Throughout her more than two-decade career, artist Sonya Clark has explored the meaning embedded in commonplace objects and materials such as textiles, hair, combs, and currency, to reflect on the complex issues of race, American history, and black cultural production. Her recent work presents challenging questions about nationhood and memorialization through the investigation, reconstruction, and dismantling of flags as symbols. Clark’s 2019 project Monumental Cloth, the Flag We Should Know, explores the symbolic legacy of the Confederate Battle Flag by invoking its lesser-known historical counterpart, the Confederate Flag of Truce. Clark will discuss this work in the context of her larger oeuvre and will be joined in conversation by Janet Dees, the Block’s Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Sonya Clark is Professor of Art at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Previously, she was a Distinguished Research Fellow in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University where from 2006 until 2017 she served as chair for the Craft/ Material Studies Department. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards including a United States Artist Fellowship, a Pollock Krasner award, an 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art, an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a Red Gate Residency in China, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency in Italy, and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, among many others. Her work has been exhibited in over 350 museums and galleries in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Australia.
This discussion is presented in conjunction with the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Dialogue 2019-2020 Memorializing, a year-long conversation about commemorating, contesting, and claiming from humanistic perspectives.
Co-presented by The Block Museum of Art, Department of Art Theory and Practice, and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, February 5, 6pmat BLOCK MUSEUM OF ART
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
40 ARTS CIRCLE DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
February 18, 2020 marks posthumously the 86th birthday of Audre Lorde and the 89th birthday of Toni Morrison (the first since her death in August 2019). M. Carmen Lane and Michael Rakowitz will engage in a public talk on ancestry, place, dispossession, and the steadfastness of survival. Using textual prompts from both Lorde and Morrison, the artists continue a dialogue between each other that began half a decade ago and which has impacted both of their practices—involving grief as both a material and a process that resists disconnection.
M. Carmen Lane is the February 2020 Artist in Residence of the Department of Art Theory and Practice and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. This talk is co-presented by the Block Museum of Art as part of the Kaplan Institute's 2019-2020 Memorializing Dialogue, a year-long public conversation about commemorating, contesting, and claiming from humanistic perspectives.
About the Artists
M. Carmen Lane is a two:spirit African-American and Haudenosaunee (Mohawk/Tuscarora) artist, writer, and facilitator living in Cleveland.
https://mcarmenlane.com/
Michael Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American conceptual artist living and working in Chicago, and Professor in Northwestern's Department of Art Theory and Practice.
http://www.michaelrakowitz.com/
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Tuesday, February 18, 5pmat BLOCK MUSEUM OF ART
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
40 ARTS CIRCLE DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
Jean-Ulrick Désert is a visual-artist born in Haiti. Désert's artworks vary in forms such as public billboards, actions, paintings, site-specific sculptures, video and objects and emerges from a tradition of conceptually engaged practices. Well known for his “Negerhosen2000” performances and his “Burqa Project” as a response to 9-11, his practice may be characterized as visualizing “conspicuous invisibility”. He has exhibited widely at such venues as The Brooklyn Museum, Walker Art Center, Studio Museum of Harlem, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Bueno Yerba in USA and internationally at the Havana, Martinique, Dakar Biennales, and galleries Savvy Contemporary, Kunstverein-Wolfsburg. He was selected as the solo-artist to represent the Haiti Pavilion in the 2019 Venice Biennale and is currently developing a permanent artwork at Humboldt University Berlin to commemorate the American scholar W.E.B. DuBois.
He is the recipient of awards including Berlin’s Art-senate Research Grant, Villa Waldberta-Munich, Kulturstiftung der Länder, Warhol Foundation via Small Axe Journal, LMCC. His work has been featured in academic books, most recently “Queer!? Visual Arts in Europe” 2019, and journals such as “NKA” established by the late Okwui Enwezor as well as lifestyle magazines such as Harpers Bazaar. Désert is an alumnus of The Cooper Union and Columbia University where he studied architecture. He advises for Trans Arts Institute, a MFA program in Berlin. After a number of years in New York and Paris, Désert established his Berlin studio-practice in 2002.
Image courtesy Jean-Ulrick Désert.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Thursday, February 27, 5pmat KRESGE HALL
ROOM 1515
1880 CAMPUS DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
Join the department in showcasing the work of our undergraduate students!
Wednesday, November 13, 5-8 pm, ground floor of Kresge Hall.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, November 13, 5pmat KRESGE HALL (GROUND FLOOR)
Art, Theory, Practice at Northwestern University
1880 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
Amy Sillman (born in 1955 in Detroit, MI) grew up in the Midwest, but has been based in New York City since 1975. Primarily known as a painter, her process is drawing-based, and weaves together many side interests, such as animation and writing. She aims for an approach to painting that is at once materialist and discursive, articulate and curious. Her work has been widely shown and collected at private and public institutions in the US and Europe, including MoMA, The Met, The Whitney, LA MoCA, Portikus in Frankfurt, Lenbachhaus and the Brandhorst Museum in Munich, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and The Tate Modern, London. She has been the recipient of many awards including a Guggenheim in 2001 and a Fellowship at The American Academy in Rome in 2014. Sillman's traveling mid-career survey show "one lump or two," curated by Helen Molesworth, opened at the ICA Boston in 2013. Sillman received a BFA from The School of Visual Art in NYC in 1979, and an MFA from Bard College’s MFA Program in 1995. Sillman currently holds a position as Professor at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt, Germany.
Amy Sillman: The Nervous System will be at The Arts Club of Chicago May 22nd through August 3rd, with an opening reception on May 22nd at 6pm.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Friday, May 17, 12pmat Kresge 1305
1880 Campus Dr
Evanston, IL, 60208
Jonas N.T. Becker is an interdisciplinary artist whose projects span photography, video installation, sculpture, and community engagement. His work explores how beliefs form around specific sites and geographies. Becker is interested in these landscapes as an intersection of personal identity, cultural mythologies, and political power. Recent projects, Mountain is a Mountain and Better or Equal Use, focus on systems of value, monetary and otherwise, to question how intersectional operations of oppression are interwoven with the land. His projects link rural communities with urban centers that are geographically distant but socially and economically implicit. Becker’s work was recently exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and Actual Size Gallery, Los Angeles and published in the New Museum/MIT Press anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility and Walls Turned Sideways which addressed the prison industrial complex. Becker is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was born in Morgantown, WV, and lives in Chicago, IL.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, May 8, 5pmat Kresge 1305
1880 Campus Dr
Evanston, IL, 60208
