Ostrow Lecture Series - Lectures

Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California in 1969 and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. She graduated from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. She is known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures that have appeared in numerous exhibitions worldwide. Her major survey show, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, premiered at the The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN in February 2007 before traveling to ARC/Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth. Other recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland (2011); CAC Málaga, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain and MDD–Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium (both 2008). She participated in the 52nd Venice International Biennale in 2007 and was the United States representative to the 25th International São Paulo Biennial in Brazil in 2002. Walker is the recipient of many awards including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award in 1997, the Deutsche Bank Prize in 2000, and United States Artists Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship in 2008. Her work is included in numerous museums and public collections including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; the Centro Nazionale per le Arti Contemporanee, Rome; and Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt. She lives and works in New York City. Walker is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

The Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitor in the Visual Arts Series brings Joseph Leo Koerner to the Reed campus. Koerner is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard and is best known for his work on German art.

The Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitor in the Visual Arts Series brought Patricia Fortini Brown to the college to present a lecture on the creation of Venetian identity through art and architecture.

Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1949, Terry Winters had his first solo-exhibition in New York, in 1982, at the Sonnabend Gallery; subsequently, he was included in the Whitney Biennials of 1985, 1987 and 1995. Additionally, he held a one-man show at the Tate Gallery in London; his work has been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art as well as with many international museums and galleries. Winters' master prints are held in the collections of major American and European museums including: The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA. Terry Winters attended the High School of Art & Design in New York and continued formal art training at the Pratt Institute, receiving a BFA in 1971. His early paintings are influenced by minimalist, monochromatic paintings, like those of Brice Marden. Winters has a love of drawing which led him to introduce schematic references to astronomical, biological and architectural structures as the subject matter of his paintings. He began exhibiting his work in 1977, and by the early 1980's his ideas had developed into loose grids of organic shapes beside lushly painted fields. Bill Goldston invited Winters to print at the Universal Limited Art Editions studio in 1982. Winters' work at ULAE has become increasingly complex, combining elements of drawing with painting. The artist lives and works in New York and Geneva, Switzerland.

David Rosand, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University, specializes in Renaissance visual culture. Noted for his important work on Venetian artists like Titian, Rosand has also made significant contributions to the phenomenological understanding of specific artistic media, including drawing and impasto-style painting. His Ostrow lecture, focused on drawing, addresses a basic tenet in the long tradition of Western aesthetics: the distinction between fantasia and mimesis. Rosand's books include Titian and the Venetian Woodcut (1976), The Meaning of the Mark: Leonardo and Titian (1988), and Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation (2002). Building on Rosand's lecture is an exhibition at the Cooley Art Gallery of Old Master drawings from the Crocker Gallery in Sacramento, California.

Barbara Maria Stafford is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus, at the University of Chicago. On Monday, October 1 2007, Professor Stafford presented her most recent research and observations on cognitive image histories in a series of talks including: a public lecture entitled "The Remaining 10%: The Role of Sensory Understanding in the Age of the Self-Organizing Brain" for the Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitors Program in the Visual Arts; two workshops, one on "Attention" and the other on "The significance of tight-figure formats;" and finally, a classroom teaching session (Art 426 Sites of Visual Modernity in China, the "senior seminar" in art history). Stafford is at the forefront of a growing movement that calls for the humanities to confront the brain's material realities.