The School of Arts & Communication's 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 and Hasan Elahi.
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.; TheWest Collection, Philadelphia; The Olbricht Collection Essen, Germany, among others.
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.