Mills 2015-2016 lecture series

We got a fantastic group of artists coming this year to Mills College Art Lecture Series:

Bonnie Sherk  

September 23rd, 2015

Danforth Lecture Hall, 7:00 p.m.

Sherk is an American landscape architect, planner, educator, artist and founder of “The Farm” and “A Living Library.” Her work examines the interrelationship of plants, animals, and humans with the goal of creating sustainable systems for social transformation. Her Sitting Still series, 1970, is featured in Public Works: Artists’ Interventions 1970s—Now at the Mills College Art Museum. For more information visit mcam.mills.edu. Supported by the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation

Public Works Performance & Panel  
October 4th, 2015

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AND
TECHNOLOGY AS PUBLIC SPACE

Danforth Lecture Hall, 3:00 p.m.

This panel will feature a live Skype performance by Enar de Dios Rodríguez, a special multiple produced by Leah Rosenberg and a panel discussion featuring artists in in the exhibition Public Works: Artists’ Interventions 1970s— Now, including Stephanie Syjuco and Favianna Rodriguez, among others. For more information, visit mcam.mills.edu. Supported by the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation

Nandipha Mntambo
October 7th, 2015

Danforth Lecture Hall, 7:00 p.m.

Born in 1982, Mntambo graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, in 2007. She won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art in 2011, for which she produced the national travelling exhibition Faena. Mntambo has had five solo shows at Stevenson in Cape Town and Johannesburg and two at Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm. In her work, Mntambo makes cascading sculptures that are molded from cowhide and suggest the human figure. These three-dimensional works, along with her photographs, videos, and performances, explore the similarities and differences between humans and animals, men and women, and attraction and repulsion. Sponsored by Herringer Graduate Lecture Series

Mildred Howard
October 14th, 2015

Danforth Lecture Hall, 7:00 p.m.

Born in San Francisco in 1945, Howard is an artist known primarily for her sculptural installation and mixed-media assemblages. Howard began her career as a dancer prior to working in visual art. Howard is represented by Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco and has been shown at galleries in Boston, LA, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Cairo and Venice and at the Oakland Museum, the de Young, SFMOMA, the San Jose Museum of Art and the Museum of the African Diaspora. Howard has been the recipient of two Rockefeller Foundation Awards, the Joan Mitchell Award and an NEA Fellowship in Sculpture. Howard has taught at Stanford and Brown Universities, SFAI and CCA.Sponsored by Herringer Graduate Lecture Series

Artistic Credibility in a Global Context: a conversation with Sarah Thornton and Larry Rinder
October 28th, 2015

Danforth Lecture Hall, 7:00 p.m.

Thornton is a writer and sociologist of culture. She is the author of Seven Days in the Art World (2008), an international best seller, available in 20 languages, and 33 Artists in 3 Acts, which goes behind the scenes with a superb cast of living artists – from global superstars to unheralded teachers – to investigate how artists play their game, maintain self-belief and command credibility. Thornton has been the chief correspondent on contemporary art for The Economist and has written for many other publications. A regular contributor to radio and TV broadcasts, Thornton has a BA in Art History and a PhD in the Sociology of Culture. A longtime resident of London, Thornton has recently moved to San Francisco.

Rinder is director of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA). He has held positions at the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he was chief curator of the 2002 Biennial. He was the founding director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, where he also served as dean. His writing has appeared in nest, Artforum, The Village Voice, Fillip, Atlantica, and Flash Art, among other publications. Sponsored by Corenah Wright Lecture Series/Art Dept.

Christian L. Frock and
Tanya Zimbardo 
November 4th, 2015

Danforth Lecture Hall, 7:00 p.m.

Frock and Zimbardo are the co-curators of Public Works: Artists’ Interventions 1970s—Now at the Mills College Art Museum. Frock is 
an independent writer, curator and educator whose work focuses on art and politics, the role of artists in public life and social justice. Invisible Venue, the alternative curatorial enterprise Frock founded and has directed since 2005, collaborates with artists to present art in public spaces, online and in the built environment. Zimbardo is the assistant curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Among other exhibitions, she co-curated public commissions for the off-site exhibition 2012 SECA Art Award and has organized numerous screenings of film, video and performance-based work at the museum and other venues. For more information visit mcam.mills.edu. Supported by the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation

Jonathan D. Katz
November 11th, 2015
HOW AIDS CHANGED AMERICAN ART

Lisser Hall, 7:00 p.m.

Katz, the 2015 Jane Green Endowment for Studies in Art History and Criticism speaker, is the Director of the Visual Studies Doctoral Program at the University of Buffalo (SUNY). He was the co-curator of the 2010 exhibition, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, and
is co-curating Art AIDS America, which previewed in Los Angeles in June and will be shown in Tacoma, Atlanta and
New York in its entirety starting in October. Sponsored by Jane Green

Yasufumi Nakamori
February 3rd, 2016

FOR A NEW WORLD TO COME: EXPERIMENTS IN
JAPANESE ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY, 1968–1979

Danforth Lecture Hall, 7:00 p.m.

In this lecture Nakamori will shed light on the development of photo conceptualism found in Japan in the 1970s. Nakamori argues that, after the 1960s, when the force of avant-garde art and the tension in politics peaked, many artists devoted themselves to experiments with the camera, individually searching for new and vital directions in their practice, exploring such emerging notions as conceptualism, post-minimalism, and international contemporaneity. He will make a case for the emergence of a shared field of practice between art and photography, and for the critical role that photography played in the emergence and development of contemporary art in the 1970s Japan. Nakamori is an associate curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where he focuses on art and photography made after 1945. He also teaches the history of modern and contemporary Japanese art and architecture at Rice University. He has authored a dozen scholarly essays, and the book titled Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture. Sponsored by Corenah Wright Lecture Series/Art Dept.

Nicholas de Monchaux   
February 17th, 2016

Local Code: 3,659 Reflections on Gordon
Matta-Clark and the Nature of Cities

Danforth Lecture Hall, 7:00 p.m.

De Monchaux is the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), an architectural and urban history of the Apollo Spacesuit. He was also awarded the Eugene Emme award from the American Astronautical Society and shortlisted for the Art Book Prize. His work has been exhibited at the 2010 Biennial of the Americas, the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale and San Francisco’s SFMOMA. De Monchaux received his B.A. with distinction in Architecture from Yale, and his M.Arch. from Princeton. Prior to his independent practice, he worked in the offices of Michael Hopkins & Partners in London, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro in New York. Sponsored by Corenah Wright Lecture Series/Art Dept.

William Lamson  
March 2nd, 2016

Danforth Lecture Hall, 7:00 p.m.

Lamson was born in 1977 in Arlington, Virginia. His video works often find him playfully and strenuously interacting with his environment, both in the natural world and in his studio.
 Lamson’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Progressive Art Collection, among others. His work has been exhibited in the U.S. and internationally, including at P.S. 1 in New York and at Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis. Lamson received his BA from Dartmouth College in 2000 and his MFA from Bard College in 2006. He was a MacDowell Foundation fellow and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. Sponsored by Herringer Graduate Lecture Series

Steve Roden 
 April 20th, 2016

Danforth Lecture Hall, 7:00 p.m.

Roden is an American sound and visual artist who pioneered the lowercase style of music where quiet, usually unheard, sounds are amplified to form complex and rich soundscapes. Roden has been exhibiting his visual and sound works since the mid 1980s and has had numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, including: Mercosur Biennial Porto Alegre Brazil, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, UCLA Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art EMST in Athens, Greece, Singuhr-Horgalerie in Parochial Berlin, Center for Book Arts, New York, The Kitchen, New York, Pomona College Museum of Art, La Casa Encendida Madrid, Susanne Vielmetter LA and Berlin Projects, Studio la Citta Verona Italy and others. In 2010, curator Howard Fox organized the exhibition steve roden / in between: a 20 year survey, which opened at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. Sponsored by Herringer Graduate Lecture Series