Mount Royal School of Art (Multidisciplinary MFA)

Fall 2022 Mount Royal Visiting Artists & Curators

 MAREN HENSON

 

 

Tuesday August 27, 2022, 4:00 pm, Lazarus Auditorium

 

 

 

 

As the concealed artifacts behind historical conspiracies become public information, Maren Henson reexamines the role of conspiracy and how it has shaped American culture. These videos, drawings, and sound installations examine how cultural narratives are manipulated and controlled. She received her Master of Fine Art degree in the Mount Royal School of Multidisciplinary Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2017. Maren is a Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize Finalist, where she was awarded a residency at the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower. She has exhibited work in New York, Boston, LA, Puerto Rico, Maryland, and Texas. Maren currently lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.

 

 

JAMES WILLIAMS II

 

 

Tuesday October 11, 2022, 4:00 pm, Lazarus Auditorium

 

 

 

James Williams II is a curator and interdisciplinary artist whose work encompasses painting, sculpture, and photography. His works center on topics of social and cultural identity in the United States tied together by self-portraiture and narration. His most recent project was curating the show, Future Planets at Longwood Center for the Visual Arts. An exhibition featuring the creativity of young artists ranging from ages 3 to 15 years old alongside their creative and established parents.  Williams is the recipient of the MFA Joan Mitchell Foundation award, the Bromo Seltzer Fellowship, the Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize Winner, and served as artist-in-residence at School 33 in Baltimore, Maryland. Williams, originally from Upstate New York, received his master’s degree from the Mount Royal School of Art program at Maryland Institute College Art (MICA). He currently teaches at MICA.

 

MARIA ELENA GONZALEZ

 

 

Tuesday November 1, 2022, 4:00 pm, Lazarus Auditorium

 

 

 

Maria Elena González was born in 1957 in Havana, two years before the Cuban Revolution. At age 11, she moved to Miami with her family. She has received two degrees in sculpture: a BFA in 1979 from Florida International University in Miami and an MA in 1983 from San Francisco State University, where she was exposed primarily to Minimalist and Conceptual art. In 1984, she moved to New York and began working in interior painting and restoration while building her artistic practice. Early in her career, her work focused on the idea of memory through formal means, as in Untitled (1990), a diptych-like work on paper in which one side is a ghostly inversion of the other. She later began using architectural principles and methods in her sculptures and installations that explore the nature of memory. In 1999, she created the site-specific outdoor sculpture Magic Carpet/Home, commissioned by the Public Art Fund and installed in Coffey Park in Red Hook, Brooklyn (and later in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles). Made of wood, recycled rubber tires, and parking-lot line paint, the work replicated the floor plan of a six-room unit in Red Hook East, a public-housing project originally designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Incorporating outlines, akin to blueprints, for a kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms, and closets on playground surfacing material, the piece itself appears to undulate, as if flying through the air, in an evocative combination of the material and fantasy elements of childhood with the economic reality of the work’s surroundings. González later explored connections between architecture and memory in more personal ways. In her 2002 installation at the Bronx Museum of Art, New York, Mnemonic Architecture, she reproduced, at life-size, the floor plan of her childhood home from a 32-year-old memory; the result was abstracted and disproportionate. In Internal DupliCity (2006), her architectural re-creations took the form of scale models, based on forms that include Renaissance villas, agrarian sheds, and Roman burial vaults. Installed on white pedestals, the models were largely obscured by an outer shell of frosted Plexiglas, conjuring visual associations of Catholic reliquaries (the predominant pre revolutionary religion of Cuba) and children’s dollhouses, conveying a sense of inaccessibility and loss. Subsequent projects incorporate the viewer as an essential element in completing the work. For You & Me (2010), beams and platforms installed across the landscape of Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, invite participants to stand in designated spaces in the work, making them appear to others to be located on or within other works of art in the larger sculpture park.González’s first solo exhibition was at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York (1991). She has had solo exhibitions at galleries and institutions including El Museo del Barrio, New York (1996–97); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2002); Bronx Museum of Art (2002); Art in General, New York (2002–03); Contemporary Museum, Honolulu (2006); and Galerie Gisèle Linder, Basel (2005, 2009). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions, including Greater New York, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), New York (2000); Sonsbeek, Arnhem, Netherlands (2001); and The Shapes of Space, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007). She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2006. She lives and works in Brooklyn and Basel.

 

 

ERIC DYER

 

 

Tuesday November 8, 2022, 4:00 pm, Lazarus Auditorium

 

 

 

Eric Dyer is internationally recognized as a leading practitioner in the avant-garde of animation art. He has been honored as a Fulbright Fellow, Sundance New Frontier Artist, Creative Capital Artist, and Guggenheim Fellow; while his films have won numerous awards, including Best Animated Film and Best Experimental Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Jury’s Choice, Jury’s Citation, and Director’s Choice awards at the Black Maria Film and Video Festival. Dyer has been a visiting artist at world-class institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, USA), East China Normal University (Shanghai, China), and California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles, USA). His films and interactive animated sculptures have been widely exhibited at prestigious international events and venues such as the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art, Ars Electronica (Austria), Tabakalera (Spain), ARoS Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), the screens of Times Square (New York City), and at the Cairo and Venice Biennales. The importance of Dyer’s work has also been recognized in leading academic books in the discipline of Animation Studies, including: Re- imagining Animation: the Changing Face of the Moving Image (Bloomsbury); Pervasive Animation (Routledge); Animation: A World History (Routledge); The Crafty Animator: Handmade, Craft-based Animation and Cultural Value (Palgrave); Art Journal (CAA publications); and A New History of Animation (Thames and Hudson). Dyer’s talk on TED.com, The Forgotten Art of the Zoetrope [go.ted.com/ericdyer] communicated his art practice to the general public and has been viewed over 1.1 million times. He is represented by the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City.

 

 

 

ADDITIONAL VISITING ARTISTS, CURATORS, AND CRITICS

 

CARMEL BUCKLEY

Born in Derby, England, Carmel Buckley, Full Professor, Department of Art, The Ohio State University, received a Bachelor of Arts in Sculpture from Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic (United Kingdom) in 1978. She continued her studies at the Escuela de Bellas Artes of Madrid University from 1979-80 and, with a Mexican Government Scholarship, at the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico City from 1983-84. In 1988 she earned a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the School of Visual Arts, New York as a Fulbright Fellow. She has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Art Sculpture Award and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Award.

In 1994 she had a solo exhibition at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. Recent solo exhibitions include The Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio (2009), Clay Street Press, Cincinnati (2011), and The Center For Recent Drawing, London, England (2012); two-person show at Clay Street Press, Cincinnati, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, England (2016-17); public art projects “Cloud’s Gold” & “Inhuman Colors,” Camp Washington, Cincinnati, OH, 2020. Group shows include Gallery North, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, England (2005); Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati (2006); E:vent Gallery, London, England (2009); Sculpture Key West, Key West, Florida (2011); “Women to Watch” at the Riffe Center, Columbus (2018); Columbus Museum of Art, (2018); Anytime Dept., Cincinnati (2019).

 

 

BASEERA KHAN

Baseera Khan is a New York-based performance, sculpture, and installation artist who makes work to discuss materials and their economies, the effects of this relationship to labor, family structures, religion, and spiritual well being. Khan is currently working on a public art commission on The High Line for fall 2023. Khan mounted their first museum solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York (2021-22), and opened their first solo touring exhibition in Houston, Texas at Moody Arts Center for the Arts, Rice University (2022-2023). Khan has representation at Simone Subal Gallery, New York where they mounted their first solo exhibition called Snake Skin (2019). They have exhibited in numerous locations such as Wexner Center for the Arts (2021), New Orleans Museum of Art (2020), Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, Munich, Germany, Jenkins Johnson Projects, Brooklyn, NY (2019), Sculpture Center, NY (2018), , Aspen Museum (2017), Participant Inc. (2017). Khan's performance work has premiered at several locations including Brooklyn Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Art POP Montreal International Music Festival. Khan completed a 6 week performance residency at The Kitchen NYC (2020) and was an artist in residence at Pioneer Works (2018-19), Abrons Art Center (2016-17), was an International Travel Fellow to Jerusalem/Ramallah through Apexart (2015), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014). Khan is a recipient of the UOZO Art Prize (2020), BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019), was granted by both NYSCA/NYFA and Art Matters (2018). Their works are part of several public permanent collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, MN, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA. Khan's work is published in 4Columns, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, and TDR Drama Review. Khan is an adjunct professor of sculpture, performance, and critical theory, and received an M.F.A. from Cornell University (2012) and a B.F.A. from the University of North Texas (2005).

VISITNG CURATORS & CRITICS:

YU YEON KIM 

Yu Yeon Kim is an independent curator of numerous international exhibitions including One Breath: Infinite Vision, Ink Studio Beijing (2019); New Conjunctions & Intersections, UN (2015) ; Idyllic Synthesis, Seoul Metropolitan Museum (2013); Mediation Biennale, Poland (2008); DMZ, Paju Book City, Korea (2000-6); Liverpool Biennial (2004) ; Translated Acts, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico, Queens Museum of Art, New York, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2001-3); Gwangju Biennale (2000) ; Mexico Cinco Continentes y Una Ciudad Biennale (1998) ; Johannesburg Biennale, S.Africa (1997).

 

IAN BOURLAND

Ian Bourland is a cultural critic and historian of global contemporary art, with an emphasis on problems of colonialism, postcolonialism, and empire. As an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program and contributor to a range of international publications, Bourland’s scholarship investigates an array of cultural strategies, including photography, film, music, and new media.

Such research is reflected in courses that survey global modernism, contemporary art, and photographic history, as well as thematic seminars on the Black Atlantic, exile and diaspora, critical theory, and a summer intensive program in South Africa that Ian cofounded in 2014. Currently, Bourland is a contributing editor of frieze, where he writes about art and pop culture. Before joining the College at Georgetown, Bourland taught at the University of Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Illinois, and was on faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art.