All Visual Culture Lecture Series are held in Montague Hall 70 from 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM unless noted otherwise.
September 18, 2012
Willie Cole (born 1955) is known for his transformations of ordinary domestic objects, such as shoes, irons, and lawn jockeys, into powerful works of art. Cole’s sculptures and images are embedded with references to the African-American experience and inspired by West African religion, mythology, and culture.
Born in New Jersey, Cole attended Boston University School of Fine Arts and received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work is innumerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.The Tweed Museum of Art recently purchased “The Worrier, 2011, which is currently on view at the museum.
October 2, 2012
Paul Berlanga was born in Chicago 1953, and still lives there today.
Berlanga studied humanities at the University of Illinois in the 1970s. Among his influences were art and design instructors who had graduated from the Institute of Design in Chicago. He studied drawing and painting at the American Academy of Art and later fell into a 20-year career dealing in used and rare books.
Since 1997, Berlanga has been Director of the Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago. The Gallery offers a range of work but specializes in vintage photographs, with an emphasis on modernist experimental and social documentary subject matter. As director he has chosen artists to represent at the Gallery and curated exhibitions. He has written and edited texts for Gallery catalogues as well as for outside publications – the most recent of which is the spring issue of Amsterdam-based Eyemazing Magazine. This May, Berlanga spent a week in Cuba on independent assignment as general editor of a forthcoming book on a client’s collection of contemporary Cuban photography, including advising her on acquisitions. In June he moderated an on-stage discussion between two accomplished photographers, the Spaniard Jordi Socias, and the American Stephen Schapiro, at the Instituto Cervantes in Chicago.
The Stephen Daiter Gallery has represented Wayne Miller for over a decade, and Berlanga interviewed Miller for the monograph Wayne F. Miller Photographs 1942-1958 (PowerHouse 2008). That year he also accompanied Wayne to the opening of a large retrospective of the artist’s work at the Southeast Museum of Photography.
When he’s not pursuing his interests in the arts he can usually be found running guns and stealing luxury cars in Chicago’s notorious Humboldt Park, just to keep his edge.
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Bohannon Hall 90
6 PM
Graphic Designer/Latino marketing expert.
In 1999 Luis Fitch founded UNO Hispanic Branding as an independent company to be a new kind of Hispanic branding and creativity company partnering with clients and other agencies in all communications disciplines.
Luis Fitch's career has spanned more than 20 years of branding with a unique focus on Hispanic strategy and design.
His no-nonsense approach and deep appreciation for the creative process and final product have helped him become one of the most sought-after Hispanic creative consultants. Fitch’s work includes brand and corporate identity and design development for leading retail companies such as Target, Best Buy, Macy’s, Nike and Nash-Finch.
October 23, 2012
Hitchcock is an artist and educator whose works combine printmaking, collaborative event, digital imaging, video, and sculptural installation. He extends the long history of social and political commentary in graphic art to explore relationships of community, land and culture. Recontextualizing images from culture, electronic media and advertising, he leads us on an examination of social, economic and political systems.
Hitchcock grew up in Lawton, Oklahoma. He earned a BFA from Cameron University in Lawton, and an MFA in printmaking and photography at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he teaches screen printing, relief printing, digital and mixed media printmaking, and installation art.
As a guest curator in Perspectives and Parallels, Hitchcock will present the work of five contemporary artists in relation to selected works from the Tweed Museum’s Richard and Dorothy Nelson Collection of American Indian Art. In Hitchcock’s project Encoded, works by Emily Arthur, America Meredith, Tom Jones, Henry Payer and Dyani Reynolds-White Hawk “examine the influence of an Indigenous perspective onto a North American aesthetic … as seen in pattern, symbolism, language, color, abstraction, earth and animal imagery.”
November 6, 2012
Doug Farr is the founding principal of the architecture and urban design firm Farr Associates. Based in Chicago, the firm is widely regarded as one of the most sustainable practices in the country, recently certifying its fifth LEED Platinum building. Doug was the founding chair of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) Core Committee- the interdisciplinary group of professionals that created this first ever rating system for sustainable land development. Launching in 2009, LEED-ND integrates smart growth, walkability, and green building practices into standards and metrics that scale up sustainability to a neighborhood level. Based on the firm’s pioneering sustainable design practice and his insights gained from chairing LEED-ND, Doug authored the urban planning best-selling book Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature in 2008.
February 5, 2013
Tom Jones is an Assistant Professor of Photography at UW-Madison. He received his MFA in Photography and a MA in Museum Studies from Columbia College in Chicago, IL. Jones’ photographs examine identity and geographic place with an emphasis on the experience of American Indian communities. He is interested in the way that American Indian material culture is represented through popular commodity culture, e.g. architecture, advertising, and self-representation. He continues to work on an ongoing photographic essay on the contemporary life of his tribe, the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin. He is critically assessing the romanticized representation of Native peoples in photography through the reexamination of historic pictures taken by white photographers. This reassessment questions the assumptions about identity within the American Indian culture by non-natives and Natives alike. Jones is a co-author on the book “People of the Big Voice, Photographs of Ho-Chunk Families by Charles Van Schaick, 1879-1943.” Jones’ work is in the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian, Polaroid Corporation, Sprint Corporation, The Chazen Museum of Art, The Nerman Museum, and Microsoft.
March 5, 2013
Erik Loyer is a media artist who uses tactile and performative interfaces to tell stories with interactive media.
His work has been exhibited online and internationally at venues including Artport at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Digital Gallery at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Prix Ars Electronica; Transmediale; and IndieCade. Loyer’s award-winning website The Lair of the Marrow Monkey was one of the first to be added to the permanent collection of a major art museum, and his serialized web narrative Chroma went on to win the Best Digital Creation award at the Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media.
As Creative Director for the experimental digital humanities journal Vectors, Loyer has designed over a dozen interactive essays in collaboration with numerous scholars including the Webby-honored documentary Public Secrets, and his commercial portfolio includes Clio and One Show Gold Award-winning work for Vodafone, as well as projects for BMW, Sony, and NASA.
He is the founder of interactive design studio Song New Creative, and develops story-driven interactive entertainment under the Opertoon label, including most recently a critically-acclaimed iPhone application entitled Ruben & Lullaby. A recipient of a Rockefeller Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship, Loyer has a B.A. in Cinema/Television Production from the University of Southern California.
March 26, 2013
Sharon M. Louden is a professional artist who lives and works in New York City. She graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Yale University. Her installation and animation work has been exhibited in numerous venues, including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Birmingham Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
Sharon Louden's work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, the Washington Post, Sculpture Magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Louden's work is held in major public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.
April 2, 2013
Terry Irwin is the Head of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University and has been teaching at the University level since 1986. Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon in 2009 she was an adjunct professor of design at Otis Parsons College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, and California College of the Arts (1989-2003), San Francisco and was a lecturer in design at University of Dundee, Scotland. She has lectured and guest taught at numerous schools in Europe and North America including Art Center, Los Angeles, The University of Washington, Seattle, Arizona State University, Tempe, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, University of the Arts, London and Bolzen Bolzano, Italy and the ICIS Centre, Denmark among others. Terry was a founding partner of the San Francisco office of MetaDesign, an international design firm with offices in San Francisco, Berlin, London, and Zurich and served as Creative Director from 1992 - 2001. In 2003 Terry moved to Devon, England to do a Master’s Degree in Holistic Science at Schumacher College, an international center for ecological studies. After completing her studies, she joined the faculty and taught design thinking to students with backgrounds in biology, ecology, physics, sociology and activism. In 2007 she moved to Scotland to undertake PhD studies at the Centre for the Study of Natural Design at the University of Dundee, Scotland. Terry's research explores how living systems principles can inform a more appropriate and responsible way to design and she is currently working with the faculty at CMU to incorporate 'design for society and the environment' into the heart of the curriculum. Terry holds an MFA in Design from the Allgemeine Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland.
April 9, 2013
Jenna Akre is a Minneapolis-based Art Director + Designer. After graduating from UMD in 2005, she has become a proven leader in the print and digital editorial community and has created a growing following of clients in branding, web and collateral design.
Annie Dugan, Curator at the Duluth Art Institute since 2010, is also the Founder and Co-director of the Free Range Film Festival in Wrenshall, MN. Dugan, who received her Masters degree in Art History from Columbia University, was previously Director of the Carlton County Historical Society, and has worked at the Walker Art Center and WDSE-TV, Duluth.
In a recent interview Dugan described her life: "I live in Northern Minnesota where I eat good vegetables and watch movies in my big old barn. Also, I like art."
April 23, 2013
Mousumi De is an independent artist and researcher who works with visual arts, media and new media for peace building, social cohesion and educational projects. Currently, she is working as Associate Instructor and doing a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction at Indiana University, Bloomington, majoring in Art Education. She is Honorary Research Fellow with Indian Institute of Sustainable Development, New Delhi, India; editor of newsletter for International Society for Education through Art (InSEA) and editorial board member of the International Journal for Education through Art. She has M.Phil in Communication and Media Studies (2009), M.A in Design and Digital Media (2003) from Coventry University, UK and B.A in English and Economics (1998) from University of Delhi, India. She is professionally trained in Fashion Designing and Clothing Technology (1995) from the National Institute of Fashion Technology, New Delhi, India, and served the clothing industry from 1994 to 2002. Her research interests lie at the intersection of art (including visual, media and new media art) and technology, peace building and peace education. Some of her research works involve using the arts to empower disenfranchised youth and children, to foster peace literacy and enhance emotional and social learning. Works from her projects with children and young people have been exhibited in places including Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry, UK (2006), InSEA Asia Regional Congress, Seoul (2007), the BBC Divine Art Project, UK (2007), and the Soufer Gallery, New York (2009). More recently, her research interests involve exploring the use of online technologies to teach visual arts to art novices and integrating games and play with the arts. Other research interests include intangible cultural heritage and cultural identity. As an artist, she works with mixed media, interactive media and ceramic carving (Wabi Sabi). Her works address issues of socio-political and cultural conflicts, peace and also traditional artforms of India. She is former member of the Gendai Association of Artists Japan and her works of been exhibited in the UK and Japan.
This lecture series on ‘The art of dissent and peace building’ will examine the culture of using visual imagery, new media arts, as well as performances that are inextricably intertwined with the practice of protesting and demonstrating across different cultures from different countries for the purpose of voicing their dissent as well as hopes for peace. Visual art and new media works from children and young people, the international civil society and various artists from different countries will be discussed. The discussions will seek to explore the power of arts in mediating resistance, civil disobedience, as well as mediating peace, forgiveness and peace building.
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