Through this presentation, I will explore the unique challenges and opportunities of creative and pedagogical practices located and developed in public, and facilitated through shared authorship and production. Bio: Andres L. Hernandez is a Chicago-based artist, designer and educator who re-imagines the environments we inhabit. Through collaborative, community-based work with youth and adults, and independent, studio-based practice, he explores the potential of spaces for public dialogue,...

Artist Wendy Red Star works across disciplines to explore the intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, both historically and in contemporary society. Raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Red Star’s work is informed both by her cultural heritage and her engagement with many forms of creative expression, including photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts, and performance. An avid researcher of archives and historical narratives, Red Star seeks...

Center for Creative Photography, Room 108, University of Arizona Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz’s para-SITE project (pictured above) is an ongoing series of custom-built inflatable shelters designed for homeless people that attach to the exterior outtake vents of a building’s Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system. The warm air leaving the building simultaneously inflates and heats the double membrane structure. The shelters were built and distributed to homeless...

Hasan Elahi’s work questions issues of privacy, information, and its distribution while attempting to blur the distinctions between society and technology. This conjunction of physical and virtual, parallels the artist’s interest in the intersection of geopolitical conditions and individual circumstances resulting in translations and mistranslations between voyeurism & exhibitionism, spectator & target, surveillance & protection, and ultimately, the nation & the individual....

Alejandro Cartagena’s work traverses the struggle we face following the ideals of a capitalistic system while striving for fairer cities in which to live. The different aspects of his project, Suburbia Mexicana: Fragmented Cities propose alternate narratives, which depict a global issue from a local perspective. The project sheds light on the implemented neo-liberal economic strategies made by the Mexican Government since 2001 that have pushed growth out of the regulation of the metropolitan...

Torkwase Dyson distills and deconstructs natural and built environments to consider how individuals negotiate and negate various types of systems and systemic order. Dyson’s lecture investigates various ways abstraction, as a multi-direction action, can distance us from lived experiences, but also bring us closer our own humanity. Interested in the plurality of abstraction as a political presence that prioritized subjectivity, she explores the spatial strategy of enslaved people who hid or...

Painters have long considered the wily relationship between natural and human-made forms in the landscape as a reflection of broader cultural values. The built environment is the result of an accumulation of materials, forms and histories, as is the surface of a painting. My investigations have taken me on site-visits throughout the United States and as far as China to see how the places we live in and the things we use effect local topographies. These visits result in paintings, drawings and...

This talk explores the idea of a Post-Palestinian perspective through a selection of Alsharif’s works centered around questions about how we can move forward when civilization begins to fail us. Presented as an autobiographical lecture that contextualizes her practice and includes a selection of works, we move from the specificity of the Israeli-Palestine to exploring the human condition in it’s subjective relationship to political landscapes. Bio: Basma Alsharif is an Artist/Filmmaker born...

Artists have long created objects, images, and experiences as positive interventions that encourage others to engage meaningfully with the world. In response to the global water crisis, some artists have recently taken the lead in a world-wide effort to produce affordable ceramic water filters created from local materials to provide a means for rendering disease-contaminated water potable. In this talk, I will address the global water crisis as a human-rights call to action and offer...

Since the 1960s, scholars in Art History and American Studies have made significant strides in opening their disciplinary borders to new interpretative methods and human demographics. Today art historians champion creative works by people around the world. American Studies, despite its founding nationalism as a field, now embraces postcolonial critiques of U.S. and white exceptionalism. Yet, for most scholars in both of these fields, one border remains more or less intact and inviolable: the...

This lecture is grounded in the premise that the zenith of authoritarian cultural production is the monument. Found worldwide, these public nuisances function as concrete reinforcements of sameness, the inherent good of the status quo, and the centralization of power. This lecture asks if monumentality could be reconfigured in a manner that would lend the form to more democratic tendencies that reinforce difference and distributed power. Bio: Steven Kurtz is a professor of art at the State...

What is the architecture of worship? It manifests as a house of prayer, a mausoleum, a secret niche inside a home, a white ghost bike on a desolate Bushwick street. The power of the shrine is its ability to interrupt time and create stillness. The act of shrine building is an ancient human compulsion, an obsessive tradition from which my work takes its inspiration. Afruz Amighi will discuss her choice of forms, medium, light and shadow, which are governed by the desire to recreate this...

Bio: Dinh Q. Lê Artist and Co-founder & Chairman of the Board of San Art Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam www.san-art.org Dinh Q. Lê was born in Ha-Tien, Vietnam. He received his BA in Art studio at UC Santa Barbara and his MFA in Photography and Related Media at The School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 1994, Lê returned to Vietnam and in 1997 Lê settled down in Ho Chi Minh City. Lê’s artistic practice consistently challenges how our memories are recalled with context in contemporary...

The politics of immigration and trade policy on the U.S.-Mexico border are as complex as they are compelling. Artists have been drawn to the physical site of the frontera, the human rights concerns it presents, and the overarching question of the ethics of globalization. Beginning in 1986, performance artists used the border region to interrogate well-established ideas of site-specificity and, in conjunction with the developments of the early 1990s, altered the definition of "site" to...

Srimoyee Mitra’s talk will address Border Cultures, a curatorial experiment and an exhibition-in-progress at the Art Gallery of Winsor, whose objective is to examine the complex and shifting notions of national boundaries through contemporary art practice. Conceptualized in three parts – Part One (homes, land), 2013, Part Two (work, labour), 2014, and Part Three (security, surveillance), 2015 – the exhibition is a platform to engage in a dialogue between critical art practices, ideas and...

Lowriding, a contemporary yet Indigenous practice, serves as the ideal metaphor to understand what Miner does as a contemporary Indigenous artist. Lowriding is both an ontology and epistemology. It is an aesthetic and a practice. As participants in lowrider culture understand, the process of lowriding engages traditional migration patterns, yet employs late-capitalist machinery to traverse colonized landscapes. While our ancestors moved slowly from one place to another, establishing deep...

Ricardo Dominguez will tell tales about how the group that he co-founded, the Electronic Disturbance Theater, developed two artivist projects that confounded the performative matrix of the Mexico/U.S.border as social architecture.

Commemorative practices of all sorts are flourishing today. Over the past few decades, thousands of newly dedicated memorials to the subjects of slavery, terrorism, war, religious persecution, natural disasters, and disease, among others, have materialized in various national landscapes. Collectively, they represent a larger commemorative project that art historian Erika Doss calls memorial mania: a pervasive preoccupation with issues of memory and history accompanied by urgent desires to...

Marcos Ramírez ERRE was born in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico in 1961. He received a law degree from the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California and immigrated to the United States where he worked for seventeen years in the construction industry as a carpenter. In 1989 he became active in the field of visual arts; since then he has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout the world. His work has been featured in numerous venues including InSite94, InSite97, the 2000 Whitney...

This lecture will examine Oax-i-fornia as a model for visual production in cross-cultural contexts, showing how the confluence of craft, art, and design—when engaged through a collaborative process of “making” between culturally diverse individuals—can not only serve as a powerful generative force for innovation, but more importantly, can also create deep and meaningful connections not commonly associated with brief encounters where verbal communication is not easy or even possible. In fact,...

Xaviera Simmons will discuss her practice which includes projects in photography, performance, sculpture, installation, video and sound. Simmons will speak overall on her studio practice which she describes as cyclical rather than linear, in that Simmons spends part of the year producing photographs, another part paying strict attention to performance and yet another part of the year focused on installation/sculptural works. Simmons will highlight her 2013-2014 projects which include...

Since the early 1990s, I have used the arena of my day to day life to develop and test prototypes for living structures and situations. By using myself as a guinea pig I often use my own experiences to try to construct an understanding of the world at large. The experiments have at times been extreme – such as wearing a uniform for months on end, exploring limitations of living space, living without measured time. However one of the most important goals of this work is to illuminate how we...

Wafaa Bilal uses diverse mediums including installation, photography, performance, “re-skinned” video games and even tattoos to provoke and challenge audiences. Now an Assistant Professor of Art at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Bilal grew up in Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s repressive regime and came to the U.S. in 1992 after almost two years in refugee camps. Incisive and chilling, and at the same time playful and full of mourning, Bilal’s dynamic, participatory art blends...

Beatriz Colomina is Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. She is the author of Domesticity at War (2007), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994) and Sexuality and Space (1992) and the curator of the exhibition Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X, which opened in New York in 2006 and has traveled to ten cities around the world. Recently she curated the...