Shenkman Lecture Series
The opinions expressed by the speaker are not necessarily those of the institution.
University of Guelph and the School of Fine Art and Music
present the 7th annual
Shenkman Lecture in Contemporary Art
Wednesday March 20, 2013, 6:00pm
War Memorial Hall, University of Guelph
Guelph, Ontario
Admission Free
Featuring: Dave Hickey
"It Takes A Village To Make Bad Art"
Dave Hickey will talk about the downside of economies of scale in art practice, art education, and art education in the age of Global Art and the digital Global Village. He will explain why bigger isn't necessarily better.
Dave Hickey is a free-lance writer of fiction and cultural criticism. He has recently retired as Professor of Practice at the University of New Mexico. He has served as owner-director of A Clean Well-Lighted Place in Austin, Texas, as director of the Reese Palley Gallery in New York City, as executive director of Art in America Magazine in New York City, and as contributing editor to the Texas Observer, The Village Voice, Art Issues, and Context. He has written for most major cultural publications in the United States and abroad. These include The Rolling Stone, Art News, Art in America, Artforum, Interview, Harpers Magazine, Vanity Fair, Playboy, Nest, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. Hickey also wrote Revisions, a monthly column for Art in America Magazine. He writes for the Art Newspaper, The London Review of Books and Frieze International in the UK, Situation in Paris and Parkett in Zurich.
He has published a volume of short fiction, Prior Convictions, SMU Press, 1982, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, Art Issue Press, 1993, The Invisible Dragon: Revised and Expanded, University of Chicago Press, 2008, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, Art Issues Press, 1998, selected as one of the most important books of the century in 2009 by Newsweek Magazine, Stardumb, Artspace Press, 1999, about artist John DeFazio, Hot Stuff: Essays on the Art of Women Artists, University of Chicago Press, 2012. Future works include: Connoisseur of Waves: More Essays on Art and Democracy, a sequel to Air Guitar in preparation by the University of Chicago Press to be released in 2013; Pagan America, forthcoming from Free Press in 2013; Pirates and Farmers: Essays on Culture and the Marketplace, Karsten Schubert, London, to follow publication of Pagan America; Feint of Heart: Essays of Individual Artists in two volumes in preparation at Chicago Press.
Hickey has also written 300+ exhibition catalogue monographs on contemporary artists including Nancy Rubins, Kenneth Price (2), Bridget Riley (2), John Chamberlain (2), Anthony Caro, Ellsworth Kelly, Ann Hamilton, Lari Pittman, Richard Serra (2), Robert Gober, Edward Ruscha (6), Terry Allen (5), Andy Warhol (5), Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Tom Wesselmann, Joan Mitchell, Vija Celmins, James Turrell, Vernon Fisher, Luis Jimenez, Barbara Bloom, Sol Lewitt, Sharon Ellis, and Michaelangelo Pisteletto, among others.
He has lectured extensively at universities and institutions in America and abroad. These include Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Penn, Brown, Stanford, Duke, the Smithsonian Institution, the Rhode Island School of Design, Hunter College, the School of Visual Arts, Bard College, the University of Texas at Austin, Art Center of Pasadena, Otis Institute in Los Angeles, the Hirshorn Museum and the National Gallery in Washington, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Dia Center for the Arts, the Walker Art Center, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth and Miami-Basel in the United States. He has lectured often in the United Kingdom at the Tate Modern, the Frieze Art Fair, the Royal College of Art and the Insitute of Contemporary Art.
He has received associated unsolicited grants and fellowships. He was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for 2002-2007. In May 2003, he received an honorary degree from The Rhode Island School of Design. More recently, he received the 2006 Peabody Award for public journalism in recognition of his work as Project Advisor and Associate Producer for Ric Burns' four-hour biographical documentary of Andy Warhol for the American Masters series on PBS in November 2006.
Hickey has organized many exhibitions including Site Santa Fe in Sante Fe, New Mexico, July 2001-January 2002, which won the 2001-2002 Best Show in a Kunsthalle Award from the Association of International Critics of Art. He is presently engaged in preparation for Ed Ruscha: Too Marvelous for Words for venues in Asia. He is also working as Project Advisor and Associate Producer on a PBS American Masters film on the artist Michael Heizer.
The annual Shenkman Lecture was established in 2007 through an endowment by Dasha Shenkman, a Canadian art collector who lives in the United Kingdom.
For more information contact:
Sandra Sabatini Ph.D.
Dean's Office, College of Arts
University of Guelph
519.824.4120. x53869
sabatini@uoguelph.ca
A free bus will leave from Mercer Union (1286 Bloor Street West) in Toronto at 2:30pm and leave Guelph to return to Toronto at 9:00pm. Email Ella Dawn McGeough, Graduate Open Studios Coordinator: email to reserve a spot!
MFA Open Studio 2013 -
The MFA students in the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph are pleased to welcome the public to their annual Open Studios.
Open Studios offers visitors a rare inside look at the development of new work within the hothouse environment of an art program. The public is invited to preview work in progress and chat with the artists in the informal environment of the studios.
On Wednesday, March 20 from 3:00 - 5:00 pm and again from 7:00 - 9:00 pm, visitors are invited to drop by the studios of graduate students. This event is scheduled in conjunction with the Shenkman Lecture in Contemporary Art, presented at 6:00pm in War Memorial Hall by American art & cultural critic, Dave Hickey.
Open Studios 2013 features work by graduate candidates:
Jen Aitken
Laura Anderson
Maryanne Casasanta
Jennifer Carvalho
Stephanie Cormier
Rachel Crummey
Laura Findlay
Denise Higginson
Aryen Hoekstra
Benjamin Klein
Amy Lockhart
Jenine Marsh
Ella Dawn McGeough
Matt Schust
Dustin Wilson
Click here to view the 2013 MFA Open Studios Brochure.
And introduces work by Specialized Studio undergraduates in Alexander Hall: Whitney Arnott, Patrick Beh, Paul Chartrand, Sarah Cordeaux, Zoe Downie-Ross, Juliane Foronda, Nicolas Good, Nadine Maher, Tyler Muzzin, Jazmyn Pettigrew, Laura Phan, Yusuf Rahmaty, Colleen Savage, Kimberley Vanderweyden, David Winfield, and Alexandra Zieger.
The University of Guelph offers a two year Master of Fine Arts Degree that combines intensive studio concentration with seminars in theory and pedagogy. Exceptionally committed graduate faculty and limited student enrolment result in a community that is intensely involved in contemporary art and its discourse. A consistently excellent program of visiting artists, critics and curators extends this community.
Alumni from Guelph's MFA program include Derek Sullivan, Kristan Horton, Katie Bethune-Leaman, Martin Golland, Melanie Authier, Zin Taylor and David Urban.
University of Guelph
50 Stone Road East, Guelph, Ontario, NIG 2W1
Press contact:
Ella Dawn McGeough, Open Studios Coordinator, email
Susan Dobson, Faculty Coordinator, email 519-824-4120 x56112
A shuttle service between buildings on campus is available between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. and again between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. Volunteers will provide directions and guided tours.
Open Studio Locations
Located at BLACKWOOD HALL, FIREHALL, AND ALEXANDER HALL.
2013 Open Studios Tour Map
.thumbnail.gif)
Previous Shenkman Lectures
in Contemporary Art
Mike Nelson
March 21, 2012
War Memorial Hall 6:00 pm.
Mike Nelson - Photo by Thierry BalIn his installations, British artist Mike Nelson functions like a novelist, but not a traditional one. The materials of his storytelling are not characters and plot but objects and space. His desire in fabricating these rooms, through a combination of persuasion and seduction, is to involve the viewer in the 'atmosphere' in which they find themselves. He regarded an early piece from 1996, called Trading Station Alpha, as a storeroom of ideas from which he could make subsequent works and following from that idea Nelson's installations have always been fascinatingly self-reflexive. His way of putting it is that he is being pursued by his own history, what he calls "a kind of retrospective, introspective backward glance." The legend of the Ouroboros - the snake that eats its own tail - is an apt image for an art that continually curls back upon itself, using its creative past to frame and construct an aesthetic present. He makes and then un-makes with equivalent intelligence. So "I, Imposter", his piece for the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, he substituted images of Istanbul from a work he made for the 2003 biennial there, and superimposed them in Venice in 2011. The resulting installation of a photographer's darkroom was a compelling accommodation between displacement and re-creation, the making of a migratory, changeable narrative of two cities, Istanbul and Venice, and two frames of mind, the east and the west. The way viewer's react to this work is consistent with other of this installations; mystery mixed with uncertainty, even a tinge of fearfulness. The atmosphere of this piece has about it an unmistakeable disquieting beauty.
See images from the British pavilion at the 2011 Venice Bienniale - britishcouncil-venice.org/images.php
Mike Nelson was born in Loughborough, UK in 1967. He lives and works in London and in the last decade has been included in major group and solo exhibitions around the world, including the ICA in London; the 13th Sydney Biennale; the 8th International Istanbul Biennial; the 3rd Singapore Biennial; PS1, New York; the Moderna Musset, Stockholm; Modern Art, Oxford; the Tate Triennial, and the Hayward Gallery, London. In 2001 he was a recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Award and he has twice been short-listed for the Turner Prize.
MFA Open Studio 2012 -
Open Studios 2012 features work by graduate candidates:
Laura Anderson
Jennifer Carvalho
Aryen Hoekstra
Benjamin Klein
Amy Lockhart
Jenine Marsh
Ella McGeough
Dustin Wilson
Nadia Belerique
Marco D'Andrea
Julia Hall
Melissa Hamonic
David Hucal
Erica Mendritzki
And introduces work by Specialized Studio undergraduates in the Alexander Hall:
Victoria Dziuma, D'Arcy Flynn, Joshua Guthrie, Amy Hallman, Ye Han Christina Hotz, Tess Martens, Graham Ragan, Nicole Runham, Nicholas Silvani, Elizabeth Sullivan, Katherine Szabo, Vanessa Tignanelli, Jessie Toonen, Vicktoria Vaitekunas,and Leah Williams
Hou Hanru - Exhibitions: making places
March 2, 2011
War Memorial Hall 5:30 pm.
For the past several decades, exhibition curating has become a central component in the system of art production and distribution. With the growth of biennials, comtemporary art museums, and public interventions, and their proliferation across the globe, curatorial practices are going through intense processes of experimentation and innovation. Exhibitions are not only expanding to accommodate creative activity from all around the world, they are also turning into sites of production of new artistic visions, concept forms and social relationships. Ultimately, they are a driving force in the making of new cultural localities in the age of globalisation.
Hou HanruHou Hanru is currently the Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and Chair of Exhibition and Museum Studies, San Francisco Art Institute.
Born in 1963, Guangzhou, China, Hou Hanru graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing in 1985 (BA) and 1988 (MA). He lived and worked in Paris, France as an art critic and curator from 1990 - 2005. Since then, Hou Hanru has been based out of San Francisco.
Besides the regular exhibitions and public programs at the San Francisco Art Institute, Hou Hanru has independently curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions including: “By Day, By Night, or some (special) things a museum can do,” Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2010, “The Spectacle of the Everyday,” the 10th Biennale de Lyon, 2009, “Too Early for Vacation,” EV + A 2008, Limerick, Ireland, March – May 2008, “Not Only Possible, But Also Necessary – Optimism in The Age of Global Wars," the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, 2007, “Everyday Miracle, four woman artists in the Chinese Pavilion (Shen Yuan, Yin Xiuzhen, Kan Xuan, Cao Fei),” the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007, “Transient City,” Urban Interventions, Luxembourg 2007, “Laboratoire pour un Avenir Incertain (Laboratory for an Uncertain Future),” Grand Palais, Paris, France, 2006, “Beyond, the 2nd Guangzhou Triennale,” Guangzhou, China, 2004-2006, “Go Inside,” the 3rd Tirana Biennale, Tirana, Albania, 2005, “Nuit Blanche 2004,” Paris, 2 Oct. 2004, “The Fifth System – Public Art in the Age of Post-Planning,” the fifth Shenzhen international public art exhibition, 2003, “Z.O.U. – Zone Of Urgency,” the 50th Venice Biennale, 2003, “Gwangju Biennale 2002,” Gwangju, Korea, “Shanghai Spirit -- Shanghai Biennale 2000,” Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China, 2000, "The French Pavilion (with Huang Yong Ping)," Venice Biennale, “Cities on the Move," 1997 - 2000, Wiener Secession, Vienna, Austria, CAPC, Bordeaux, France, PS1, New York, Louisiana Museum, Denmark, The Hayward Gallery, London, UK, various venues, Bangkok, Thailand, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, "Hong Kong, etc.," in 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1997, "Parisien(ne)s," Camden Arts Centre, London, 1997, “China/Avant-Garde,” China National Art Gallery, Beijing, 1989, etc.
As an art and culture critic and curator, Hou Hanru has focused on the dynamic relationship between art, architecture, urbanism and social change in the age of globalisation. Collaborating closely with professionals and the public from various domains, his curatorial and writing projects are highly experimental and propose new understandings of the tension and interactions between global and local, between past, present and future, in order to envision new conditions for cultural production.
Hou Hanru has lectured in numerous international institutions and served on international juries of art and architecture awards. His international credits are extensive and varied. He has served as Advisor (professor) at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, Netherlands, as a visiting Professor, HISK, Antwerp/Ghent, Belgium, a member of Asian Art Council, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York, and a member of International committees for Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul Culture Foundation, Turkey, the Deutsche Bank Collection, and the Yokohama Triennial, Japan Foundation, among others. He has also served as a contributor and guest editor for several magazines, such as, Flash Art International, Urban China, Yishu, and Art Asia Pacific. He is a frequent contributor to exhibition catalogues, art and architecture magazines and books. Hou Hanru's book “On The Mid-Ground” was published by Timezone 8, Beijing-Hong Kong, in 2002.
Hou Hanru received the honours of Chévalier des ordres des arts et des lettres of the French Cultural Ministry, 2008.
MFA Open Studio 2011 - Wednesday, March 2 - 1:00-5:00pm and 7:00-9:00pm
Open Studios 2011 features work by graduate candidates:
Ashleigh Bartlett
Nadia Belerique
Marco D'Andrea
Martie Giefert
Jessica Groome
Julia Hall
Melissa Hamonic
David Hucal
Dawn Johnston
Laura Marotta
Tiziana La Melia
Maryse Lariviere
Amanda McMorran
Erica Mendritzki
Jennifer Murphy
And introduces work by Specialized Studio undergraduates in the Zavitz Gallery:
Samantha Ackerley, Monte Burman, Stephanie Deumer, Omar Elkharadly, Danica Evering, Dan Frawley, Midori Fullerton, Bailey Govier, David Graham, Charlotte Hodgson, Dara Mussar, Ashley Schirripa, Haley Uyeda, Rachel Vanderzwet, Sarah Walterhouse, Jen Weber, Maliha Qureshi
Open Studios 2011
Open Studios 2011
Open Studios 2011
Open Studios 2011
Iwona Blazwick - Just What is it that makes today's institutions so different so appealing?
March 10, 2010
War Memorial Hall 5:30 pm.
This lecture explores the transformation of the museum, from mausoleum to mass spectacle - and the implications for artists and audiences in the 21st century.
Iwona Blazwick is among a handful of indispensable gallery directors and critics of bcontemporary art. Since 2001 she has been the Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, where she oversaw a major expansion of that venerable institution. Prior to assuming the directorship of the Whitechapel, she was the Director of Exhibitions at the ICA in London from 1986 - 93, and Head of Exhibitions and Displays at the Tate Modern from 1997 - 2001. Before becoming a curator, she had a transformative career in art publishing as the Commissioning Editor for Phaidon Press, initiating both the Contemporary Artists monograph series and the Themes and Movements series. She is also the Editor for the Documents of Contemporary Art series co-published by Whitechapel and MIT. She was an independent curator (1993-97) during which time she organized a range of important contemporary art exhibitions. She has written extensively about a number of artists, including Marlene Dumas, Elizabeth Peyton, Lawrence Weiner, Hannah Collins, Rachel Whiteread and Ilya Kabokov. In 2008 Ms Blazwick was made an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire).
University of Guelph MFA Open Studio 2010
Wednesday, March 10th from 2 - 5 pm, 7-9 pm
Open Studios 2010 features work by graduate candidates:
Ashleigh Bartlett
Stephen Fisher
Martie Giefert
Maggie Groat
Jessica Groome
Doug Jarvis
Shane Krepakevich
Tiziana La Melia
Maryse Larivière
Laura Mcmorran
Ryan Park
Nadja Pelkey
Jeff Tutt
And introduces work by Specialized Studio undergraduates:
Christina Boyer
Courtney Bryant
Zachary Cassidy
Shannon Dickie
Darryn Doull
Paul Hay
Stefan Herda
Patrick Krzyzanowski
Liam Sanagan
Drea Scotland
Samuel Silversides
Laura Simon
Anna Skrypnychenko
Victor Stan
Meaghan Wilcox
Donna Willard
Roni Horn
March 11, 2009
War Memorial Hall 5:30 pm.
The School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph is pleased to announce that Roni Horn, the internationally recognized American artist, will give the third annual Shenkman Lecture on March 11 from 5:30pm to 6:30 pm in War Memorial Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Best known for work that mixes the personal and the abstract in unique ways, Horn's artistic practice has included sculpture, drawing, lithography, installation and bookworks.
Horn is regarded as a minimalist, a method of art-making that concentrated on the material of the thing being made. But she has found ways to take the reductions of minimalist practice and turn them inside out. She has made sculptures out of steel, copper, aluminum, glass, and gold, but they have such a presence that they transport the viewer beyond the limitations of the medium into a kind of material poetics. She obliges us to look so intensely at the "thingness" of the objects she creates - whether solid copper forms, steel spheres, or delicate sheets of annealed gold foil - that they become fields for imaginative speculation.
Operating inside a world in which there are no hierarchies, Horn contends that no single form of artistic expression is more important than any other. She has completed major photographic projects, like Index Cixous, a portrait of 79 photographs of the famous feminist theorist taken in Paris in 2003 and published by Steidl in 2005; You are the weather, an exhibition (and book) of 100 almost identical portraits of a young woman bathing in Iceland; and Earth Grows Thick, a meditation on the poetry of Emily Dickinson that takes the form of sculpture and text. In 1990 she began an ongoing series of artist's books called To Place.
Roni Horn has worked all over the world - especially in Iceland, a country she first traveled to in 1975 and which she has visited and worked in for over 30 years. She recently edited a collection of observations by Icelanders about the effect of weather on their culture which was published under the title Weather Reports You in 2007.
Roni Horn has had a number significant of one-person shows since she began exhibiting in the 1980s, including Making Being Here Enough at the Kunstshalle Basel (1995); and exhibitions at the Musee d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1999); the Dia Center for the Arts (2001); the Art Institute of Chicago and the Centre Georges Pompidou (2004) and the Chinati Foundation, in Marfa Texas.
Roni Horn will lecture at the University of Guelph following the opening of Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, a major retrospective of her work in London at the Tate Modern (February 25 - May 25), which will then travel to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
In conjunction with the Shenkman Lecture presented by Roni Horn, current MFA students in the School of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Guelph are pleased to welcome the public to their annual Open Studios. On March 11, from 3:00pm to 9:00pm, visitors are invited to drop by the studios of 16 graduate students and 14 thesis-year undergraduate art students.
Open Studios offers visitors a rare inside view into the development of new work within the hothouse environment of an art program. The public is invited to preview work in progress and chat with the artists in an informal environment. The artists will be on hand to answer questions and discuss their practice.
The University of Guelph's MFA program in Studio Art has an excellent track record. Just a few notable graduates include: Derek Sullivan, Kristan Horton, Katie Bethune-Leaman, Zin Taylor and David Urban. The two year Master of Fine Arts Degree combines intensive studio concentration with seminars in theory and pedagogy. Exceptionally committed graduate faculty and limited student enrolment result in a community that is intensely involved in contemporary art and its discourse. A consistently excellent program of visiting artists, critics and curators extends this community.
Check out the PBS website for more details about Roni Horn and her work:
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/horn/index.html
The Roni Horn Shenkman Lecture will be presented in conjunction with:
University of Guelph Master of Fine Arts Open Studio 2009
The Inaugural Shenkman Lecture, "Putting Things in Context: A Survivor's Guide," was delivered by Michael Craig-Martin, an internationally renowned conceptual artist and a visionary teacher.
Click here to listen to the Inaugural Shenkman Lecture in Contemporary Art at iTunes U.
On behalf of the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph, I am delighted to announce that renowned American art critic, philosopher, and Columbia University Professor Emeritus, Arthur Danto, will give the 2008 Shenkman lecture at War Memorial Hall at the University of Guelph. Please consider the card as advanced notice to mark the date — Tuesday, March 4, 2008 at 5p.m. — in your calendar. A detailed invitation will follow in the next few weeks.
Best wishes,
John Kissick, Director
School of Fine Art and Music
University of Guelph
Pivotal U.K. Art Figure Will Give First Shenkman Lecture
Talk will focus on issues around contemporary art, culture and art education
http://www.uoguelph.ca/atguelph/07-02-28/newspivotal.shtml
BY RACHELLE COOPER
Michael Craig-Martin, one of the pivotal figures in the "Cool Britannia" art movement in the United Kingdom in the late 1980s and early '90s, is giving his first Canadian talk March 13 at 5 p.m. in War Memorial Hall. The event is free and open to the public. Craig-Martin is the inaugural speaker for the University's Shenkman Lecture, an annual talk on contemporary art created through a generous endowment provided by Dasha Shenkman, a Canadian art collector who haslived in the United Kingdom for 40 years.
Prof. John Kissick, director of the School of Fine Art and Music, says Craig-Martin represents the complete package as a contemporary artist. "His practice is rigorous and internationally renowned, but he's also been intimately involved in the development of young artists and new ideas in the United Kingdom."Craig-Martin's talk, "Putting Things in Context: A Survivor's Guide," will focus on issues around contemporary art, culture and education related to artists. As he describes it, the talk will "mix reminiscence, personal philosophy, anecdote, self-justification and advice to provide background and put into context the ideas, experiences and personalities that have shaped my work and life as an artist and influenced my approach to art education." He'll describe how he came to be an artist, his education at Yale and what brought him to Goldsmiths College at the University of London, where he taught from 1974 to 1988 and was a Millard Professor of Fine Art from 1994 to 2000. The lecture will be published in BorderCrossings, a Canadian art magazine.
Before coming to Guelph, Craig- Martin was in Japan creating a new installation at Tokyo's National Art Centre as part of the "Living in the Material World: ‘Things’ in Art of the 20th Century and Beyond" exhibit, which opened in January and runs until mid-March. His first one-man show was at the Rowan Gallery in London in 1969. Since then, he has exhibited in solo and group shows worldwide, including the definitive exhibition of British conceptual art, "The New Art," at the Hayward Gallery in 1972. A major retrospective of his work was held in London at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1989. In 1994, he made site-specific installations at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and at the Museum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland. He also created large-scale site-specific installations at Düsseldorf Kunstverein (1997), Hannover Kunstverein (1998) and Stuttgart Kunstverein (1999). Craig-Martin represented Great Britain at the 1998 Sno Paulo Bienal and created a major wall painting installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1999.
In addition to his talk, he will spend time with visual arts graduate students, both individually and in groups, doing studio visits and critiques March 12 and 13.
"The idea behind this endowment is to invite speakers who can address the University community as a whole about contemporary art in its many-faceted and complicated dimensions, and also for people to gain knowledge and wisdom from the artist that they can apply to their own work," says Kissick.
Endowed Lecture Series to Bring Top Artists to U of G
Donor committed to development of young artists
http://www.uoguelph.ca/atguelph/06-11-22/newsartists.shtml
BY RACHELLE COOPER
A new annual lecture focused on contemporary art has been created at U of G through a generous endowment provided by Dasha Shenkman, a Canadian art collector who has lived in the United Kingdom for 40 years. Shenkman has long been committed to the development of young artists and has been involved with a number of arts-oriented organizations, either at board level or as a consultant, says Prof. John Kissick, director of the School of Fine Art and Music. "Dasha's gift will allow the University to bring in five speakers over the next five years who can speak eloquently about contemporary art and contemporary culture in a way that will have ramifications for young artists," he says. "This significant endowment is a testament to her compelling vision of creating a yearly point of access to internationally renowned figures in contemporary art for Guelph students at a critical time in their development. We are sincerely grateful for the endowment and her extraordinary commitment to the Guelph program."
The inaugural Shenkman Lecture will be delivered by Michael Craig-Martin, an internationally renowned conceptual artist who is also known as a visionary teacher, March 13 at 5 p.m. in War Memorial Hall.
"Michael Craig-Martin was one of the pivotal figures in the Cool Britannia movement in the United Kingdom in the late '80s, early '90s," says Kissick. "He's never spoken in Canada before, so this is an exciting opportunity for both the U of G community and artists and art lovers outside of Guelph." President Alastair Summerlee says U of G is "absolutely thrilled with this generous gift. Not only will our students benefit from getting to spend time with highly successful artists, but this also helps put the University of Guelph on the map as a leading institution of contemporary art." Says Shenkman: "I am a Canadian and I care about Canada. Having lived in the United Kingdom for a good many years, I have seen a breadth of culture both here and elsewhere. This series is an opportunity for students at the University of Guelph, which boasts one of the best fine art programs in Canada, to be exposed to new thoughts and ideas that will encourage them to look and think with maximum creativity." Prof. Robert Enright, who is editor-at-large at Border Crossings magazine, will publish Craig-Martin's lecture in the well-known Canadian art magazine.
World-Renowned Art Critic to Give Shenkman Lecture
February 26, 2008 - News Release
http://www.uoguelph.ca/news/2008/02/worldrenowned_a.html
Arthur Danto, a world-renowned philosopher and art critic, will speak March 4 at 5 p.m. at the University of Guelph's War Memorial Hall. Hosted by the School of Fine Art and Music, Danto's talk is the second annual Shenkman Lecture in Contemporary Art. He is speaking on "From Photograph to Philosophy: Two Moments of Post-Traditional Art" and the event is free and open to the public. Well known for his expertise in philosophical esthetics, he is highly regarded for his work on the classic question of how you decide whether or not something is a work of art.
"Arthur Danto has long been considered one of the most influential thinkers on contemporary art," said Prof. John Kissick, director of the School of Fine Art and Music. "His work mixes significant philosophical insights into the nature of art in the post-modern age with accessible journalistic art criticism." A longtime art critic for The Nation, Danto has published a number of books and journal articles on art criticism and won the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1990 for his book Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present. In addition, he is a contributing editor to the Naked Punch ReviewandArtforum. Danto is also the author of numerous articles and books on philosophy and is an editor of the Journal of Philosophy. He taught at Columbia University for more than half a century and is now Johnsonian Professor Emeritus Philosophy. His extensive knowledge in both art and philosophy have garnered him many fellowships and grants, including two Guggenheims, a Fullbright, and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. He has served as vice-president and president of the American Philosophical Association and president of the American Society for Aesthetics.
Kissick said the lecture series gives the University community a unique opportunity to interact with some of the leading international figures in contemporary art. "The lectures also spotlight the University's superb graduate program in the visual arts, which is known as one of the country's best." The Shenkman Lecture series was established last year through an endowment provided by Dasha Shenkman, a Canadian art collector who now lives in the United Kingdom.
