2021 Visiting Artist Lecture Series
2021 Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Presented by the Department of Art
Lectures take place on Thursdays at 6:30 p.m. PST via Zoom
The Department of Art presents the Visiting Artist Lecture Series (VALS). The annual series, organized by graduate students in Art, invites artists, scholars, curators, critics, gallerists and writers to give public lectures and conduct studio visits with students relevant to graduate students' research and practice. The series is presented in a colloquium setting (this year via Zoom), where students engage in in-depth discussions with the visiting artists and scholars.
This series is made in part thanks to support from UCI Illuminations.
Learn more and register for the events at the UCI Illuminations website
Jan. 13, special time 10 a.m. PST: Slavs and Tartars
* March 2 at 12 p.m. PST: Ravi GuneWardena & Mile Coolidge
with a response by Bert Winther-Tamaki
* March 9 at 3 p.m. PST: David Kelley
with a response by Bill Maurer
* Learn more about the Towards a Raw Materialism project
About the Artists
Kavior Moon is an art historian, critic, and Liberal Arts faculty member at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). She received a B.A. in Visual Arts from Columbia University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she wrote her dissertation on the later works of Michael Asher and the expanded field of contemporary art institutions. Her scholarly work focuses on modern and contemporary art history, with a particular emphasis on institutional critique and experimental, post-studio art practices. In addition to SCI-Arc, Moon has taught at UCLA, ArtCenter College of Design, and Claremont Graduate University. Her essays and reviews have appeared in such publications as Artforum, ARTNews, Kaleidoscope, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly.
Register for the March 11 event here.
David Kelley works with photography, video, and installation. His recent projects draw attention to the effects of global capitalism, resource extraction, and shifting physical and political landscapes. Influenced by a range of visual traditions, Kelley draws upon elements of experimental documentary, ethnography, performance, and avant-garde cinema. By working at the intersection of these strategies, he encourages an understanding of his subjects that is simultaneously direct and speculative. His recent exhibitions include the Louvre in Paris, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Other exhibitions include Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, The Bank in Shanghai, the de Cordova Biennial in Boston, BAK in Utrecht, MAAP space in Australia, and the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok. Kelley received a Master of Fine Art from the University of California, Irvine, and was a 2010 -11 resident at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He is currently Associate Professor of the Practice of Fine Arts at University of Southern California, and was named a Cultural Trailblazer 2020-2021 by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
Bill Maurer is a cultural anthropologist and sociolegal scholar whose most recent research looks at how professional communities conceptualize and build financial technology or “fintech,” and how consumers use and experience it. More broadly, his work explores the technological infrastructures and social relations of exchange and payment, from cowries to credit cards and cryptocurrencies. As an anthropologist, he is interested in the broad range of technologies people have used throughout history and across cultures to figure value and conduct transactions and has particular expertise in alternative and experimental forms of money and finance, payment technologies, and their legal implications. He is the Director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (www.imtfi.uci.edu), and his numerous curatorial work includes an ongoing exhibit on the past, present and future of money at the British Museum. Prof. Maurer is a fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science and Dean of the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine.
Register for the March 9 event here.
Paul Chan is an artist, writer, and publisher who lives in New York. Chan is the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize in 2014, a biennial award honoring artists who have made a visionary contribution to contemporary art. His work has been exhibited widely in many international shows including: Plato in LA, Getty Villa in Los Angeles in 2018; Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany in 2012, the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009; and the Whitney Biennial, in New York in 2006. Solo exhibitions have been mounted at The Cycladic Museum of Art in Athens, The Renaissance Society in Chicago, The Serpentine Gallery in London, and the New Museum in New York. A mid-career survey entitled Selected Works was mounted at Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland in 2014.
In 2002, Chan was a part of Voices in the Wilderness, an American aid group that broke U.S. sanctions and federal law by working in Baghdad before the U.S. invasion and occupation. In 2004 he garnered police attention for The People's Guide to the Republican National Convention, a free map distributed throughout New York to help protesters to get in or out of the way of the RNC. In 2007, Chan collaborated with the Classical Theatre of Harlem and Creative Time to produce a site-specific outdoor presentation of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot two years after Hurricane Katrina.
Paul’s essays and interviews have appeared in Artforum, Frieze, Flash Art, October, Parkett, Texte Zur Kunst, Bomb, and other magazines and journals. Paul founded the independent press Badlands Unlimited in 2010. Badlands has published over 50 books, including the works of Yvonne Rainer, Calvin Tomkins, Lynne Tillman, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carroll Dunham, Claudia La Rocco, Dread Scott, Martine Syms, Craig Owens, Petra Cortright, Cauleen Smith, Ian Cheng, Rachel Rose, Aruna D’Souza, and many others. Badlands closed in 2019.
Register for the March 4 event here.
Ravi GuneWardena, an architect by profession, is a practitioner of Sogetsu Ikebana, studying under ikebana teacher Haruko “Gyokushun” Takeichi, Riji, Overseas Eiyo Syo, Sogetsu School. He is a member of the Sogetsu Men’s Class, founded by Kaz Yokou Kitajima in 2012 in preparation for the Sogetsu Seminar the following year. Developing his practice as an ikebana artist over the past 15 years, GuneWardena worked simultaneously on learning the essential curriculum of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana and on researching the history of the school and its headmasters. As an architect and half of Escher Gunewardena Architecture, he and his partner Frank Escher has collaborated with artists such as Sharon Lockhart, Mike Kelley, and Stephen Prina; and designed exhibitions for the Carnegie International, LACMA, and the Kemper Museum. In 2013 they created the site-specific chamber opera, “ Pauline," based on the letters of Pauline Schindler, for the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles.
Miles Coolidge's artwork is often concerned with subject matter at the intersection of landscape and architecture. His work gained international visibility in the mid-1990's, standing out as a synthesis of his exposure to the post-studio ethos of his California Institute of the Arts experience as an MFA student, and his year of DAAD-supported postgraduate study in the class of Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His work has been shown internationally, including at venues such as NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf; the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Projekt Fabrika, Moscow; Kunsthaus Graz, Austria; the Shanghai Museum of Art, China, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MOCA Los Angeles, the Albright-Knox Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Henry Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015 and is Professor of Art at UC Irvine.
Bert Winther-Tamaki’s scholarship focuses on the role of the visual arts in the construction of modern meanings of materials, especially in twentieth-century Japan. His forthcoming book TSUCHI: An Environmental History of Contemporary Japanese Art follows the plight of earthy materials such as loam, landfill, beach sand, potter’s clay, and riverbank pebbles in ceramics, photography, and installation art in Japan since the 1950s. Much of Winther-Tamaki’s work has focused on artists whose positions partly outside Japan complicated the artistic identities they developed in various media. He is the author of Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years (2001) and Maximum Embodiment: Yoga, the "Western Painting" of Japan, 1910-1955 (2012). Winther-Tamaki is Professor of Asian American Studies, Visual Studies, and Art History and Chair in the Department of Art History at UC Irvine.
Register for the March 2 event here.
Tourmaline is an artist, archivist, activist and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. Building upon her long-standing experience as a community organizer, her research mines archival sources, tracing historical lineages of marginalized and excluded communities. By centering and inscribing black, brown, trans, and queer historical figures and narratives, she directly challenges dominant cultural histories and storytelling. Her work honors and links antecedents of resistance with current possibilities for liberation, and offers models in which to broadly imagine and thrive within self-actualization. Her work has been included in many exhibitions and screenings, including The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others, and has been featured in numerous publications, including Artforum, Frieze, The New York Times, The New Yorker, ArtNews, and Vogue. This year she opened her first solo gallery exhibition of films and self-portrait photographs entitled Pleasure Garden at Chapter NY, which was met with critical acclaim. She has received widespread recognition for the impact of her work, including being named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020.
Register for the Feb. 25 event here.
Eric Wesley (b. 1973, Los Angeles) has had solo exhibitions internationally, including at MOCA, Los Angeles, and Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Museo d’Arte, Benevento; the 2004 Whitney Biennial, New York; the Prague Biennale; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; MoMA PS1, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. He is a cofounder of the Los Angeles Mountain School of Arts.
Register for the Feb. 18 event here.
Young Joon Kwak (b. 1984 in Queens, NY) is a LA-based multi-disciplinary artist who primarily uses sculpture, performance, video, and community-based collaborations to reimagine bodies and the power structures that govern our everyday lives as mutable and permeable sites of agency. Kwak is the lead performer in the electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner, and the founder of Mutant Salon, a roving platform for collaborative installations and performances with their queer/trans/POC/mutant community. Kwak presented solo and collaborative exhibitions and performances internationally at galleries and institutions including Commonwealth & Council, LA (2017, 2016, 2014), Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta, Canada (2018), the Art Museum of the National University of Colombia, Bogotá (2018), The Broad, LA (2016), and the Hammer Museum, LA (2016). Selected group exhibitions have been held at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea (2020), Antenna Space, Shanghai, China (2019), Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018), and Le Pavillon Vendôme Centre d’Art Contemporain, Clichy, France (2015). Kwak received the Korea Arts Foundation of America’s Award for the Visual Arts (2020), Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Grant (2018), Artist Community Engagement Grant (2016), and the Art Matters Grant (2016). Kwak is the 2020 – 2021 Artist-in-Residence in Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University. Kwak received an MFA from the University of Southern California, an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago, and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kwak’s work has been reviewed and featured in Artforum, ARTnews, Artillery Magazine, BOMB Magazine, Frieze, Hyperallergic, and LA Times, among others.
Register for the Feb. 11 event here.
Daniel R. Small (b.1984 in Centralia, Illinois, USA; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University. Recent exhibitions include the traveling exhibition “Never Spoken Again” organized by Independent Curators International which will travel for five years and is currently installed at the MSU Broad Museum (2020), “The Conspiracy Of Art: Part II,” Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (2019), “74 million million million tons,” SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York (2018); “Seeing Eye Awareness,” Museum of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2018); “Mad Horizon,” Index- The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, Sweden (2017); “Concrete Island,” VENUS LA, Los Angeles (2017), “The Hierophant,” Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest, Romania (2017); “Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only,” Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); “13th Biennale de Lyon,” Musee d’Art Contemporain Lyon, France (2015); “The Historical Society of Desert Archives,” The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, Utah (2015); “Bloody Red Sun of Fantastic L.A.,” PIASA, Paris, France (2015); “The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project,” Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) (2015). He received the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award in 2015 and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award in 2016.
Register for the Feb. 4 event here.
Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities and versions of modernity, memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration, and in relation to imagining possible futures. She has had numerous solo exhibitions and has participated in group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Currently, her work is on view in Becoming Atmosphere at the 18th Street Art Center Airport Campus in Santa Monica until February 5 and at the MSU Broad Museum as part of the exhibitions Interstates of Mind and Seeds of Resistance. In addition, her work will be on view starting January 30 at the Lux Art Institute, in collaboration with Los Angeles based artists rafa esparza, Kang Seung Lee, Candice Lin, Pavithra Prasad, and Christian Tedeschi and starting January 31 at the Craft Contemporary Museum as part of Making Time. Cortez has received numerous awards including the Longenecker-Roth Artist Residence at UCSD (2021), Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020), Frieze LIFEWTR Inaugural Sculpture Prize (2019), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016), among others. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and a doctorate in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She teaches in the Department of Central American and Transborder Studies at California State University, Northridge.
Register for the Jan. 28 event here.
Patricia Fernández (b. 1980, Burgos, Spain; lives and works in Los Angeles) received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2010 and BFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002. Fernández has had solo exhibitions at Holiday Forever, Jackson Hole, WY (2020); Todd Madigan Gallery, California State University, Bakersfield (2018); Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (2015); Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, Spain (2015); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica (2014); and LA> Register for the Jan. 21 event here. Slavs and Tatars is an internationally-renowned art collective devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Salt, Istanbul; Vienna Secession, Kunsthalle Zurich, Albertinum in Dresden and Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art Warsaw, among others. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications and lecture-performances. They are best known for their use of a playful presentation style to disarm and engage viewers in the content of the research underlying their work. In addition to their translation of the legendary Azerbaijani satirical periodical Molla Nasreddin (currently in its 2nd edition with I.B Tauris), Slavs and Tatars have published more than ten books to date, most recently Wripped Scripped (Hatje Cantz, 2018) on the politics of alphabets and transliteration. In 2019, the collective curated the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts and their work was included in the main exhibition, "May You Live in Interesting Times," of the 58th Venice Biennale. They have participated in the 11th Sharjah, 10th Manifesta, 8th Berlin and 9th Gwangju Biennials as well as group shows at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Kunsthaus Graz, and Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. The collective launched a residency and mentorship program for young professionals from their region in 2018 and recently opened Pickle Bar, a new project space a few doors down from their studio. Register for the Jan. 13 event here.