Adam McEwen was born in London in 1965 and lives and works in New York. He received his BA from Christ Church, Oxford in 1987 and graduated from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA in 1991. Recent exhibitions have taken place at: Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2017); de la Cruz Collection, Miami; MoMA PS1, New York (both 2016); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museo Civico Diocesano di Santa Maria dei Servi, Città della Pieve, Italy; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (all 2015); Winter Palace and 21er Haus, Vienna, Austria (2014); and the Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas (2012).
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Thursday, February 22, 5:00pmat KRESGE HALL,
ROOM 1319,
1880 CAMPUS DRIVE,
EVANSTON, IL, 60202,
Sky Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation. He was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent several years in Southern California, and Portland, Oregon and is currently based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His work centers around personal positions of homeland and landscape, designs of language and facets of culture contained within, and the play between the accessibility of the known and the unknowable. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
His work has played at various festivals and exhibitions including ImagineNATIVE, Images Festival, Courtisane, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, AFI, Sundance, Antimatter, Chicago Underground Film Festival, FLEXfest, Projections, Out of Sight Seattle, the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial and the 2017 Whitney Biennial. He was awarded jury prizes at the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, 3rd Prize at the 2015 Media City Film Festival, and the New Cinema Award at the 2017 Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Thursday, January 18, 5:00pmat HARRIS HALL
ROOM 108
1881 SHERIDAN RD
EVANSTON, IL, 60208
Abraham Cruzvillegas (b. 1968) is one of the most important conceptual artists of his generation to come out of the vibrant art and architecture scene in Mexico. Over the past 15 years, Cruzvillegas has developed a riveting body of architectural constructions that investigates what he calls autoconstrucción, or “self-construction,” a platform for architectural work informed by the sociopolitical contexts of Latin America and inspired by improvised building materials and techniques.
In conjunction with the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial Cruzvillegas will speak about a new series of work, The Water Trilogy, which comprises a set of exhibitions in Paris, Tokyo and Rotterdam. The constructions within The Water Trilogy focuses on water in urban contexts, including specific issues of pollution and water shortage.
Presented in partnership with the Northwestern McCormick School of Engineering and the Northwestern Block Museum of Art
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, October 25, 6:00pmat BLOCK MUSEUM OF ART
40 ARTS CIRCLE DR
EVANSTON, IL, 60202
Fred Moten is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where he teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and literary theory. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2009); B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010); The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), which was a poetry finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the California Book Award for poetry; The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016), A Poetics of the Undercommons (Sputnik and Fizzle, 2016) and a three volume collection of essays whose general title is consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press, 2017, 2018). Moten is also co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2013) and, with Wu Tsang, of Who touched me? (If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution, 2016). Moten has served on the editorial boards of Callaloo, Discourse, American Quarterly and Social Text; as a member of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine; on the board of directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York; and on the advisory board of Issues in Critical Investigation, Vanderbilt University. Moten has been the Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, the Sherry Memorial Visiting Poet at the University of Chicago and a Visiting Artist at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. In 2016 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Stephen E. Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry by the African American Literature and Culture Society.
This event is presented in partnership with the Black Arts Initiative, the Critical Theory Cluster, the Department of African American Studies, and the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Collective Fund for Critical Race Studies.
The Visiting Artist lecture series is supported by the Myers Foundations and The Jerrold Loebl Fund for the Arts.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, November 8, 5:00pmat HARRIS HALL, ROOM 108
1881 SHERIDAN RD
EVANSTON, IL, 60202
Visiting Artist Talk: Adrián Villar Rojas
"The Argentinean artist Adrián Villar Rojas offers his audience a mash-up of the adolescent iconographies that have fascinated him since he was a teenager: that of sci-fi, with its robots and spaceships; that of the postapocalyptic, derived from graphic novels and video games; and that of the prehistoric, with its dinosaurs and primitive tools." -Jens Hoffman, Artforum, 2016
Known for his unique mixture of clay and concrete sculptures that crumble and decay over time, Adrián Villar Rojas's installations draw on the history of Minimalist sculpture and Modernist architecture, creating works that refer back to classical antiquity as well as forward towards a future archaeology. In his 2012 installation for dOCUMENTA (13), Return the World, held in both Kassel, Germany and Kabul, Afghanistan, Villar Rojas created a filmic narrative of post-apocalyptic survival in a public garden. In his 2013 installation for MoMA PS1, La inocencia de los animales ("The Innocence of Animals"), he built a large, amphitheater-like riser indoors as well as several smaller works that appear to be invading the space. The cracked and crumbling surface is reminiscent of Roman ruins and late 20th century earthworks.
Villar Rojas has been exhibiting worldwide for a number of years, including shows at the Venice Biennial (2011) and the Istanbul Biennial (2015). His project for the Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum in New York opens on April 14 2017.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Monday, April 3, 6:00pmat BLOCK MUSEUM
40 ARTS CIRCLE DR
EVANSTON, IL, 60208
