hopson-Walker, John Hilliard, Hasan Elahi, Cassils and Dread Scott .

Recent Visiting Artists and Scholars

October 16, 2019 - Joan Truckenbrod

Joan Truckenbrod is a pioneering digital artist who has exhibited her artwork nationally and internationally. Recently her digital artwork was included in an exhibition titled “Programmed: Rules, Codes and Choreographies in Art from 1965 to 2018” in the Digital Artwork Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She also has work in the collection of the V&A Museum in London and in The Art Institute of Chicago, where she is professor emeritus and former chair of the art and technology department she helped to create. Future exhibitions of her artwork will include a local solo exhibition at Benton County Historical Museum in Philomath, Oregon: a solo exhibition at the Schneider Art Museum in Ashland, Oregon and a group exhibition titled “Coded: Art at the Dawn of the Computer Age 1960-80” at LACMA in Los Angeles. Truckenbrod is curator of the Truckenbrod Gallery, a contemporary art gallery located in downtown Corvallis, Oregon.

View Truckenbrod's Talk at OSU

March 5, 2020 - Tom Huck

Tom Huck (born 1971) is an American printmaker best known for his large-scale satirical woodcuts. He lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri, where he runs his own press, Evil Prints. He is a regular contributor to BLAB! of Fantagraphics Books. His work is influenced by Albrecht Dürer, José Guadalupe Posada, R. Crumb, and Honoré Daumier. Huck’s illustrations have appeared in publications such as The Village Voice, The Riverfront Times, and the Minneapolis City Pages.

Huck's woodcut prints are included in numerous public and private collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of Congress, Spencer Museum of Art, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Fogg Art Museum, Michael C. Carlos Museum, and New York Public Library. Huck has been represented by David Krut Art Projects in New York, Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, Duane Reed Gallery in St. Louis, Missouri, and Eli Ridgway Gallery in San Francisco. Beginning in October 2017 Huck’s gallery representation is C. G. Boerner in New York.

April 15, 2020 - Tala Madani

Canceled due to Covid-19.

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 figures, 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 modernism with a contemporary sense of sequencing, movement, and speed. Thus her work finds some of its most powerful echoes in cartoons, cinema, and other popular durational forms. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at a number of museums worldwide, including Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany (2019); La Panacée, Montpellier, France (2017); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2016); Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2016); and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain (2014). Her work forms part of the permanent collections of institutions that include Moderna Museet, Stockholm and Malmö, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Image of artist Hrag VartanianMay 12, 2020 - Hrag Vartanian 

Canceled due to Covid-19.

Hrag Vartanian is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of "Hyperallergic," a podcast in response to changes in the art world, the publishing industry and the distribution of information. Breaking news, award-winning reporting, informed opinions and quality conversations about art have helped Hyperallergic reach an audience of a million visitors per month. Vartanian has helped champion a type of straightforward online art criticism that believes in the power of journalism while retaining a sensitivity to the cultural and economic realities that inform the world of art, culture and politics.

Vartanian's curatorial interests are focused on theories and practices of decolonization and he prefers to work in unorthodox spaces. In 2010, he moved Hyperallergic into a gallery at Outpost in Ridgewood, Queens, New York, to stage "#theSocialGraph," the world’s first multi-disciplinary exhibition of social media-related art. In 2015, he orchestrated Jade Townsend’s "Crazy Amazing Garage Sale" exhibition at Auxiliary Projects, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York. The three-day liquidation sale of unsold art was an attempt to “free” the capital trapped in one artist’s storage unit — it 'liberated' over $3,000. In 2017, Vartanian began a ten-year project exploring the contemporary legacy of Ottoman studio photography with an exhibition at Minerva Projects in Denver, Colorado.

Portrait of artist Paul ShambroomOctober 9, 2018 - Paul Shambroom: Past Time: Troubled Visions of the Good Old Days
Paul Shambroom uses found and original photographs to explore American power and culture. His recent practice incorporates sourced images, collaborative theater and 3D constructions. His documentary subjects include nuclear weapons and small-town council meetings. He’s published two monographs: “Meetings” and “Face to Face with the Bomb….” and a catalog for his mid-career touring exhibition “…Picturing Power.” He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Creative Capital grantee, among others. His work has been in the Whitney Biennial and has been collected and exhibited by major museums including the San Francisco MoMA, MoMA (NY), the Walker Art Center and the Art Institute of Chicago. He is an Associate Professor in Art, University of Minnesota. 

View Shambroom's Talk at OSU

Artist Eric Dyer with workNovember 13, 2018 - Eric Dyer: Material Motion
Eric Dyer is an artist/educator who brings animation into the physical world with his sequential images, sculptures, installations and performances. As an animator, music video director, and experimental filmmaker, Dyer spent years working at a computer to produce images for the screen. Longing to “get my hands back on the work,” Dyer returned to a tactile process. He continues to innovate with new tools, moving his work off the screen and into real spaces.

View Dyer's Talk at OSU

Image of curator Phillip March JonesNovember 14, 2018 -  Phillip March Jones, Curator and Gallery Director
Phillip March Jones is an artist, writer and curator based in New York City. In 2009 he founded Institute 193, a non-profit contemporary art space and publishing company in Lexington, Kentucky. Jones has also served as the inaugural director of Atlanta's Souls Grown Deep Foundation, and director of the Galerie Christian Berst (New York, Paris) and the Andrew Edlin Gallery (New York.) He currently oversees Institute 193 (1B), a collaborative project space in New York's East Village.

Artist April Vollmer with her work in TokyoJanuary 24, 2019 - April Vollmer: Norma Seibert 2019 Print Artist
April Vollmer is a New York artist and writer with an M.F.A. from Hunter College whose work has been exhibited internationally. She specializes in Japanese woodcut and has lectured and taught many workshops in the U.S. and abroad. Her book Japanese Woodblock Print Workshop, about the contemporary use of traditional Japanese woodcut, was released by Watson-Guptill in 2015. She is on the Advisory Board of the International Mokuhanga Association, now organizing a conference for Nara in 2020.

View Vollmer's Talk at OSU

Portrait of artist Julia ChristensenFebruary 6, 2019 - Julia Christensen: Upgrade Available
Julia Christensen’s ongoing interdisciplinary art project, "Upgrade Available," investigates how 'upgrade culture'––the perceived relentless need to upgrade software/hardware to remain relevant––impacts life on a range of scales. Christensen will present art pieces that examine how upgrade culture affects our personal lives, institutional operations, and long-term scientific research, especially space exploration.

View Christensen's Talk at OSU

Self portrait art of CassilsApril 17, 2019 - Cassils: The Body as Social Sculpture
With targeted, strictly disciplined strength training, Cassils makes their own body the protagonist of their performances, and contemplates the history(s) of violence, representation, struggle and survival. Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to social expectations, Cassils speaks about past works and their starting points, development processes and historical contexts.

Cassils, performance artist, bodybuilder and transgender icon, lives and works in Los Angeles. Using their own body as artistic material, Cassils processes influences from feminism, body art and hyper-masculine, homoerotic aesthetics. Cassils eludes binary gender categories and understands and embodies transgender not as a crossing from one gender to another, but rather as a continual process of becoming, as a form of embodiment that works in a space of indeterminacy and ambiguity.

View Cassils' Talk at OSU

 

Visiting Artist Mariam Ghani

Thursday, May 10, 2018 - MARIAM GHANI

Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work looks at places and moments where social, political, and cultural structures take on visible forms. Long-term collaborations include the experimental archive Index of the Disappeared, with Chitra Ganesh, the video series Performed Places, with choreographer Erin Kelly and composer Qasim Naqvi, and the Afghan Films online archive, with Pad.ma. Solo and collaborative exhibitions include the Queens Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Rogaland Kunstsenter, and the Gatchina Museum. Notable group exhibitions and screenings include dOCUMENTA 13, the Liverpool Biennial, the Sharjah Biennial, the Asian Art Biennial, the Dhaka Art Summit, the National Gallery in DC, the Secession in Vienna, the CCCB in Barcelona, the Rotterdam Film Festival, CPH:DOX, and the Met Breuer, MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York. Recent texts have been published in Creative Time Reports, Ibraaz, Triple Canopy, and the readers Critical Writing Ensembles, Dissonant Archives, Assuming Boycott, and Social Medium: Artists Writing 2000-2015. Upcoming projects include Public Art Munich, the Yinchuan Biennale, an installation at the Shaker Village in Hancock, MA, and a feature-length documentary in post-production. Ghani holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from NYU and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and has received a number of awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies, most recently from 18th Street Art Center, Art Matters, Creative Capital, EMPAC, Yale Law, and the Center for Constitutional Rights. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a fellow at the New York Public Library. 

Visiting Artist Reed Anderson

Wednesday, April 18, 2018 - REED ANDERSON: WHAT AM I DOING HERE?

Reed Anderson began his training at the Cleveland Institute of Art and later graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute. He also attended Skowhegan and in 2009 received an M.F.A. from Stanford University. Reed is represented by Pierogi Gallery in New York City, and by Gallery 16 in San Francisco. His work resides in public collections including MOMA, New York; The Albright-Knox, Buffalo, N.Y.; The West Collection, Philadelphia; The Olbricht Collection Essen, Germany, among others.

Visiting Artist Dread Scott

Wednesday, March 7, 2018 - DREAD SCOTT

Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. His work is exhibited across the US and internationally. For three decades he has made work that encourages viewers to re-examine unifying ideals and values of American society. In 1989, the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed one of his artworks and President G.H.W. Bush declared it “disgraceful” because of its transgressive use of the American flag. His art has been exhibited/performed at the Whitney Museum, MoMA/PS1, the Walker Art Center and galleries and street corners across the country. His works can be hard-edged and poignant. Dread plays with fire—metaphorically and sometimes literally—as when he burned $171 on Wall Street and encouraged those with money to burn to add theirs to the pyre.

Visiting Artist Farrah Karapetian

Wednesday, February 21, 2018 - FARRAH KARAPETIAN

Farrah Karapetian is an artist currently based in California. Her methods incorporate sculptural and performative means of achieving imagery that refigures the medium of photography around bodily experience.  Her work is in public collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. Karapetian is a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Russia, a Pollock-Krasner grant, and a Warhol Artswriters Grant, among other awards. She has had multiple solo exhibitions and is represented by Von Lintel Gallery (Los Angeles) and Danziger Gallery (New York, NY.) Her recent exhibitions include A Matter of Memory, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY (2016); The Surface of Things, Houston Center for Photography (2016); and About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change, SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA (2016.) Karapetian will discuss the notion of process in visual art, drawing from her own work as well as the artwork of other contemporary and historical artists, the political process, and the Russian revolutionary avant garde.

Printmaker Minna Resnick

Thursday, January 25, 2018 - PRINTMAKER MINNA RESNICK

Minna Resnick is the 2018 Norma Seibert Printmaking Artist. A native of New York City now based in Ithaca, New York, Resnick has work in more than 60 public and private collections and in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of New York, the Denver Art Museum, the New York Public Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and many more. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and two New York Foundation for Arts Fellowships. Her work in lithography and drawing has always focused on language. Early works examined body language and non-verbal communication to explore the narrative. Current work uses actual text as the impetus for conception. Language connects and gives substance to the pictorial imagery, as well as providing titles for much of the work.

Visiting Artist Sharon Louden

Monday, November 13, 2017 - SHARON LOUDEN: The Artist as Culture

Sharon Louden's work is held in major public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Neuberger Museum of Art, Arkansas Arts Center, Yale University Art Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. She graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Yale University School of Art. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues and has also been written about in the New York Times, Art in America, Washington Post, Sculpture Magazine, ARTnews and the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as other publications. She has participated in residencies at Tamarind Institute, Urban Glass, Franconia Sculpture Park, Society of the Four Arts and Art Omi.

Visiting Artist Richard Misrach

Friday, October 20, 2017 - RICHARD MISRACH: CURRENT PROJECTS

Co-presented by the Regional Society for Photographic Education

For four decades, Misrach has been a significant and influential photographer of the American landscape. Known as a pioneer of the 1970s renaissance of color photography and large scale presentation that are still practiced today, Misrach is also known for the monumental epic, “Desert Cantos,” a multifaceted study of people’s political, cultural and environmental relationship to the natural world.

In his talk, Misrach will speak in depth about Border Cantos, his collaboration with composer Guillermo Galindo, a major undertaking focusing on the U.S. - Mexico border, and his two current projects about the election.

Visiting Artist Hank Willis Thomas

April 17, 2017 - HANK WILLIS THOMAS 

"History doesn't laugh. Us is them. They are us. Love overrules." -Hank

Visiting Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger

February 16, 2017 - CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER 

Artist and activist Cannupa Hanska Luger is a native of North Dakota who was born on the Standing Rock Reservation. Luger creates socially conscious work, interweaving his identity as an American Indian with global issues. Of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian and Norwegian descent, Luger's unique, ceramic-centric, multidisciplinary artwork tells provocative stories of complex indigenous identities coming up against 21st century imperatives, including mediation and destruction. Using his art as a catalyst, Luger invites the public to challenge expectations and misinterpretations imposed upon indigenous people by historical and contemporary colonial social structures. His talk is titled,"They Need Us More Than We Need Them."

Visiting Artist Kathy Aoki

January 23-28, 2017 - KATHY AOKI - NORMA SEIBERT VISITING ARTIST 

Printmaker and multimedia artist Kathy Aoki lives and works in the Silicon Valley where she is an associate professor of studio art at Santa Clara University. Her work can be found in major collections across the U.S., including the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Harvard University Art Museums. She received an MFA in printmaking at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and is a recipient of several fellowships, including Frans Masereel Centrum, Val Paraiso, Djerassi, and Headlands Center for the Arts.

Artist Ping Foong

November 16, 2016 - PING FOONG 

A leading scholar of Chinese are and a specialist in Chinese ink painting, Ping Foong is the Folster Foundation Curator of Chinese Art at the Seattle Art Museum.

Artist Shoshanna Weinberger

October 19, 2016 - SHOSHANNA WEINBERGER

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Shoshanna Weinberger’s work relates to her Caribbean-American background and draws strongly on the complexity of heritage and assumed norms as she goes about defining the female archetype. Referencing herself among a sea of antiquated stereotypes, adolescent memory and current subjects as a source, Weinberger renders her female muses as excessive and sexualized; some passive and others dominant; questioning the notions of beauty. Weinberger will cover the visual interests and explorations that inspire her studio practice, how the work relates to the complexity of her Caribbean-American background and the assumed norms that go about defining the modern female archetype. Referencing numerous stereotypes, adolescent memory and current cultural subjects as a source, Weinberger will examine questions on the notions and politics of beauty.

Michelle Grabner - OSU Exhibition

May 18, 2016 - MICHELLE GRABNER 

 

Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, curator and chair of the department of painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Identifying as being a Painter first, her work has been exhibited at numerous important venues.  Major institutional solo exhibitions include the Indiana Museum of Art (2015 and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2013). She holds an MA in art history with a BFA in painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as an MFA in art theory and practice from Northwestern. Michelle was one of the curators of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and served as senior critic at Yale’s department of painting and printmaking from 2012-2014. Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in Portland, Oregon recently named Grabner as curator of the Portland 2016 Biennial of Contemporary Art, which opens July 9, 2016. She is represented by James Cohen Gallery in New York, Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie in Basel, Switzerland.

Ben Buswell - Visiting Artist and Scholars exhibition

 

May 4, 2016 - BEN BUSWELL 

Ben Buswell is a multi-media artist working in sculpture and installation living, in Portland, Oregon. Buswell received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and his BFA (Cum Laude) from Oregon State University. Notable solo exhibitions were held at The Art Gym (2015), CoCA Seattle (2013), Helzer Gallery (2010) and at TILT Gallery and Project Space (2008). His work was included in Portland2012: A Biennial of Contemporary Art at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center and The Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum (2006). Buswell is a 2015 recipient of a Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts from the Ford Family Foundation, as well as grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and The Oregon Arts Commission. His work is included in several private collections, including that of Jan and Patricia de Bont, and public collections at PCC Rock Creek and the OHSU Collaborative Life Sciences Building. Ben is represented by UPFOR Gallery in Portland, Oregon.

"I am always touching the world in an effort to build an intuitive sense of how materials communicate through their presence. I have a firm belief that we exist only through our bodies, that we are wholly physical things. So material and sculptural presence, as surrogates for this idea, are embedded in the way I think about content. My work is the interaction of the spaces between things: more specifically the space between us. I am looking for the space right before the story is told, the place where we agree to listen."

Nigel Poor - Caged Race

 

February 10, 2016 - NIGEL POOR

Artist Nigel Poor has been working with the inmates at San Quentin Prison since 2011. The San Quentin Prison Report Archive Project demonstrates Poor’s longstanding commitment to facilitating a dialogue around how we manage crime, punishment and rehabilitation in the United States. 

“For many years my work has explored the various ways people make a mark and leave behind evidence of their existence. I am interested in forms of portraiture and explore this vastly mined photographic area through unconventional means. I have used fingerprints and hands, objects people have thrown out, human hair, dirt, dryer lint and dead insects as indexical markers of human presence and experience. I am trying to explore the troubling question of how to document life and what is worthy of preservation. In 2011 my interest in investigating the marks people leave behind led me to San Quentin State Prison.”

Nigel Poor’s work has been shown at: San Jose Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, Friends of Photography, SF Camerawork, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Haines Gallery in San Francisco. Her work is in the collections of the SFMOMA, the M.H. deYoung Museum, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and Corcoran Gallery of Art. She received her BA from Bennington College and her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and is a Professor at CSU Sacramento and a producer for the San Quentin Prison Report Radio Project.

Artemio Rodriguez print

January 25-30, 2016 - ARTEMIO RODRIGUEZ - NORMA SEIBERT PRINTMAKER SERIES 

 

Artist Artemio Rodriquez is an award winning Printmaker from Michoacán, México. His linocut fine art prints have been widely published and exhibited.  In 2001, he and his partner opened La Mano Press, a print shop near downtown Los Angeles where his works found an audience, being exhibited at the Central Library of L.A. and Center for the Print in New York City. Rodriguez has published several books including Posada, 150 Years, American Dream and Loteria King of Things. Receiving recognition from the Los Angeles Cultural affairs as Emerging Artist and subsequent Established Artist, Rodriguez received a grant from Creative Capital New York in 2006. His work has been acquired for important collections such as LACMA, Hammer Museum, San Diego Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, the Laguna Art Museum and others. Rodriguez is represented by Davidson Galleries in Seattle WA and Galeria Florencia Riestra in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato Mexico. In 2007, Artemio relocated back to Mexico. He currently lives in the town of Patzcuaro in Michoacan where he has opened a gallery with his partner and child.