University of Guelph and the School of Fine Art and Music
present the 10th annual
Dasha Shenkman Lecture in Contemporary Art
Wednesday March 23, 2016, 6:00pm
War Memorial Hall, University of Guelph
Guelph, Ontario
Admission Free - Everyone Welcome! Free parking in P23/24 and P19 after 5:00 p.m.
Featuring: FRED WILSON
LOOKING THROUGH GLASS DARKLY: EXHIBITION PROJECTS and SCULPTURE by FRED WILSON
Fred Wilson will present a lecture highlighting his museum installations of the past 25 years. Wilson is known internationally for works which infiltrate museum structures and art historical canons through the medium of display. For the 2016 Dasha Shenkman Lecture, he will also discuss his recent sculptures in bronze and glass, which investigate the symbolism and meaning of the color black. In these works, inspired by historic design, art, and literature, Wilson creates both baroque and simple forms that speak to contemporary times.
Fred Wilson is a conceptual artist whose practice includes painting, sculpture and photography. He is known for his sculptures in glass and for his site-specific installations in collaboration with museums and cultural institutions throughout North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. He received his B.F.A. from the State University of New York, Purchase in 1976, and was awarded Honorary Doctorates from Maryland Institute College of Art, MD (2013), Skidmore College, NY (2009), and Northwestern University, IL (2007). Wilson’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and retrospectives worldwide, including, amongst others, the critically acclaimed Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson sponsored by the Contemporary in collaboration with The Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore (1992–1993) and Fred Wilson, Objects and Installations 1979–2000 which traveled to eight different venues nationally from 2001-2004. In 2003, Wilson represented the United States at the 50th Venice Biennale with the solo exhibition, Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am. In 2008, Wilson was named to the Board of Trustees of the Whitney Museum of Art, New York as well as to the Board of Trustees of the American Academy in Rome. His many accolades include the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant (1999), among others. Wilson’s work can be found in numerous public collections worldwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Hood Museum, New Hampshire; The Tate Modern, London; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Institute of Jamaica, Kingston; The Jewish Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; Seattle Art Museum; and The Whitney Museum of American Art.
Fred Wilson lives and works in New York City, where he is represented by The Pace Gallery.
MFA Open Studio 2016
Please also plan to join us for the MFA Open Studios before and after the lecture:
3:00-5:00 p.m. and 7:30-9:00 p.m.
Blackwood Hall, Firehall, Alexander Hall, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario
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, offering a rare inside look at the development of new work within the hothouse environment of an art program and a chance to chat with artists about their work in progress.
Open Studios 2016 features work by graduate candidates:
Paul MacIntyre; Peter Denton; Steven Beckly; Ambera Wellmann; Amanda Boulos; Larissa Tiggelers; Shannon Garden-Smith; Patrick Cruz; Jean-Marc Perin; Erika Dueck; John Haney; Simon M. Benedict; Kevin Murphy; Hiba Abdallah.
Click for the 2016 MFA Open Studios Brochure [1].
We will also showcase work by our fourth year Specialized Studio undergraduates:
Sonali Menezes; Jordan Pedersen; Merlin Hunt; Kenneth Jeffrey; Chris Withenshaw; Kelly Zantingh; Erika Farfaras; Alison Postma; Elana Shvalbe; Emma Welch; Katie Cheung; Emma Green; Andrew Mandaliti; Christina Smith; Linh Thai; Lindsay Sisson.
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.
Press contact:
Sandra Sabatini, sabatini@uoguelph.ca [2] 519-824-4120 x53869
Erika Dueck and Paul MacIntyre, Graduate Open Studios Student Coordinators, openstudiosmfa@gmail.com [3]
John Kissick, Faculty Coordinator, jkissick@uoguelph.ca [4] 519-824-4120 x53191
A free bus will leave Mercer Union (1286 Bloor Street West) in Toronto at 2:00 p.m. and leave Guelph to return to Toronto at 8:30 p.m. Reserve a seat on this bus - http://shenkman.eventbrite.ca [5]
A free shuttle service between Open Studio buildings is available between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. Volunteers will provide directions and guided tours.
University of Guelph and the School of Fine Art and Music
present the 9th annual
Dasha Shenkman Lecture in Contemporary Art
Wednesday March 25, 2015, 6:00pm
War Memorial Hall, University of Guelph
Guelph, Ontario
Admission Free
Featuring: Michael Snow
Fine Art and Music
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Since the fifties, Michael Snow has worked with objects, images and sound separately and together. In this year’s Shenkman Lecture, he will explore the identities of image and sound with examples from his manifold practice which includes drawing, collage, painting, sculpture, photographic works, lithography, holographic works, installation, film, video, bookworks, LP jackets, multiples, music improvisation, music composition, records, cassettes, CDs, performances, tours, broadcasts, soundtracks and sound installations.
Michael Snow is a national cultural treasure. No other living Canadian artist has made as profound a contribution to international visual culture and Canadian artistic identity. The University of Guelph is honoured to host a rare speaking appearance by this great artist.
Snow was born in Toronto in 1928 and, notwithstanding extensive and on-going international travel, has made Toronto his primary residence for most of his life. Alongside names like Jack Bush, Marshall McLuhan and General Idea, Michael Snow has put Toronto and Canada on the map of world culture in a way that few others can claim.
Snow is a cultural polymath: his internationally recognized proficiencies include music, film, painting, sculpture and public art. Remarkably, he has made pioneering contributions in all these fields. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Anthology Film Archives, New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Royal Belgian Film Archives in Brussels, to name just a few. Retrospectives of his work have been held at the world’s foremost museums in Tokyo, Paris, Lyon, Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, Brussels, Geneva and Philadelphia. He has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions in Amsterdam, Atlanta, Berlin, Bonn, Boston, Brussels, Kassel, Lima, Los Angeles, Lucerne, Lyons, Minneapolis, Montreux, Munich, New York, Ottawa, Paris, Pittsburgh, Quebec City, Rotterdam, San Francisco, and Toronto.
Michael Snow is a Companion of the Order of Canada, a Chevalier d’ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France and holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Sorbonne, alongside honorary degrees from Emily Carr University, the University of Toronto, the University of Victoria, Brock University and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
Michael Snow’s output as an artist has consistently and persistently demanded that his audience be acutely aware of its perceptions. His appearance as the 9th Dasha Shenkman Lecturer will surely demand similar attention from his audience while offering an opportunity to hear a resident legend speak of his work. The lecture is open to the public and will be followed by a question and answer period moderated by Robert Enright, University of Guelph Research Chair in Art Criticism.
The annual Dasha Shenkman Lecture was established in 2007 and is made possible through the support of Dasha Shenkman, OBE, a Canadian art collector and philanthropist 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 [2]
MFA Open Studio 2015
Please also plan to join us for the MFA Open Studios before and after the lecture:
3:00-5:00 p.m. and 7:30-9:00 p.m.
Blackwood Hall, Firehall, Alexander Hall, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario
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, offering a rare inside look at the development of new work within the hothouse environment of an art program and a chance to chat with artists about their work in progress.
Open Studios 2015 features work by graduate candidates:
Steven Beckly, Simon M. Benedict, Patrick Cruz, Brandan Doty, Erika Dueck, Paul MacIntyre, John Haney, Maegan Harbridge, MinWoo Lee, Maegan Mehler, Janine Miedzik, Jasmine Reimer, Ambera Wellmann
Click to view the 2015 MFA Open Studios Brochure [7].
We will also showcase work by our fourth year Specialized Studio undergraduates:
Chelsea Brant, Tory Berends, Emma Carney, Maya Ben David, Jess Eisner, Dylan Evans, Angela Ferguson, Allison Henry, Katie Holmes, Megan Keogh, Rachel Laurzon, Tessa McDougall, Melina Panara, Katie Schultz, Allannah Vokes in addition to The University of Guelph Senior Drawing Class
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.
Press contact:
Sandra Sabatini., sabatini@uoguelph.ca [2] 519-824-4120 x53869
Jasmine Reimer, Graduate Open Studios Student Coordinator, openstudiosmfa@gmail.com [3]
Sandra Rechico, Faculty Coordinator, srechico@uoguelph.ca [4] 519-824-4120 x52324
A free bus will leave Mercer Union (1286 Bloor Street West) in Toronto at 2:00 p.m. and leave Guelph to return to Toronto at 8:30 p.m. Email openstudiosmfa@gmail.com [3] to reserve a spot.
A free shuttle service between Open Studio buildings is available between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. and again between 7:30 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. Volunteers will provide directions and guided tours.
University of Guelph and the School of Fine Art and Music
present the 8th annual
Shenkman Lecture in Contemporary Art
Wednesday March 19, 2014, 6:00pm
War Memorial Hall, University of Guelph
Guelph, Ontario
Admission Free
Featuring: Roberta Smith
"Criticism in the Expanded Field"
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Roberta Smith will talk about how she became an art critic; her responsibilities as she sees them as well as the workaday nature of newspaper criticism, how her job and view of her job has changed over time and how both have been affected by academia, by social media and the globalized big-spending art world/market.
Roberta Smith was born in New York City in 1947 and raised in Lawrence, Kansas and graduated from Grinnell College, Iowa in 1969. She has written art criticism for the New York Times since October 1986. She was art critic for the Village Voice from 1981 to 1985 and in the 1970s, wrote for Artforum, Art in America and Arts Magazine. She worked on the Donald Judd catalog raisonnè and has contributed essays to museum catalogs on various artists, including Judd, Alex Katz, Elizabeth Murray and Cy Twombly. Smith has lectured widely and taught at the School of Visual Arts, NYC and the Rhode Island School of Design. She received art criticism grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1975 and 1980. In 2003, she received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism from the College Art Association. Smith lives in New York City with her husband, Jerry Saltz, senior art critic for New York Magazine.
Previous Shenkman Lectures in Contemporary Art
Dave Hickey "It Takes A Village to Make Bad Art"
Wednesday, March 20, 2013 at 6:00pm
War Memorial Hall, University of Guelph
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.
[10]
The opinions expressed by the speaker are not necessarily those of the institution.
Mike Nelson
Wednesday, March 21, 2012 at 6:00pm
War Memorial Hall, University of Guelph
In 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 Alpha Station, 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 presence. He makes and then un-makes with equivalent intelligence. So "I, Imposter", his piece for the British pavillion at the Venice Bienniale this year, he substituted images of Istanbul from a work he made for the 2003 bienniale there, 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 between two cities, Istanful and Venice, and two frames of mind, the east and the west. The way viewers react to this work is consistent with other of his 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 Pavillion at the 2011 Venice Bienniale at britishcouncil-venice.org/images.php [11]
Mike Nelson was born in Longborough, 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 Bienniale; the 8th International Istanbul Bienniale; the 3rd Singapore Bienniale; PS1, New York; the Moderna Musset, Stockholm; Modern Art, Oxford; the Tate Triennial; and the Hayward Gallery, London. In 2001 he was the recipient of the Paul Hamlyn award and has twice been short-listed for the Turner Prize.
Hou Hanru Exhibitions: making places
Wednesday March 2, 2011 at 5:30 pm
War Memorial Hall, University of Guelph
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, contemporary 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 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 Hanru is currently the Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and Chair of Exhibition and Museum Studies, San Francisco Art Institute.
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 the Asian Art Council, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York, 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 contributer 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.
