Distinguished Speaker Series

Artist Carrie Mae Weems is considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists today. Weems’s work investigates family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences of power.

Lynda Benglis’s work generally exists in an indefinable space between painting and sculpture, and explores metaphorical and biomorphic shapes as well as the materiality of the surface.

Designer Lisa Perry is a style fixture who continually takes her appreciation of the design of the 60s to new heights. She blends her love of vintage fashion with her love of collecting modern art, including works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Yvonne Force Villareal is the co-founder of the Art Production Fund, an organization that commissions ambitious public art projects with the aim of reaching wider audiences and expanding awareness through contemporary art. The fund works to reduce the physical as well as the psychic distance of cultural, class, linguistic, racial, and income barriers that may hinder participation in contemporary art.

Nick Cave is an artist and educator working between the visual and performing arts. In a conversation with Curator Chad Alligood, Cave talks about his lifework, including his Soundsuits in Crystal Bridges’ permanent collection.

Marina Abramović is a pioneer in the world of performance art. Her career has spanned five decades and her work explores the relationship between artist and audience, pushing the limits and boundaries of the physical and mental. In the 2010 MOMA retrospective, The Artist is Present, a team of trained artists re-performed Abramovic’s seminal performances, some of which with her former partner Ulay, while Abramović herself sat at a small table as museum visitors waited to sit across from her. Like so much of her work, the performance was a major feat of endurance: the artist sat stationary every day for three months. Abramović is the founder of the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a platform for immaterial and long-durational work.

Innovative designer, inspiring thought leader, and award-winning architect Thom Mayne explores how architecture connects us with people and landscape. Morphosis Architecture is a collective practice engaged in cross-disciplinary research and design.

Judy Chicago has remained steadfast in her commitment to the power of art as a vehicle for intellectual transformation and social change. As an artist, writer, educator, and humanist, her work and life are models for an enlarged definition of art.

Primarily known as an actor, director, and performer, Cheech Marin has developed what is arguably the finest private collection of Chicano art in the nation. Marin talks about his love of art and the events that sparked his interest in collecting. A third‐generation Mexican American, Marin has received numerous awards for his work on behalf of Latinos, including the 2000 Creative Achievement Award from the Imagen Foundation and the 1999 ALMA Community Service Award from the National Council of La Raza and Kraft Foods.

Bestselling author, food critic, and judge on Bravo’s Top Chef Masters, Ruth Reichl is a well-recognized and beloved culinary voice. The Seattle Times has called her “one of the nation’s most influential figures in the food world.” Most recognized as a writer and editor, Reichl was the Editor-in-Chief of Gourmet Magazine for ten years until its closing. Prior to this role, she was the restaurant critic of The New York Timesand both the restaurant critic and food editor of the Los Angeles Times. The Distinguished Speaker Series is sponsored by Del Monte Foods, Inc.

Artist Faith Ringgold speaks about her career of more than 60 years, with particular focus on Maya’s Quilt, inspired by Maya Angelou and on view in Crystal Bridges’ 1940s to Now Gallery. Ringgold provides an overview of her fascinating career, beginning in the early 1960s with the artist’s first-hand accounts of the Civil Rights Movement and the political imagery in her American People Series. Ringgold’s inspiring, often humorous, and always human stories illustrate her life’s work as an artist, activist, author, teacher, and parent through the evolution of an amazing body of work, including her well-known story quilts.