Art & Identity: The Artists Lecture Series

Dana Fritz, William Fox, Judy Natal, and Pierre Meystre discuss artists as they relate to science, particularly focusing on the artist in residence program at Biosphere 2. Moderated by Julie Sasse.

This lecture will present the conceptual roots and future paths of two large bodies of art, science and technology-related works that Marko Peljhan has been developing in collaborations since the early 2000s, focusing on the Arctic Perspective Initiative and its Makrolab roots and the polar m [mirrored] project. The Arctic Perspective Initiative (API) is a non-profit, international group of individuals and organizations, whose goal is to promote the creation of open authoring, communications and dissemination infrastructures for the circumpolar region. Its aim is to work with, learn from, and empower the North and Arctic Peoples through open source technologies and applied education and training. Peljhan holds joint appointments with the Department of Art and the Media Arts & Technology graduate program at the University of California Santa Barbara and was appointed as Co-Director of the UC Institute for Research in the Arts in 2009, where he is coordinating the art/science Integrative Methodologies Initiative. Peljhan worked on the Makrolab, a unique project that focuses on telecommunications, migrations and weather systems research in an intersection of art and science from 1997-2007. In 2007, he founded the technology branch of Projekt Atol called PACT SYSTEMS where he developed one of the first Global Positioning Systems-based participatory networked mapping projects, the Urban Colonization and Orientation Gear 144 and the Interpolar Transnational Art Science Constellation (project 417). He is currently coordinating the Arctic Perspective Initiative, an art/science/tactical media project focused on the global significance of the Arctic geopolitical, natural and cultural spheres. His work has been exhibited internationally at multiple biennales and festivals, including documenta X in Kassel, several ISEA exhibitions, and Ars Electronica presentations and at major museums such as P.S.1, MOMA, New Museum of Contemporary Art, ICC NTT Tokyo, YCAM Yamaguchi and others.

In this performance/talk, Garoian will discuss art-in-the-flesh as a double-coded figure of speech, a trope that suggests that the existential liveness of art research and practice constitutes an arousal and agitation of the senses that evokes new ways of seeing and understanding the world.

Transcript of Ellen Lupton's lecture. Ellen Lupton is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. An author of numerous books and articles on design, she is a public-minded critic, frequent lecturer, and AIGA Gold Medalist. Sept. 2006.

Jean Shin is nationally recognized for her monumental installations that transform everyday objects into elegant expressions of identity and community. For each project, she amasses vast collections of a particular object—prescription pill bottles, sports trophies, sweaters—which are often sourced through donations from individuals in a participating community. These intimate objects then become the materials for her conceptually rich sculptures, videos and site-specific installations. Distinguished by her meticulous, labor-intensive process, and her engagement of community, Shin’s arresting installations reflect individuals’ personal lives as well as collective issues that we face as a society. . November 15, 2010

Ken Gonzales-Day lives and works in Los Angeles. He received an MFA from UC Irvine, and an MA in Art History from Hunter College (C.U.N.Y). His interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded projects consider the history of photography, the construction of race, and the limits of representational systems ranging from the lynching photograph to museum display. Searching for California Hang Trees series offered a critical look at the legacies of landscape photography in the West while his most recent project considers the origins of racial profiling. Profiled began as an exploration of the influence of eighteenth century "scientfic" thought on twenty-first century institutions from the prison to the museum, with an emphasis on the historical and artistic construction of difference. September 23, 2010

Liz Cohen’s projects create parameters for experiences in which she negotiates her relationships within groups where she does not have the defining characteristic for membership. As her work changes she remains interested in groups of men, radical transformation, and in-between-ness. Cohen spent four years performing her investigations for CANAL, a series of photographs and performances about a group of transgender sex workers along the fringe of the Panama Canal. The transgender sex worker’s bodies become metaphors for Panama's geography and history. She learned to transform her appearance and took on the personas of different sex workers she had met for a series of performances. With BODYWORK, she shifted her focus toward the flexibilities of group membership in the lowrider world and became a member of a group of men who do the customizing work on these cars. Bodywork is the attempt to transform an East German car into an American car by means of hydraulic technology. Simultaneously, Cohen converted her own body into one worthy of a car-show bikini model. Liz Cohen’s work has been shown internationally including exhibitions at Färgfabriken (Stockholm), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Galerie Laurent Godin (Paris), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Rubin Center (El Paso). Cohen is the Artist-in-Residence/Head of Photography at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. March 25, 2010

Bruce Yonemoto is a Japanese-American multimedia artist. His photographs, installations, sculptures, and films appropriate familiar narrative forms and then circumvent convention through direct, over-eager adoption of heavily clichéd dialogue, music, gestures, and scenes that click in the viewer’s memory without being identifiable. Working in collaboration with his brother, Norman Yonemoto, since 1975, Bruce Yonemoto has set out to divulge a body of work at the crossroads of television, art, commerce, and the museum/gallery world. As a complement to his body of work, Yonemoto explores intersections of traditional Japanese and contemporary American cultures. His work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, the Maya Deren Award for Experimental Film and Video, and a mid-career survey show at the Japanese American National Museum. This digital photograph from the North South- East West series, 2007, centers on Walter Benjamin’s ideas raised about portrait photography and the vestige of the aura. Yonemoto researched the historical record and discovered that there were, indeed, soldiers of Asian descent in both the armies of the North and South. He realized that once again people of various racial backgrounds had been systematically excluded from the national record, even by recent revisionist histories. The costumes worn are rented from the oldest Hollywood collection house, Western Costume. Western Costume’s collection dates back to 1912 (the beginning of cinematic history) and includes Civil War uniforms used in D.W. Griffith’s infamous film, Birth of A Nation. February 18, 2010

David Taylor earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. His photographs, multimedia installations, and artist’s books have been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions at the The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; 516 Arts, Albuquerque, New Mexico; the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso; El Paso Museum of Art; SF Camerawork, San Francisco; Society for Contemporary Photography, Kansas City, MO; and Northlight Gallery at Arizona State University, Tempe. His work is in a number of permanent collections, including Columbia College Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Washington State Arts Commission, Olympia; University of Washington, Seattle; El Paso Museum of Art; Fidelity Investments, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Palace of the Governors/New Mexico History Museum. Taylor has completed recent major commissions for artwork that is installed in the U.S. Border Patrol Station in Van Horn, Texas and the United States Federal Courthouse in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Taylor’s ongoing examination of the U.S. Mexico border was supported by a 2008 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. January 2010.

"Cultural Hybridity in Tucson” provides a local view and exchange of ideas on the lecture series Transculturations. Our panelists will reflect on their experiences, discuss their work and comment on current trends and issues confronting contemporary artists, curators, writers and critics in Southern Arizona. Transculturations seeks to examine the ever-expanding notion of hybridity and its manifestation in visual art, criticism and institutional curatorial practices. January 21, 2010 Participants: Fatima M. Bercht | Curator of Latin American Art, Tucson Museum of Art Dustinn Craig | Producer, Director & Visual Artist Jamie Lee | Filmmaker & Founder, visionaries filmworks Adela C. Licona, PhD | Poet, Writer & Filmmaker Moderator: Larry D. Busbea, PhD | Art Historian

Jaimey Hamilton is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Hawaii. She teaches contemporary visual culture and critical theory. Currently, she is completing a book about appropriation in contemporary sculpture called “Strategic Materiality: Contemporary Sculpture in the Age of Globalization.” Her recent publications include: “Arman’s System of Objects,” in Art Journal vol. 67 (Spring 2008): no.1: 54-67; and “Making Art Matter: Alberto Burri’s Sacchi” October 124 (Spring 2008): 31-52. December 3, 2009

Since 2001, Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam have developed projects that raise questions about nationalism and national identity, the contingency of memory, and the haunting of daily life by the specter of war, militarism, and socio-political inequities. Inspired by a particular site, historical incident, or political issue, their work emerges from the interrelation between current events and residues of the past. Trained in architecture, H. Lan Thao Lam uses photography, sculpture, and installation to address social memories of time and place. Informed by critical cinema, Lana Lin is interested in the processes of identification. Lin + Lam’s projects have taken shape in sculptural forms, full-scale installations, 16mm film, photography, writing, and performance. The environments the artists construct, whether physical or psychic, invite viewers into an excavation process in which they may contemplate the inscription of history, power, desire and memory. The collaborative team will speak about their working process, which evolves from in depth research to determining the form most appropriate to each project. Lin + Lam’s work has been exhibited at international venues including the New Museum, The Kitchen, and the Queens Museum, New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Arko Arts Center (Korean Arts Council,) Seoul, the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany, and the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, China. Beginning in mid-October, Lin + Lam will exhibit in the Joseph Gross Gallery. The exhibition brings Departure, a 3-channel video installation, to the US for the first time. Shot from the exploratory perspective of a moving car, cyclo, and trains, the video travels through three postcolonial Asian cities: Taipei, Shanghai, and Hanoi. The transformation of a road, a bridge, and railways parallels the cycle of construction and destruction that distinguish these sites of occupation. The impact of modernization and foreign intervention on these urban environments is viewed through different modes of transportation. Lin + Lam’s other recent projects have revolved around issues of immigration, trauma, and estrangement as an effect of language and translation. Unisex (2008), a mixed media installation and public performance, maps the history and artistry of grooming as it has evolved through socio-economic shifts in a diverse Latino community. Through counter-archival practices, Unidentified Vietnam (2001-2006), addresses propaganda and myths of democracy. Even The Trees Would Leave (2005), a photo/text project, uncovers residual trauma in Hong Kong’s former Vietnamese refugee camps that now house golf driving ranges and family recreation centers. H. Lan Thao Lam received her MFA from CalArts. Lana Lin received her MFA from Bard College. They have been honored with awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Princess Grace Foundation, among others, and are 2009 -10 Vera List Center for Art and Politics Fellows. November 12, 2009

Born in Nigeria, Okwui Enwezor is a curator, writer, critic, and editor of international acclaim. He has held positions as Visiting Professor in Art History at University of Pittsburgh; Columbia University, New York; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and University of Umea, Sweden. Enwezor was Artistic Director of Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (1998–2002) and the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1996–1997). He has curated numerous exhibitions in some of the most distinguished museums around the world, including The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, Gropius Bau, Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and P.S.1 and Museum of Modern Art, New York; Century City, Tate Modern, London; Mirror’s Edge, Bildmuseet, Umea, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Tramway, Glasgow, Castello di Rivoli, Torino; In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940–Present, Guggenheim Museum; Global Conceptualism, Queens Museum, New York, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, List Gallery at MIT, Cambridge; David Goldblatt: Fifty One Years, Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, AXA Gallery, New York, Palais des Beaux Art, Brussels, Lenbach Haus, Munich, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, Witte de With, Rotterdam; co-curator of Echigo-Tsumari Sculpture Biennale in Japan; co-curator of Cinco Continente: Biennale of Painting, Mexico City; Stan Douglas: Le Detroit, Art Institute of Chicago. October 15, 2009

Tam Van Tran's work crosses borders between change and stasis, organic and human made, painting and sculpture; it is in fact, hybrid. Van Tran couples organic substances such as chlorophyll, spirulina, and beet juice with acrylic paint, and metal staples. He lists as his influences artists as diverse as Francisco Goya, Odilon Redon, and Charles Burchfield. Using staples and hole punches, Tam Van Tran manipulates his paintings on paper, forcing them into asymmetrical shapes and odd bunches. By stapling paper together over and over, Van Tran changes the shape of his works, relying on both nature and accident. His emphasis on materials including crimped paper, staples, and hole punches is tempered by his interest in traditional Chinese landscape painting, yet the works can look digitally altered and futuristic. Simultaneously, the work can look organic, suggesting cellular structures. Van Tran draws imagery from past experiences as waiter, chef, and lab technician. He has made paintings that have molded and he has used eggshells, all the while noting the way in which these unconventional materials shape shifted over time. He has also experimented with white out liquid and with chlorophyll and spirulina algae, two substances favored by health food stores for their healing properties. Born 1966 in Kontum, Vietnam, Van Tram 's family left Vietnam in 1975 before the fall of South Vietnam. They relocated to Denver, CO where the artist grew up. He later attended Pratt Institute in New York City and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. September 24, 2009.

Kay Lawrence is a visual artist and an academic. She was Professor and Head of the South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia from 2002-08. Prior to this appointment she was Portfolio Leader of Research and Coordinator of the Textiles Studio. She has a long association with the South Australian School of Art having been a student at the school in the 60s, majoring in painting and printmaking. She subsequently studied tapestry weaving at the Edinburgh School of Art, in Scotland in 1977-78 and has developed an international profile as a visual artist working in the areas of woven tapestry and drawing. Her practice as an artist is grounded in textiles although her most recent work has encompassed installation as well as woven tapestry and other textile processes. She makes work for both public and private contexts as well as writing about contemporary Australian textiles. As well as exhibiting her work extensively in Australia and overseas she has completed a number of major tapestry commissions, including two works for the national Parliament in Canberra in 1988. For her design of the Parliament House Embroidery, she was made a member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1989. In 1991 she was commissioned by the then Ambassador of the United States in Australia, the Honourable Mel Sembler and his wife Betty to design and weave a tapestry From Italowie to Chambers Gorge, for the Sembler Bank in Florida. She is particularly interested in exploring the relationship of textiles practice to gender, place and community, and recently completed three major projects in collaboration with other artists and designers that involved consultation with Indigenous Australian communities. In 2001 she worked with six other artists to create the major installation Weaving the Murray for the Centenary of Federation of Australia. Drawing upon community consultation the work explored the importance of the Murray River as Australia’s major watercourse (currently in crisis) and its symbolic role connecting the settler and Indigenous communities living along its banks. September 17, 2009

In the almost 30 years since Richard Hell et al at CBGB’s in New York and Johnny Rotten & Co. at the Worlds End in London snagged the public’s eye and ear and kicked the corpse of hippy dreaming, the world has witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the internet and the cell phone, the rise and fall of the global economy and the stabilization to permanence of punk as (anti) fashion statement, marketable music genre, and secessionist life-style choice. That same period has also seen the rise and fall of dance club culture and the invasion of the international art-fashion-media scape by Japanese anime and Takashi Murakami. This talk uses Murakami’s work as a lens to look at how ideas about and attitudes towards youth and youth culture, consumerism, appropriation tactics, the power of perversion, the value of negation, the politics of insubordination, sex and love have changed in the three decades since “Subculture” was first published in 1979. Dick Hebdige has written extensively on contemporary art, media and culture and has published 3 books: “Subculture: The Meaning of Style” (1979), “Cut ‘n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music” (1987) and “Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things” (1988). He taught through the 90’s at CalArts before moving first to UC Santa Barbara then last July to UC Riverside where his title is Director of Arts and Interdisciplinary programs at UC Riverside’s Palm Desert Graduate Center. His current interests include writing for performance, writing across media and the emergent interdisciplinary field of Desert Studies. April 30, 2009

Barbara McCloskey is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Pittsburgh. She is author of George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 and Artists of World War II. Professor McCloskey has also published catalogue essays, journal articles, and anthology contributions on the subject of art and politics in German 19th and 20th century culture. She is currently preparing a book-length study of German artists and intellectuals in American exile during the World War II era. March 26, 2009.

Kathryn Maxwell’s print and mixed media works have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. and abroad, including solo exhibitions at the Glasgow Print Studio, Glasgow, Scotland; Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland; University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and Northern Arizona University Museum, Flagstaff. She has participated in group exhibitions at the International Print Center, New York; Melanee Cooper Gallery, Chicago; Detroit Institute of Arts; Tucson Museum of Art; Indianapolis Art Center; Marshall Arts Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona; and American Cultural Center, New Delhi, India. Her work is in numerous public and corporate collections, including Alabama Power Company; Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium; Denver Art Museum; Harvard University Art Museum; UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Los Angeles; Michigan Bell; and Phoenix Arts Commission. Kathryn Maxwell was born in Southern Illinois. She received an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a B.A. from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Ms. Maxwell is currently Professor of Printmaking at Arizona State University, Tempe.

A strategic provocateur, Daniel J. Martinez deploys the full range of available media in his practice, having used at various times text, image, sculpture, video, and performance to construct his uniquely tough-minded brand of aesthetic inquiry. Using forms of strategic engagement and illusion, Martinez employs mutation and schizophrenia as a form of confusion directed toward the precondition of the coexistence of politics as radical beauty. Ongoing themes in the work are contamination, history, nomadic power, cultural resistance, dissentience and systems of symbolic exchange. Martinez is currently exhibiting work in the Orange County Museum of Art, Disorderly Conduct, and El Museo Del Barrio. His latest piece, Divine Violence, was recently installed in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. And he was awarded the United States Artists fellowship in 2008. He is a Professor of Theory, Practice, and Mediation of Contemporary Art at the University of California Irvine, where he teaches in the Graduate Studies Program and New Genres Department. An ongoing project is the building of a doomsday machine, a transporter and a time machine to change the past in order to affect the future. February 12, 2009

Mary Jane Jacob is Professor and Executive Director of Exhibitions at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. One of the most nonconformist U.S. curators of the last 20 years, Jacob has critically engaged the discourse around art in public spaces with such innovative exhibitions as Places with a Past, Charleston (1991), Culture in Action, Chicago (1993), Conversation in the Castle, Atlanta (1996) and Evoking History, Charleston (2001-present). Away from large-scale sculptures on public plazas, Jacob supports a form of art in public space that explicitly deals with the history and the current realties of the locations in which she works. With the book Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, she has furthered her research into the nature of artmaking today and the forthcoming anthology, Slow: Experience into Art, will deal with the art experience and its relation to pedagogy. Jacob's lecture will draw upon her own practice as a curator; creating spaces and situations for art to be made and experienced in cities and communities, as well as in galleries. Importantly, she will ground her remarks in the work of artists who cross cultures, some following the Buddha, others reaching points of wisdom along other paths, and all of which move beyond national or ethnic identity to speak on universal terms. It will include the work of Marina Abramovic, Ann Hamilton, Alfredo Jaar, Kimsooja, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Bill Viola. January 22, 2009

In each of his graphically styled paintings, Michael Ray Charles investigates racial stereotypes drawn from a history of American advertising, product packaging, billboards, radio jingles, and television commercials. Through notions of beauty, ugliness, nostalgia, and violence, his work reminds us that we cannot divorce ourselves from a past that has led us to where we are, who we have become, and how we are portrayed. November 20, 2008

In each of his graphically styled paintings, Michael Ray Charles investigates racial stereotypes drawn from a history of American advertising, product packaging, billboards, radio jingles, and television commercials. Through notions of beauty, ugliness, nostalgia, and violence, his work reminds us that we cannot divorce ourselves from a past that has led us to where we are, who we have become, and how we are portrayed. November 20, 2008

"Jenny Schmid: The Vistas of Gender Utopia," was an exhibition at the University of Arizona Museum of Art marking this exciting emerging printmaker’s first comprehensive solo museum presentation and monograph publication. Schmid’s “Gender Utopia” project explores notions of gender and liberty through images that fuse Old Master print precedents with a hip contemporary sensibility. Critical yet humorous, Schmid’s work is luxuriantly colored, exquisitely wrought, and iconographically rich. Her prints quote from Europe’s Medieval and Renaissance print precedents, the medium’s traditions of social satire and arch political caricature (including Breugel, Hogarth, Goya and Daumier), contemporary journalism and sociology, feminist scholarship, graphic novels and various strains of popular culture – visual, musical and literary. Densely packed with symbols and language, the work traces the distant past to the immediate present with a wry humor that carries the sharp poke of contemporary critique. Sept. 2008.

Natalie Ascencios received her BA and BFA at the New School for Social Research at Eugene Lang College and Parsons School of Design NY/Paris. Works first appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Review of Books, Rolling Stone, Time, as well as other publications. Ms. Ascencios' paintings can also be seen in the various competitive annuals of the Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, Communication Arts and the Print Annuals. The Society of Illustrators has awarded her one gold medal and two silver medals. She also received first place in puppetry in the Henson design competition. Interviews with the artist appear in the Pro-Illustration Vol. II, 1999 January/February Print magazine and in the January 1999 Communication Arts. She has taught drawing and painting at the School of Visual Arts at the graduate and undergraduate schools and has given talks on painting at Parsons School of Design, Maryland School of Art and various other institutions throughout the country. Ms. Ascencios has lived in New York for fourteen years and currently keeps a studio in Brooklyn.

Polly Johnson is a graphic design educator at the Ringling College of Art + Design in Sarasota, Florida. There her teaching is focused around three dimensional problem solving, typography, visual thinking and design process. Examples of her three dimensional student work can be found at the http://www.flatcities.blogspot.com. http://www.boxredux.blogspot.com. Recently, she is building a body of work { in the shadows } exploring the inscription of written words onto three dimensional clay surfaces. Each piece is episodic and represents a part of ongoing drama. The whimsical stories are seemingly childlike, but upon closer investigation, one discovers hidden texts.These can be seen at http://www.pollyjohnson.net

Kit Hinrichs Pentagram partner, expert in corporate communications, and avid collector. url: http://www.pentagram.com/ Kit Hinrichs has been a partner of Pentagram Design since 1986 when his West Coast branch of the bicoastal association Jonson, Pedersen, Hinrichs & Shakery became Pentagram’s San Francisco office. His work, such as the 22 annual reports he has designed for the paper company Potlatch and his design of @Issue: The Journal of Business and Design (that he co-founded) is characterized by its narrative quality and an encyclopedic set of references. His instincts as a visual storyteller and a collector inform his work and his 3,000-piece-strong collection of American flags and American flag memorabilia has formed the basis of several exhibitions and two books. This podcast is his April 20, 2006, lecture for the 30th Annual Visual Communications Exhibition.

Philip Zimmermann has been making artists’ books under the imprint Spaceheater Editions since 1979 and making books since 1974. He now teaches at the University of Arizona but taught for 24 years at Purchase College, State University of New York. His work may be found in The Joan Flasch Artist Book Archive at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Special Collection at Yale University, The Fogg Museum at Harvard. The Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum and shown and collected by many other institutions and libraries. He is the author of Options for Color Separation, High Tension, Nature Abhors and Shelter, among many other books. He has been the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, a Lila Auchincloss Foundation Fellowship and a Mid-Atlantic Individual Artist Fellowship through the NEA.

Dan’s a swashbuckler, a double edged sword, a nationally recognized designer and successful business entrepreneur. You can say he has mastered the balancing act of one foot in the artist world and one in the business realm. He constantly updates himself on the latest trends and fads and then designs the complete opposite just to defy the logic of trends. Currently, his designs for the Mikasa line of Volleyballs in 1990 are still best sellers. His swordsmanship has extended into his copywriting skills and developments of new business identity systems that leave clients wanting more from his vast buried treasure of concepts. Such clients as Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut, Sunburst Shutters, Wolfgang Puck, and Arnold Palmer have obliged themselves to set sail with this modern day swashbuckler.

Eleanor Heartney, a New York City based cultural critic, is the author of several books about the American contemporary art world, including, most recently, Defending Complexity: Art, Politics, and the New World Order (Hard Press Editions 2005). Her numerous and diverse essays have appeared in several anthologies, artist catalogues, and international art periodicals. She has been a lecturer, panelist, and visiting critic at top institutions. Her talk "Art for the 21st Century" provided a survey of contemporary art for the past 25 years and relates it to how we think about art today. April 12, 2007.

The ParkeHarrisons' presentation discusses their background, artwork and recent works. Their photographs, exhibited at the Joseph Gross Gallery Feb. 7 - March 31, 2007, further the thematic explorations of their previous works, depicting a landscape that is neither interior nor exterior, but is somehow both. The arrival of a female character marks a shift in the photographic narrative, as does the addition of shocking color, which at times insists upon a singular item and at times is more equitable in its attention. The effect is at once magnetic and revolting, for, though butterflies are vivified, their blood is too. On this fictitious yet veracious Earth, this work seems to indicate, beauty can look the same as pain. Feb. 22, 2007 .

Frank Gohlke is a primary figure in American photography. His work has been exhibited in museums around the world and is included in the permanent collections of, among others, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Allan deSouza's photography, scultpure, and installation and performance work have been exhibited extensively in museums an dgalleries around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Pompidou Centre (Paris), Mori Museum (Tokyo), and Bamako Encounters (Mali). His wirting has appeared in various art publications. He is on the faculty of the MFA program at Vermont College. On Thursday, October 26, 2006, he showed slides of his work and provided explanations as part of the College of Fine Arts' Visiting Artists and Scholars Lectures, 2006-2007.

Kathleen Nicholson is a Professor of Art History at the University of Oregon, Eugene. Her primary field of scholarship is 18th century art. She has a Getty Research Institute Scholar, has received NEH fellowships, and was the invited speaker for the Mellon Foundation Summer Fellowship Program for graduate students in Art History held at UCLA. Her book, Turner's Classical Landscapes, was published by Princeton University Press.

Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist who creates sculpture, drawings, performances and video animations that explore themes of time, loss, private and social rituals. Her artwork embraces conceptual strategies and handwork using everyday materials -- table linen, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread, glass, and wire.

Franco Mondini-Ruiz (born 1961) is an American artist who lives and works in New York, New York and San Antonio, Texas. He is of Mexican and Italian descent. According to art critic Roberta Smith, his work "questions notions of preciousness and art-market exclusivity while delivering a fizzy visual pleasure". Mondini-Ruiz takes a variety of approaches to creating art, working in installation, performance, painting, sculpture, and short stories. [from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco_Mondini-Ruiz]

Moira Geoffrion is a member of the UA sculpture faculty. Her work responds directly to the primal nature of the landscape and the varied responses of its populations to life within the desert's particularly stringent demands. Geoffrion, whose work has been exhibited internationally and throughout the United States, has public art works in Indiana and Arizona, with recent commissions for Tucson and the Town of Oro Valley. Sculptor Fred Borcherdt, a longtime Tucson resident, creates monumental sculptures in stone, steel and wood that reflect the human tendency to mark our presence on the land. He has been influenced by Native American artifacts and the land formations of the Catalina Mountains where he lives. The majority of his work is meant to be placed outside in the landscape in order to demonstrate visual kinship as well as to subject it to the forces of time. Christopher LaVoie earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture at the UA. The 25-year-old LaVoie was featured recently in his first solo show at Tucson's Dinnerware Gallery. La Voie's work relates to culture and landscape.

Tom Hapgood is at the University of Arkansas Art Department, where he teaches Web Design, Animation and Typography (see Courses) and is involved in research involving SecondLife, semacode and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) with the Walton College of Business and the College of Engineering. Tom’s interests are typography, motion graphics, information design, ubiquitous computing (qr codes), father depiction in mass media, Radio Frequency Identification, and installation art. Lately, he’s also been involved in production, design consulting and strategizing with Monster.com and U.S. News & World Report with HarperCollins publisher and authors Jeremy Hyman and Lynn Jacobs. He is a consultant for Applied Minds out of Glendale, CA and launched the site and packaging for The Buffalo Flows and Bridge to War Eagle documentary films. He is also writes for the design blog at Design.org

Ellen Lupton is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. An author of numerous books and articles on design, she is a public-minded critic, frequent lecturer, and AIGA Gold Medalist. Sept. 2006.