SRESHTA RIT PREMNATH
Tuesday February 21, 2023, 4:00 pm, Lazarus Auditorium
Sreshta Rit Premnath (born 1979, Bangalore, India) works across multiple media, investigating systems of representation and reflecting on the process by which images become icons and events become history. He has had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego, MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge, the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, the Contemporary Art Vancouver, KANSAS, New York; Gallery SKE, Bangalore; The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago; Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin; Wave Hill, New York; Art Statements, Art Basel; as well as numerous group exhibitions at venues including The Logan Center, Chicago; Queens Museum, New York; YBCA, San Francisco; Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris; 1A Space, Hong Kong and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York. He is the founder and co-editor of the publication Shifter. Premnath completed his BFA at The Cleveland Institute of Art, his MFA at Bard College, and has attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. He has received grants from Art Matters and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.
JENNIFER WEN MA
Tuesday February 28, 2023, 4:00pm, The Phillips Auditorium
This lecture is part of Conversations with Artists and is organized in partnership with The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.
Jennifer Wen Ma’s interdisciplinary practice bridges installation, drawing, video, public art, design, performance, and theater. The ongoing theme of the artist’s work is the exploration of the human condition with all its contradictions and utopian and dystopian aspirations. Merging elements from Chinese traditional art with minimalist aesthetic, she creates three-dimensional forms and immersive, participatory installations that carry beauty, poignancy, and emotional depth. Since 2008, Ma’s work has increasingly focused on highlighting social tensions, inequalities, and disparities. These projects are often designed to be platforms for research, experimentation, and collaboration, as well as direct engagement with the public.
Ma (b. 1973, Beijing, China) has exhibited worldwide, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, NC; Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; Qatar Museums; Ullens Center For Contemporary Art, and the National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Biennale of Sydney; Singapore Biennale; Cambio Cultural, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; and 5x5 Nonument Park, and The Phillips Collection, Washington DC, among others. Ma’s public art installations include Nature and Man in Rhapsody of Light at the Water Cube, The National Aquatic Center, Beijing; In-Between World—Daydream Nation, Digital Beijing Building, Beijing; and Aeolian Garden, city of Colle di Val d’Elsa, Italy, to name a few. In 2019, Ma was a recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Award and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the exhibition Cry Joy Park—Gardens of Dark and Light. The installation opera Paradise Interrupted that she conceived, visually designed, and directed, won the prestigious international award from Music Theatre Now in 2016. In 2008, she received an Emmy for the US broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, where she was a member of the core creative team and the chief designer for visual and special effects. Ma teaches in the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and lives and works between New York and Beijing.
Ma will be joined in conversation with Vesela Sretenovic, Director of Contemporary Art Initiatives and Academic Affairs, The Phillips Collection.
TOMMY HARTUNG
Tuesday April 18, 2023, 4:30 pm, Lazarus Auditorium
Tommy Hartung (b. 1979, Akron, OH) currently lives and works in New York. Exploring the didactic potential of the moving image, Hartung’s videos analyze the creation and dissemination of cultural narratives through entertainment. Often taking the major themes of modernism as his subject matter, his work has addressed colonial expansion and exploration, evolution, conquest, and innovation. He received his BFA from SUNY Purchase in 2004 and his MFA from Columbia University in 2006. Hartung’s work has been in a major solo exhibition at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, MA and in the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. His work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art , the Hammer Museum, the Rose Art Museum, and the Dimitris Daskalopoulos Art Collection.
RINA BANERJEE
Tuesday May 2, 2023, 4:00 pm, Lazarus Auditorium
This lecture is made possible with the support of the Tour de Force Foundation
Rina Banerjee lives and works in New York City. She was born in Kolkata, India, and lived briefly in Manchester and London before arriving in New York. Drawing on her multinational background and personal history as an immigrant, Banerjee’s work focuses on ethnicity, race, and migration and American Diasporic histories. The artist’s sculptures feature a wide range of globally sourced materials, textiles, colonial/historical and Domestic objects, while her drawings are inspired by Indian miniature and Chinese silk paintings and Aztec drawings. In 2018, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the San José Museum of Art co-organized the artist’s first solo retrospective, Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World. The retrospective’s North American tour includes exhibitions at the Fowler Museum at University of California and Frist Art Museum, with a final showing at Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in 2021. Banerjee has exhibited internationally, spanning 14 biennials including Venice Biennial, Yokohama Triennale, and Kochi Biennial. The artist’s works are included in many private and public collections such as the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, San Jose Museum of Art, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum
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).
VISITING CURATORS & CRITICS:
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.
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).
LARRY OSSEI-MENSAH
Larry Ossei-Mensah uses contemporary art as a vehicle to redefine how we see ourselves and the world around us.
The Ghanaian-American curator and cultural critic has organized exhibitions and programs at commercial and nonprofit
spaces around the globe from New York City to Rome featuring artists such as Firelei Baez, Allison Janae Hamilton,
Brendan Fernades, Ebony G. Patterson, Modou Dieng, Glenn Kaino, Joiri Minaya and Stanley Whitney to name a few.
Moreover, Ossei-Mensah has actively documented cultural happenings featuring the most dynamic visual artists working
today such as Derrick Adams, Mickalene Thomas, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Federico Solmi, and Kehinde Wiley.
A native of The Bronx, Ossei-Mensah is also the co-founder of ARTNOIR, a 501(c)(3) and global collective of culturalists
who design multimodal experiences aimed to engage this generation’s dynamic and diverse creative class. ARTNOIR
endeavors to celebrate the artistry and creativity of Black and Brown artists around the world via virtual and in-person
experiences. Ossei-Mensah is a contributor to the first-ever Ghanaian Pavilion for the 2019 Venice Biennial with an essay
on the work of visual artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
Ossei-Mensah is the former Susanne Feld Hilberry Senior Curator at MOCAD in Detroit. Ossei-Mensah currently serves
as Curator-at-Large at BAM, where he curated the NY Times heralded the exhibition Let Free Ring in January 2021.
Ossei-Mensah has had recent profiles in such publications as the NY Times, Artsy, and Cultured Magazine,
and was recently named to Artnet’s 2020 Innovator List.
KRISTEN HILEMAN
Baltimore-based independent curator Kristen Hileman spent nearly two decades organizing exhibitions and building
collections at museums, first as a curator at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC
and more recently as the Head of the Contemporary Department at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Among her current projects
is a survey of female-identifying artists working in abstraction across the Mid-Atlantic region, which will be presented at
The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington in late 2021 and at the American University Museum in Washington, DC in
early 2022. During spring 2021, Hileman is visiting faculty at UMBC; she has previously taught courses on contemporary
art and theory at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University.
LESLIE COZZI
Dr. Leslie Cozzi (she/her), FAAR’18, is the Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs at the Baltimore Museum of
Art. She co-curated the critically acclaimed survey A Modern Influence: Henri Matisse, Etta cone, and Baltimore and
is organizing solo exhibitions of the works of Darrel Ellis and Omar Ba that will open at the BMA in the fall of 2022.
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Winner in
Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome, where she conducted research on the intersections
between feminism, race, and text in post-war and contemporary Italian art. Previously, she served as the Curatorial
Associate at the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum. In that capacity, she was
responsible for research and daily management of various collections the Museum oversees, including the
Armand Hammer Permanent Collection, the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, and the Grunwald Center’s
extensive collection of works on paper. She helped organize several exhibitions at the Hammer Museum,
including William E. Jones: Imitation of Christ; Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible; Tea and Morphine: Women in
Paris, 1880-1914; Robert Heinecken: Object Matter; Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now;
The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris; and Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space.
and the A. Conger Goodyear Senior Essay Prize. She received her PhD in 2012 from the University of Virginia.
She received a 2010-2011 Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research in Italy for her dissertation,
“Protagonismo e non: Mirella Bentivoglio, Carla Accardi, Carla Lonzi, and the Art of Italian Feminism in the 1960s
and 1970s,” which was awarded the Zora Neale Hurston essay prize by the University of Virginia’s Women and
Gender Studies program. Dr. Cozzi has co-edited and contributed to several exhibition catalogs, including
A Modern Influence: Henri Matisse, Etta cone, and Baltimore; Valerie Maynard: Lost and Found;
Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space; the Menil Collection’s publication of Apparitions: Frottages and
Rubbings from 1860 to Now; and the Pomona College Museum of Art’s exhibition catalog for Pages:
Mirella Bentivoglio, Selected Works, 1966-2012. She has also contributed to scholarly journals, anthologies,
and artforum.com.