The visiting artist program Art Talks creates access to artists via webcam and in-person lectures, and provides students access to keep pace with critical thought, contemporary artistic practice, and emerging technology used in cultural production today.
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Vanessa Rocco
Vanessa Rocco
Dr. Vanessa Rocco is Professor of Humanities and Fine Arts at Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, and former Associate Curator at the International Center of Photography in New York. Her presentation was entitled "Photofascism". Photography and fascism in interwar Europe developed into a highly toxic and combustible formula. The use of visual imagery in 1930s Germany and Italy is a potent case study for every generation, particularly in our current global political environment. Rocco’s book Photofascism demonstrates how dictatorial regimes have deployed photographic mass media, methodically and in combination with aggressive display techniques, to manufacture consent among their publics, oftentimes with highly destructive — even catastrophic — results.
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Miguel Luciano
Miguel Luciano
Miguel Luciano, a multimedia visual artist whose work explores themes of history, popular culture, and social justice through sculpture, painting and socially engaged public art projects. Link to the artist's website.
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Amy Sacksteder
Amy Sacksteder
Amy Sacksteder's work explores personal and collective relationships to landscape and artifact. She works across media, most commonly in painting, collage, drawing, cut paper, installation, and ceramics. Link to the artist's website.
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Rebecca Howard
Rebecca Howard
Dr. Rebecca Howard is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Memphis. Her presentation is entitled, "Portrait Medallions, Death Masks, and Memory in Renaissance Italy".
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Lúthien Leerghast
Lúthien Leerghast
Lúthien Leerghast is a full-time freelance artist living in Hobart, Tasmania. Link to the artist's website.
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Linda Wysong
Linda Wysong
Sculptor, Video and Installation artist Linda Wysong has public art installed nationally and internationally, and has been a part-time PNCA faculty member since 1990, teaching Sculpture, Art Theory, Professional Practices, and Art History. Link to the artist's website.
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Saleema Waraich
Saleema Waraich
Dr. Saleema Waraich is an Associate Professor and Department Chair of Art History at Skidmore College. Her presentation is entitled "Dislocations and Relocations: Contemporary Neo-Miniature Painting in/from Pakistan."
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Ellen Lupton
Ellen Lupton
Ellen Lupton is a typographer, graphic designer, author, and Curator at the Cooper-Hewitt/Smithsonian Design Museum. Link to the artist's website.
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Valerie Hagerty
Valerie Hagerty
Valerie Hegarty is a New York City based artist who makes paintings, sculptures and installations that explore issues of memory, place and history. Link to the artist's website.
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Zoe Kahr
Zoe Kahr
Zoe Kahr is the Executive Director of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Link to museum's website
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Tommy Kha
Tommy Kha
Tommy Kha (b. Memphis, TN) is a photographer currently working between Brooklyn, New York and Memphis, Tennessee. Link to the artist's website.
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Ito and Sarmiento
Fuko Ito and Eugene Sarmiento
Fuko Ito hails from Kobe, Japan where she grew her love for storytelling through reading books and comics. She moved to the US to study printmaking and drawing and currently resides and works in Lexington, KY as an artist and educator.Link to the artist's website. Eugene Sarmiento is an artist and educator from Oak Cliff, Dallas, TX currently teaching in Concord, NH. Link to the artist's website.
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Kat Toronto
Kat Toronto
Kat Toronto, aka "Miss Meatface", is a multidisciplinary artist hailing from the San Francisco Bay Area that works in performance based photography. Diagnosed with a rare form of cervical cancer in 2010 that eventually led to a total hysterectomy in 2013, Kat uses Miss Meatface as an artistic and spiritual catalyst to delve into a complex set of questions about where she now fits into society as a woman. Link to the artist's website.
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Loie Hollowell
Loie Hollowell
Raised in Woodland, CA, Loie Hollowell (b. 1983) is a painter living and working in New York City. Link to the artist's website.
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Manuel Mathieu
Manuel Mathieu
Manuel Mathieu (b. 1986) is a multi-disciplinary artist, working with painting, ceramics and installation. His work investigates themes of historical violence, erasure and cultural approaches to physicality, nature and spiritual legacy. Link to the artist's website.
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Mellow Mountain Coalition
Tad Lauritzen Wright and Hamlett Dobbins
Mellow Mountain Coalition is a collaboration by Memphis artists Tad Lauritzen Wright and Hamlett Dobbins. Link to their website.
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Douglas McCulloh
Douglas McCulloh
Douglas McCulloh, is a photographer/artist based in Southern California. He was one of the creators of The Great Picture, the largest photograph ever made (31 feet by 107 feet!) Link to the artist's website.
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Anna Chisholm
Anna Chisholm
Dr. Anna Chisholm, an Assistant Professor of Art History at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, will be presenting on the work of African-American artist Fred Wilson.
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Karen Barber
Karen Barber
Art Historian Dr. Karen Barber received her Ph.D. at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, with a dissertation entitled “Writing with Light: Cameraless Photography and Its Narrative in the 1920s.” She specializes in the history of photography and 20th-century art. Her work has been published in Exposure and Studies in Photography. With a background in museums, she has worked in photography collections at SFMOMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the California Museum of Photography. She is currently working on a manuscript on cameraless photography and its publications in the 1920s.
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Ben Snell
Ben Snell
Ben Snell is an artist who listens to and amplifies the inner dialogues of machines. Using contemporary techniques and traditional motifs, he navigates the space between creation and automation, suggesting a humanist approach to technology. Link to the artist's website.
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Margaret Vendryes
Margaret Vendryes
Margaret Rose Vendryes, Art Historian, Artist, and Curator, entered the faculty of York College and The Graduate Center in 2000. She is the author of Barthé, A Life in Sculpture (2008). Vendryes returned to York College, in 2013, as Distinguished Lecturer in Fine Arts and Director of the York College Fine Arts Gallery after a seven-year absence during which she established a successful studio practice. As a visual artist, Vendryes is best known for her painting series The African Diva Project which merges African masks with commercial images of popular black women soloists.
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Clare Torina
Clare Torina
Artist Clare Torino will be giving a lecture about her work and practice. Link to her website.Additionally, she will be discussing Flyweight, a miniature art space created with co-founder Jesse Cesario. Link to their website.
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Nathan Shipley
Nathan Shipley
San Francisco-based technical director, creative technologist, visual effects supervisor, and motion graphics artist with over a decade of experience. Digital artist Nathan Shipley’s work has been featured in national broadcast and interactive campaigns, Super Bowl spots, and most recently at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. Link to the artist's website.
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Mike Cinelli
Mike Cinelli
Ceramic artist Mike Cinelli’s work has been displayed nationally and internationally in numerous juried and invitational exhibitions, with work displayed as far away as Skopelos, Greece, where he attended a one-month residency at the Skopelos Foundation for the Arts. He has received various jury awards, including the Studio Potter Merit Award. He was featured in the August 2016 issue of Ceramics Monthly as a contributor to “From Idea to Finished Form”. Currently, he is attempting to juggle his studio practice, being a father and husband, and maintaining a rigorous schedule of complaining on the internet. Link to the artist's website.
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Mike Durkin
Mike Durkin
Mike Durkin, Performance Artist “Football Tailgating as Performance Art” (IN PERSON) Mike (He/Him) is a multidisciplinary social practice performance artist residing in New York City. Mike was born in Boro Park, Brooklyn, and has lived in Philadelphia for the last 10 years before moving back to NYC. Mike is guided by the intersection between art and everyday. With his performance group, The Renegade Company he has created site-responsive social practice productions exploring food access, place and gentrification. Most recently he created a community-based performance project focussed on substance abuse, addiction, and homelessness working with residents of the Kensington neighborhood in Philadelphia called:(Kensington) Streetplay. He is currently in development to create a performance project focusing on the role sports plays in communities, entitled, S-P-O-R-T-S-P-L-A-Y. Mike has held residencies with the Space at Ryder Farm, Drop Forge and Tool, and San Luis Valley Social Practice Residency at Adams State University in Alamosa, CO. Mike’s work has been presented at the Brandywine River Museum, Barnes Foundation, Mt. Moriah Cemetery, the Life Do Grow Farm, and in parks, churches, fields, along the streets, and online. Link to the artist's website. For more information, check out,www.therenegadecompany.org
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Tad Lauritzen Wright
Tad Lauritzen Wright
In his work, Tad Lauritzen Wright is interested in generating an impromptu reaction to an idea, thought, or experience. He has always been attracted to art work that comes from discounted sources. He takes basic ideas, simple plans, and rigorous daydreaming to an extreme in his work, always attempting to elevate his ideas and observations. Craft and hobby projects are elevated to art status, and icons of the past become poised for new interpretations in his work. He believes in allowing the extended possibilities of landscape, dead images, jokes, plays on art history, pop culture, and personal history to shape how the pieces develop. He approaches his work as an ongoing project where he is constantly expanding his own artistic vocabulary. Link to the artist's website.
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Daniel J. Sander
Daniel J. Sander
Daniel J Sander, PhD, is the Assistant Curator of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. The Leslie-Lohman Museum is the only dedicated art museum in the world to exhibit and preserve artwork that speaks about the LGBTQ experience. Their roots trace back to 1969 when Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman held an exhibit of gay artists for the first time in their SoHo loft. Throughout the 1970s, they continued to collect and exhibit gay artists while supporting the SoHo art community. During the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s, the collection continued to grow as they rescued the work of dying artists from families who, out of shame or ignorance, wanted to destroy it. This led to the formation of the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation in 1987. In recognition of its importance in the collection and preservation of LGBTQ history, the organization was accredited as a museum in 2016.
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Shane McDermott
Shane McDermott
Shane McDermott, Illustrator/Cartoonist/Character Designer “Character Development” (IN PERSON) *Preceded by reception at 5 pm -Bryant Rotunda Shane McDermott is a cartoonist, character designer, illustrator, and comics professor living and working in Memphis, Tennessee. He has a BFA in Design Arts with a Concentration in Illustration from Memphis College of Art and an MFA in Comics from California College of the Arts. After earning his BFA, Shane worked for seven years as the staff editorial illustrator at The Commercial Appeal, the daily newspaper in Memphis, where he created numerous illustrations, infographics, and even his own comic series titled Drawing from Life. He taught comics, digital painting, and illustration at Memphis College of Art for 12 years and has created numerous educational comics on a broad range of topics for a variety of clients. Link to the artist's website.
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Ali Fitzgerald
Ali Fitzgerald
Ali Fitzgerald, Comics Artist “On ‘Hungover Bear’ (McSweeney’s), Optimism, and Teaching Comics to Refugees.” (VIRTUAL) *with reception to follow in Meek Gallery Ali Fitzgerald is an artist and writer living in a 90’s glass box off of Karl Marx Allee, Berlin’s former dream-thoroughfare to Moscow. She is a regular contributor to the The New Yorker, where she writes and draws a monthly column called “America!” She also wrote and drew the popular comic Hungover Bear and Friends for McSweeney’s, contributed a monthly visual column to Art Magazin and a weekly comic to New York Magazine called “Bermuda Square.” Her comics//drawings have also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, the Huffington Post, Art21, Vox.com, Modern Painters, Gastronomica, Berlin Quarterly, and Bitch Magazine and her artwork has been exhibited extensively in the U.S. and Europe as well as mentioned in the New York Times, Artlies, Varoom Magazine, The Guardian, Art in America, Afar Magazine, the Tagesspiegel, Dadada Magazine and Tip Magazin. Link to the artist's Instagram feed.
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Austin Dunbar
Austin Dunbar
Austin Dunbar is the founder of Durham Brand & Co., a creative studio with a strong foundation in brand development, strategic thinking, and design chops that is passionately crafted and creatively driven. DB&Co. provides unfiltered, top-notch creative work for some of the most recognizable consumer brands, pioneering start-ups and artists around. Link to the artist's website.
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Cole Lu
Cole Lu
Cole Lu is an artist, curator, and writer based in New York. Her work has been included in Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis, MO), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE), Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis, MO), Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, PA), American Medium (New York, NY), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), FAIR. (Miami Beach, FL), The 3rd New Digital Art Biennale – The Wrong (Again), I Never Read (Basel, Switzerland), FILE: Electronic Language International Festival (São Paulo, Brazil), The Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (Grand Rapids, MI), The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles, CA), Roman Susan (Chicago, IL), CENTRAL BOOKING ART SPACE (New York, NY), Syndicate (Cologne, Germany), K-Gold Temporary Gallery (Lesvos, Greece) and Invisible Space (Taipei, Taiwan). Link to the artist's website.
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Joe Morzuch
Joe Morzuch
Joe Morzuch, Assistant Professor in the Painting Department of Art at Mississippi State University, is a still life painter interested in the visual and communicative potential of objects that are cast-off, discarded, and overlooked. His subjects, and the process of working directly from life, provide him with rich pictorial and conceptual possibilities. His work engages the mundane, domestic, and every-day, as well as the notion of an arrested perceptual experience. Link to the artist's website.
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Eddie Chambers
Eddie Chambers
Dr. Edward (“Eddie”) Chambers, Professor, Art History, University of Texas at Austin Eddie Chambers is a Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, teaching visual arts of the African Diaspora. He is a field editor, with responsibility for assigning reviews of publications relating to African Diaspora art and African art, for caa.reviews.