Critical Studies Program
Because Cranbrook is a small and graduate-only institution, the academic program at the Academy is truly unique. Both our studios and our academic programs are free from conventional classes and traditional grades. This allows us to be specialized and flexible — responsive to student and faculty interests. Our academic program is both rigorous and yet approachable. The program takes the form of lectures, discussions, student-initiated symposia, critiques with visiting curators, dinners with guest thinkers and debates in the studio kitchens. Our Academy-wide academic programs are open to all students at the Academy —regardless of their primary studio department — and are designed to foster inter-departmental exchange.
Critical Studies
Our Critical Studies program is the central piece of our academic program. In the fall semester, we bring a visiting Critical Studies Fellow to be in residence at the Academy. Selected for their perspectives on contemporary theory and culture studies, the visiting Fellows present public lectures, conduct student discussion groups and serve as an active presence in studio critiques and reviews. In the spring semester, the Critical Studies program continues with a new set of visitors for lectures, discussions, critiques and workshops. These visitors are chosen each year to reflect the most current intellectual discourse within contemporary architecture, art, and design.
Public Lecture Series
The academic program also offers a rich year-long public lecture series that includes artists and designers who are visiting our ten departments, as well as critics and scholars brought to campus by the Cranbrook Art Museum and the Critical Studies program itself. Because the Academy is not bound by a formulaic educational structure, all types of thinkers — artists, designers, philosophers, activists, historians, scientists and writers — are invited to present ways to link one’s studio practice with larger and diverse communities, national and international.
2013 [SPRING] EDITION LECTURE SERIES
All lectures begin at 6:00 pm in the Cranbrook Art Museum’s de Salle Auditorium, unless otherwise noted. Please use the Library entrance for all public lectures. Parking is available in the Cranbrook Art Museum parking lot and in the parking deck next to the Institute of Science.
Tuesday, January 15
Brian Lutz
Author
“Eero Saarinen: Furniture for Everyman”
Co-sponsored by Cranbrook Art Museum and Pointed Leaf Press
Please note – admission for this lecture is included with regular Museum admission.
The lecture will be followed by a book-signing with copies of “Eero Saarinen: Furniture for Everyman” (2012) available for purchase.
Brian Lutz worked in the New York sales division of Knoll before moving to Helsinki in 1992 where he served as the export director for Artek Oy Ab, the Finnish company that oversees the sales and distribution of the furniture of Alvar Aalto. He currently works as a market development consultant for Scandinavian furniture manufacturers in the United States. Lutz co-authored “Knoll: A Modernist Universe,” with Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum Director Reed Kroloff. His new book, “Eero Saarinen: Furniture for Everyman,” is the first book to focus exclusively on Saarinen’s trend-setting and revolutionary furniture designs.
Tuesday, January 22
Jerszy Seymour
Designer
“An Evening with Jerszy Seymour”
Co-sponsored by the 3D Design Department and the Humanities Program
Born in Berlin in 1968, Jerszy Seymour grew up in London, where he studied engineering at South Bank Polytechnic and industrial design at the Royal College of Art.While living in Milan, Seymour started his own experimental projects including House in a Box, Scum - and the clothing concept, Tape. He has designed for companies including Magis, Vitra, Kreo, Moulinex, SFR and IDEE. Seymour’s work has been exhibited in the Design Museum in London, the Vitra Design Museum in Basel and Berlin, and the Palais De Tokyo and Gallery Kreo in Paris. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Fonds National de Art Contemporain, France, and the Musee d´Art Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg. Seymour has taught at the Royal College of Art in London, the Domus Academy in Milan, the ECAL in Lausanne, the HfG in Karlsruhe, and the Vitra Design Workshops in France. Currently he holds a guest-professorship at the HBK Saar.
Sunday, January 27, 3-5pm
Alec Soth and Siri Engberg
“On Contemporary Photography: An Afternoon with Alec Soth and Siri Engberg”
Sponsored Cranbrook Art Museum
Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth is one of today’s most compelling voices in contemporary photography. His work is rooted in the distinctly American tradition of "on-the-road photography" developed by Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore. From “Huckleberry Finn” to “Easy Rider,” there seems to be a uniquely American desire to travel and chronicle the adventures that consequently ensue. Soth has received fellowships from the McKnight, Bush, and Jerome Foundations and was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. His photographs are represented in major public and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Walker Art Center. His exhibition “From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America” is currently on display at Cranbrook Art Museum through March 30, 2013.
Siri Engberg is Curator in the Visual Arts department at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where she has served as curator for over 30 Walker-organized exhibitions, including, “From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America.” Her other recent exhibitions include “Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967-2005”; “Sol LeWitt: 2D + 3D”; and “Text/Messages: Books by Artists”. For the Walker, Engberg has also curated the first retrospective of the work of artist Kiki Smith, which toured the U.S. and Mexico, and the first U.S. retrospective of Ed Ruscha’s prints and books. Her most recent exhibition, “Lifelike”, a group show about artists’ engagement with the notion of “the real” in contemporary art, is currently touring the U.S. She is currently at work on an upcoming exhibition celebrating the Walker’s 75th Anniversary.
Tuesday, February 5
Peter Schjeldahl
Art Critic
"The Critic as Artist"
Sponsored by the Humanities Program
This lecture is now sold out. Please contact Sarah Westerman (248-645-3300) if you have questions.
If you have already registered, please bring your confirmation with you to the lecture.
Attendance is limited by auditorium size.
Peter Schjeldahl is the art critic of The New Yorker. He was born in Fargo, North Dakota and attended Carleton College and the New School before working as a newspaper reporter in Minnesota, Iowa, and New Jersey. After spending a year in Paris, he settled in New York and began writing art criticism for ARTnews in 1965. He was a regular art critic for the Sunday New York Times, the Village Voice, and 7 Days before joining The New Yorker in 1998. He is the author of five published books of poetry and four books of criticism, including The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings (1991, University of California Press), and Let's See: Writings on Art from The New Yorker (2008, Thames & Hudson). He has received the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing from the Clark Art Institute, the Frank Jewett Mather Award for excellence in art criticism from the College Art Association, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Chicken's Appeal, 2003
Wednesday, February 6
Koen Vanmechelen
“An Evening with Koen Vanmechelen”
Sponsored by the Painting Department
Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen explores issues of diversity, multiculturalism, globalization, genetic engineering, and even fertility and immunity through the cross breeding of chickens representing different countries. His works include paintings, photography and video, installations, sculpture, and glass to express and explore the broad spectrum of ideas straddling art and science. Vanmechelen launched his “Cosmopolitan Chicken Project” during the late 1990s and it is now in its 18th generation. His goal is to create a Universal Chicken that symbolizes global unity through diversity. His initiative poses ethical questions, while advocating the role of artists in promoting communication and interaction across many types of boundaries, between geographical areas, races, cultures, and professional disciplines.
Vanmechelen has presented his work around the world and was recently featured at the World Expo in Shanghai and dOCUMENTA, and will again be included in the Venice Biennale opening in June. His “Inception / Cosmopolitan Chicken Project” opens at Wasserman Projects with a reception to meet the artist on Saturday, February 2 and continues through March 9.
Tuesday, February 12 - Please note: this lecture has been canceled
Sanda Iliescu
Associate Professor of Architecture and Art, University of Virginia
“The Studio and The Street: an exploration of similarities and distinctions between art made in the private studio and art made collaboratively in the public realm”
Sponsored by the Studio Council
Thursday, February 14
The Knoll Lecture in Design
Martino Gamper
An Evening with Martino Gamper
Sponsored by Knoll Corporation
Martino Gamper’s practice engages in a variety of projects - from exhibition and interior design to specialized one-off commissions and design of mass-produced products for the cutting edge of the international furniture industry. Gamper has an abiding interest in the social aspects of furniture design. He has also worked in the public realm, with designs for the Design Museum, London; Victoria & Albert Museum; Wellcome Trust; Triennale Design Museum in Milan; the Yerba Buena Centre; the Frieze Art Fair and the Royal College of Art. Gamper has collaborated with a number of British and European designers and has become internationally respected as a teacher and workshop leader at art and design schools around the world.
The Knoll Lecture in Design at Cranbrook Academy of Art was established in 2004 by Knoll Inc., the internationally-renowned workplace and residential furnishings company founded by Florence Schust, an Academy graduate, and her husband Hans Knoll. Each year, the endowed Knoll Lecture Fund brings to the Cranbrook campus the world’s most distinguished and innovative designers to speak about their practice and to work with tomorrow’s design leaders studying at the Academy. Knoll is the recipient of the 2011 National Design Award for Corporate and Institutional Achievement from the Smithsonian's Copper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.
Wednesday, February 27
Jimenez Lai
NOTE: This lecture takes place at the University of Detroit Mercy
An Evening with Jimenez Lai
Sponsored by the University of Detroit Mercy and Cranbrook Academy of Art
The lecture will take place in the Exhibition Space in the Lorganer Architecture Building. The campus is located on Livernois Avenue just south of McNichols. It is best to use the Livernois entrance.
Jimenez Lai is the leader of Bureau Spectacular and an Assistant Professor of Architecture at University of Illinois at Chicago. A graduate of the University of Toronto, his fascination with abstract reduction has led him to work for a number of acronym firms (such as MOS, AVL, REX, and OMA) and to live in tight quarters around the world (such as a desert shelter at Taliesin and a shipping container in Rotterdam). His first book, Citizens of No Place, was published by Princeton Architectural Press with a grant from the Graham Foundation. It imagines fake architectural realities through cartoon drawings, telling stories about people, attitudes, and habitation. Most recently, Jimenez lived in "Three Little Worlds" - an architectural intervention - at the London Festival of Architecture.
Friday, March 1
Bonnie Begusch
Artist
“An Evening with Bonnie Begusch”
Sponsored by the Studio Council
Drawing from histories of abstraction, concrete poetry and structuralist film, Bonnie Begusch works with time-based media to reflect on the intertwined relationship between text, tools and perception. After studying Media Art and Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, she received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. Recent awards include the Murphy & Cadogan Fellowship in the Fine Arts, the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Studies and residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Headlands Center for the Arts and Djerassi. Her work has been presented both nationally and internationally at such venues as the Berkeley Art Museum; Tape Modern, Berlin; Exile, Berlin; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; 92YTribeca, New York and the Courtisane Festival in Ghent, Belgium. She has taught in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley and is a founding member of The Critique Program, an artist-run school and press based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She lives and works between the Bay Area and Berlin.
Monday, March 4
Trenton Doyle Hancock
Artist
"Trenton Doyle Hancock Talks About Things"
Sponsored by the Print Media Department
Trenton Doyle Hancock’s intricate candy-colored prints, drawings, collaged felt paintings and site-specific installations work together to tell the story of the Mounds—a group of bizarre mythical creatures that are the tragic protagonists of the artist’s unfolding narrative between good and evil.
Hancock earned his BFA from Texas A&M University-Commerce and his MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia. Hewas featured in the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, becoming one of the youngest artists in history to participate in this prestigious survey. His work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at venues such as The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum; The Savannah College of Art and Design; The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston and many more.
In 2008, Hancock’s mythology was translated to the stage in an original ballet, Cult of Color: Call to Color, commissioned by Ballet Austin in Texas. He created an original mural for the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium as well as a site-specific installation entitled, A Better Promise, at the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park. Hancock’s work is in permanent collections around the world, including the Dallas Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; il Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea, Trento, Italy and more. The recipient of numerous awards, Hancock lives and works in Houston.
Tuesday, March 5
Duncan MacKenzie
Founding member / Producer of Bad at Sports
“Critics = Jerks = Sometimes (but they are always better than blog trolls) or, Telling the Stories of Your Art World”
Sponsored by the Humanities Program
Duncan MacKenzie is an artist, pundit, educator and a founding member/producer of Bad at Sports and his works have appeared in galleries all over the world. Bad at Sports, a project he began with Richard Holland in 2005, is one of the USA’s largest arts resources and continues to grow every week. His work has been discussed in Flash Art, Art Forum, The New York Times, Time Out and many other venues. He is the author of over 300 interviews and has worked with such people as Rodney Graham, Kerry James Marshall, Suzanne Lacy, Martha Wilson, Helen Molesworth, Francesco Bonami, Luc Tuymans, Johanna Drucker, Julie Ault, Carol Becker, James Rondeau, Jeff Wall, and David Salle. He currently enjoys a posting as an Assistant Professor in Art + Design at Columbia College Chicago.
Monday, March 11,
Nina Samuel
Art and Science Historian
"The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot" to "My Brain is in my Inkstand: An Exhibition on Drawing as Epistemic Process in Art and Science – Or: Crafting Thoughts on Paper"
Sponsored by Cranbrook Art Museum
Join the conversation when German art and science historian Nina Samuel visits Cranbrook Art Museum to give a public lecture about her recent exhibition, "The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot," which she curated for the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.
This exhibition, which focuses on the drawings of the legendary twentieth-century mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, will be coming to Cranbrook in November, and we are inviting the public to join us in the curatorial process and listen while we have a public conversation about an additional exhibition that extends the ideas of the Mandelbrot exhibition into the contemporary realm of drawing.
Tuesday, March 12
The J. Robert F. Swanson Lecture
Marlon Blackwell
Architect
“Figures and Types”
Sponsored by the Architecture Department
Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, practices architecture in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and serves as Distinguished Professor and Department Head in the School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas. Working outside the architectural mainstream, his architecture is based in design strategies that draw upon vernaculars and the contradictions of place; strategies that seek to transgress conventional boundaries for architecture. Work produced in his professional officehas received national and international recognition with numerous design awards and significant publication in books, architectural journals and magazines and was announced as the 2011 Top Firm by Residential Architect magazine. Recent honors include the St. Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church (Springdale, Arkansas) winning the 2011 Civic and Community Building category at the World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Spain and receiving a 2012 AIA National Honor Award for the IMA Ruth Lilly Visitor’s Pavilion (Indianapolis, Indiana). The significance of his contributions to design is evidenced by the 2012 Architecture Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the publication of a monograph of his work entitled “An Architecture of the Ozarks: The Works of Marlon Blackwell” published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2005.
The J. Robert F. Swanson Lecture Fund at Cranbrook Academy of Art was established in 1983 by the family of J. Robert F. Swanson, a noted architect who was also the son-in-law of Eliel Saarinen. Each year, the endowed Swanson Lecture Fund brings to the Cranbrook campus an architect, designer, artist or scholar who has received critical acclaim for their work and enjoys a sustained record of excellence and achievement in their respective field. J. Robert F. Swanson and his wife and lifelong design partner, Pipsan Saarinen Swanson, founded their firm, Swanson Associates, in 1947 and worked on many exteriors and interiors, including residences, schools, universities, churches, airports, banks, and government, industrial and commercial projects.
Monday, April 1
Laurie Makela
Designer
“Dead History”
Sponsored by the 2D Design Department
Laurie Haycock Makela has been a recognized voice of experimental graphic and trans-disciplinary design practice and education in the United States and Europe for over 30 years. Recently she co-founded Madeinthoughtspace with colleagues April Greiman, Michael Rotondi and John Ford to pursue a collaborative, creative design consultancy. Makela was Designer-in-Residence and Co-Chair of the Department of 2D Design at the Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1996-2001 with the late P. Scott Makela. Their studio, Words and Pictures for Business and Culture, produced print and new media for clients such as NIKE, MTV, Kodak, and Warner Brothers Records; with work included in the National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian in New York. They also published a book and website with Lewis Blackwell called Whereishere.
In 2002, Makela was the Head of Graphic Design at Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, and subsequently opened O.B.O.K. in Sweden with artist and critic Ronald Jones, Ph.D., collaborating on research-based projects such as an art/cafe/garden space on Royal Swedish Grounds.
She continued to teach graphic design and design thinking at prestigious academies such as Konstfack University of Art and Design in Stockholm and ZKM/HfG in Karlsruhe Germany until returning to the U.S. in 2004. In 1991, she became the Design Director at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. "Walker," her 1995 typography and branding project with Matthew Carter, was included in the design collection at MOMA in 2011. She received the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts with P. Scott Makela in 2000 for ten years of innovative work. Makela holds a BA in Environmental Design from University of California at Berkeley, and an MFA in Graphic Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Tuesday, April 9
Dineke Blom
Artist
“Between Verb and Noun”
Sponsored by the Metalsmithing Department
Dineke Blom is a visual artist living and working in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She was educated at Ateliers 63 in Haarlem. A central theme in her work is the way in which we perceive the world around us. The images that appear in Dineke Blom’s drawings elicit active seeing, for there is no narrative to follow. Light and shadow, foreground and background, seclusion and transparency, weight and the rhythm of lines and shapes are agents in this process. Dineke Blom’s work has been shown internationally in galleries and museums and she is represented by gallery AdK Actuele Kunst, Amsterdam, where she regularly hosts solo exhibitions. Her work is also included in the collections of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Teylers Museum, Haarlem; ABNAmro Artfoundation; Bouwfonds Artfoundation; NOG Collection of SNS REAAL Fonds, and private collections in The Netherlands and abroad.
Tuesday, April 23, 6pm
Jan Verwoert
Critic and Writer
"Painting’s in the air and patterns alight"
Sponsored by the Ceramics Department and the Humanities Program
Jan Verwoert is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory based in Berlin. He is a contributing editor of frieze magazine and his writing has appeared in journals, anthologies and monographs. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam, the de Appel Curatorial Programme and the H’Midrasha School of Art, Tel Aviv. Verwoert is the author of Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous (MIT Press/Afterall Books, 2006) and the essay collection Tell Me What You Want What You Really Really Want (Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute, 2010).
Sunday, May 5, 4:00pm
Nina Katchadourian
Artist
"All Forms of Attraction"
Sponsored by the Fiber Department
Nina Katchadourian was born in Stanford, California and grew up spending every summer on a small island in the Finnish archipelago, where she still spends part of each year. Her work exists in a wide variety of media including photography, sculpture, video and sound. Her work has been exhibited domestically and internationally at places such as PS1/MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, New Langton Arts, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, and the Palais de Tokyo. In January 2006 the Turku Art Museum in Turku, Finland featured a solo show of works made in Finland, and in June 2006 the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs exhibited a 10-year survey of her work and published an accompanying monograph entitled "All Forms of Attraction." The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented a solo show of recent video installation works in July 2008. In February 2010 she was the artist in residence at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in Dunedin, New Zealand, where she had a solo show entitled "Seat Assignment." She is currently at work on a permanent public piece, commissioned by the GSA, for a border crossing station between the US and Canada. Katchadourian is represented by Catharine Clark gallery in San Francisco.
PAST LECTURES
2012 [FALL] EDITION LECTURE SERIES
All lectures begin at 6:00 pm in the Cranbrook Art Museum’s de Salle Auditorium, unless otherwise noted. Please use the Library entrance for all public lectures. Parking is available in the Cranbrook Art Museum parking lot and in the parking deck next to the Institute of Science.
Monday, September 17
Please note: these lectures begin at 4:00 pm
Anders Ruhwald, Scott Klinker, Liz Cohen
Artist-in-Residence Lectures, “On Taste”
Tuesday, September 18
Please note: these lectures begin at 4:00 pm
Bill Massie, Beverly Fishman, Mark Newport, Iris Eichenberg
Artist-in-Residence Lectures, “On Taste”
Wednesday, September 19
Please note: these lectures begin at 4:00 pm
Elliott Earls, Randy Bolton, Heather McGill
Artist-in-Residence Lectures, “On Taste”
Thursday, September 27
Jon Sueda
Design Director, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at California College of the Arts and Founder, Stripe SF
“Wide White Space”
Sponsored by the 2D Design Department
Originally from Hawaii, Sueda has practiced design everywhere from Honolulu to Holland. In 2004, Sueda founded the design studio Stripe, which specializes in print and exhibition design for art and culture. He is also the co-editor of Task Newsletter and the co-organizer of AtRandom events. Sueda is currently an Assistant Professor in the Graphic Design Program at California College of the Arts (CCA) and Design Director at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. Most recently, he curated the exhibitions The Way Beyond Art: Wide White Space at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and Work from California at the 25th International Graphic Design Biennial in Brno, Czech Republic.
Tuesday, October 2
Shannon Stratton
Cranbrook 2012 Critical Studies Fellow
“As Form”
Part of the fellowship series, “The Social Capital of the Amateur”
Sponsored by the Critical Studies Program
Shannon Stratton is a founder and current Executive and Creative Director of threewalls Chicago, a not-for-profit residency and exhibition space that supports contemporary visual arts in Chicago. With Green Lantern Press, Stratton founded and published PHONEBOOK, a guide to contemporary independent and artist-run projects. Stratton maintains an active curatorial practice and works with Harold Arts in SE Ohio, coordinating projects including residencies, festivals and site-specific architecture. In 2010 Stratton was named one of the top 5 most vital people in the visual arts in Chicago by NewCity. In 2011 she was a fellow of the NAMAC Visual Arts Leadership Institute and a finalist for the Chicago Community Trust Emerging Leader Award. Stratton was one of nine leaders in the arts featured in the Chicago Tribune 2011 Chicagoans of the Year. Shannon Stratton teaches in Art History, Theory & Criticism and Fiber & Material Studies departments at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Thursday, October 4
Christoph Zellweger
Artist and Jewellery maker, Professor of Art + Design
“INCREDIBLES”
Sponsored by the Metalsmithing Department
Christoph Zellweger graduated from the Royal College of Art in London after working for several years as a trained maker/designer in the jewelry trade in Germany and Switzerland. Besides running his Zurich-based studio and exhibiting internationally, he has held a professorial research post at Sheffield Hallam University in England since 2003 and lectures in many of Europe’s leading design and art colleges, in addition to the MA in Product Design program in Lucerne, Switzerland. Zellweger’s work is featured in various museums and public art collections and has received international awards.
Tuesday, October 16
Amitis Motevalli
Artist
“Presenting: Tah(r)ir Social Club, a project of Everyday Imamzadeh”
Sponsored by the Critical Studies Program
Amitis Motevalli was born in Tehran, Iran, and moved to the US in 1977. She received a BA in Art with a minor in Women’s Studies from San Francisco State University and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University. Her work as an artist incorporates a combination of Near-Eastern aesthetic with a Western art education. Motevalli states, “Being transnational is present in my work through cultural plurality, natural and learned. In all of my work, I create a dialogue that presents alternatives to dominant canons in research and reflection of the present as well as history.” Motevalli is also the director of The William Grant Still Arts Center in Los Angeles. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles and Tehran, exhibiting art internationally as well as organizing to create an active and resistant cultural discourse through information exchange, either in art, pedagogy, or organizing artists and educators.
Saturday, October 20
Please note: this lecture begins at 4:00 pm
Terry R. Myers
Critic and Independent Curator, Chicago and Los Angeles and Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
“Painting's Unfinished Business”
Sponsored by the Painting Department
Terry R. Myers has written for more than 35 international journals, including Art/Text, Arts Magazine, Flash Art, LA Weekly, Modern Painters, New Art Examiner, and Parkett. Currently he is a regular contributor to Afterall, Art Review and The Brooklyn Rail. Myers has contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogues and books including Sunshine & Noir: Art in LA 1960-1997; Peter Doig: Blizzard Seventy-Seven; Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting, Rona Pondick: Works 1986-2008, and Dexter Dalwood. His books include Mary Heilmann: Save the Last Dance for Me (Afterall Books, 2007), and Painting: Documents of Contemporary Art (Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2011). Exhibitions that he has organized include There is A Light That Never Goes Out at Amy Lipton Gallery in New York; Kay Rosen: Lifelike at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Otis Gallery in Los Angeles; Standing Still and Walking in Los Angeles at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills; Robert Overby: Parallel, 1978-1969 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; The Slide Area at James Van Damme Gallery in Brussels; A red letter day at Fredericks Freiser Gallery in New York; and Angles in America and Never Let Me Go, both at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago. Myers has held teaching positions at Pratt Institute in New York, Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and The Royal College of Art in London. Currently he is Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Tuesday, October 30
Jessica Hemmings
Professor of Visual Culture, Head of Faculty of Visual Culture, National College of Art & Design, Dublin
“Introversion and Knitting: Rethinking Solitary Production”
Sponsored by the Fiber Department
Jessica Hemmings writes about textiles. She also writes about fiction that contains textiles, materials that remind us of textiles and other things, as long as they are interesting. She studied Textile Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA (Honors) in 1999 and also studied Comparative Literature (Africa/Asia) at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, earning an MA (Distinction) in 2000. Her PhD, awarded by the University of Edinburgh in 2006, is published by kalliope paperbacks under the title Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth (2008). Jessica writes articles and exhibition reviews for publications such as Crafts, Selvedge and the Surface Design Journal. In 2010 she edited a collection of essays entitled In the Loop: Knitting Now published by Black Dog and has recently compiled The Textile Reader for Berg (2012) and written Warp & Weft for A&C Black (2012). She has taught at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, the Rhode Island School of Design, Winchester School of Art and Edinburgh College of Art and is currently Professor of Visual Culture and Head of the Faculty of Visual Culture at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland.
Tuesday, November 6
Please note: Lecture time changed to 4:00 p.m.
Shannon Stratton
Cranbrook 2012 Critical Studies Fellow
“Auxiliary Motors & Affect Machines”
Part of the fellowship series, “The Social Capital of the Amateur”
Sponsored by the Critical Studies Program
Shannon Stratton is a founder and current Executive and Creative Director of threewalls Chicago, a not-for-profit residency and exhibition space that supports contemporary visual arts in Chicago. With Green Lantern Press, Stratton founded and published PHONEBOOK, a guide to contemporary independent and artist-run projects. Stratton maintains an active curatorial practice and works with Harold Arts in SE Ohio, coordinating projects including residencies, festivals and site-specific architecture. In 2010 Stratton was named one of the top 5 most vital people in the visual arts in Chicago by NewCity. In 2011 she was a fellow of the NAMAC Visual Arts Leadership Institute and a finalist for the Chicago Community Trust Emerging Leader Award. Stratton was one of nine leaders in the arts featured in the Chicago Tribune 2011 Chicagoans of the Year. Shannon Stratton teaches in Art History, Theory & Criticism and Fiber & Material Studies departments at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Wednesday, November 7
Kathy Butterly
Artist
“An Evening with Kathy Butterly”
Sponsored by the Ceramics Department
Kathy Butterly is an artist working and living in New York City. Her works are represented by the Tibor De Nagy Gallery in New York and she shows regularly with the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica. Butterly has received various awards and grants, including a 2011 Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant, a 2009 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant and a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Grant. Her works have been included in various museum exhibitions, most recently "Figuring Color: Kathy Butterly, Roy McMakin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sue Williams" curated by Jenelle Porter at the ICA/Boston. Other selected exhibitions include: "Freaks and Beauties: Kathy Butterly" at the Tang Museum; "The Jewel Thief" at the Tang Museum; "Dirt on Delight" at the ICA/Philadelphia and the Walker Art Center; "Pretty is as Pretty Does" at SITE Santa Fe; and "The 54th Carnegie International,” among others. An upcoming solo exhibition of Kathy's work, "Lots of Little Love Affairs," will open at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery on October 20 and close December 22, 2012. Butterly earned a MFA from the University of California, Davis, and a BFA at Moore College of Art.
Tuesday, November 13
Susan York
2012 Alumni Achievement Award Recipient
“A Study of Form and Material”
Co-sponsored by the Alumni Circle Committee and the Ceramics Department
Susan York’s graphite sculpture and drawings are in collections across the United States and Europe, including the Frankel Foundation for Art, Lannan Foundation, and Panza di Biumo. York received her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art (Ceramics 1995) and is currently the head of the sculpture program at Santa Fe University of Art and Design, where she has taught since 1998. Writing about York’s work in artforum.com, Washington Post Art Critic Blake Gopnik wrote, “You can’t just look at her columns; you need to discover that they are made of solid graphite. Her works are not so much about the space they take up as the substance this space contains and what it means.”
Throughout the past decade York has lectured at a variety of institutions including Harvard University, New York University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She maintains a studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico and has recently completed a collaborative drawing/poetry project with the poet Arthur Sze that will result in a 2013 publication by Radius Books. A recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship and the Alpert Foundation/Ucross Residency, York will be in residence this Spring at the Ucross Foundation in Clearmont, Wyoming. Exhibitions of Susan York’s work are scheduled this year in Munich, Germany, and Milan, Italy.
Tuesday, December 4
David Adey
Artist and Associate Professor, Point Loma Nazarene University
“An Evening with David Adey”
Sponsored by the Sculpture Department
David Adey participated in the 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, CA. His work has also been presented in Here Not There: San Diego Art Now (2010) at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; John Henry (2010), presented at the La Jolla Athenaeum of Music and Arts Library and at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles (where, in 2008, he also presented I've got a river of life flowing out of me); ZOOM (2009), at the Torrance Art Museum; Cut: Makings of Removal (2009), at Wignall Museum of Art/Chaffey College; and Atomic Particulars (2007), at Spacecraft Gallery. In addition, he has appeared in exhibitions at Biola University, Quint Contemporary Art, La Jolla, as well as the Cannon Gallery Invitational and Cannon Biennial Exhibitions, in Carlsbad, CA. He has also exhibited in New York, Miami, Detroit, Boston, and Berlin. David is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Design at Point Loma Nazarene University, where he teaches sculpture, 3D design, contemporary art seminar, and illustration. Adey was born 1972 in Morristown, New Jersey, and is a graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA, Sculpture, 2002) and Point Loma Nazarene University (BA, Visual Art, 1994). David Adey is a recipient of the 2010-2011 San Diego Art Prize in the Emerging Artist category. He is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles in Culver City, CA and Scott White Contemporary Art in La Jolla, CA.
Tuesday, December 11
Etienne Turpin
Editor, Scapegoat: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy and Lecturer, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan
“Jimmie Durham in Lascaux: A Parable for Art in the Anthropocene”
Sponsored by the Critical Studies Program
Etienne Turpin is a lecturer in architecture at the University of Michigan and a visiting lecturer in landscape architecture at the University of Toronto. He is a founding editor of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy, as well as the editor of Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Deep Time, Design, Science and Philosophy, forthcoming from MAP Books Publishers. His research and writing is aggregated online at www.ANEXACT.org.
