Welch Visiting Artist and Scholar Series 2017–18

The Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design at Georgia State University is pleased to announce the Welch Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series for the 2017/18 academic year. The program provides access to a diverse mix of renowned artists and scholars, encouraging artistic discourse, lead workshops, and engage in studio critiques. The lectures spark fresh perspectives and insight for a greater understanding of contemporary art. 

Marlene McCarty
September 14
McCarty has worked across various media since the 1980s, was a member of the AIDS activist collective, Gran Fury, and co-founder of the trans-disciplinary design studio, Bureau, with Donald Moffett. Using materials such as graphite, ballpoint pen, and highlighter, McCarty probes issues ranging from sexual and social formation to parricide, infanticide, and transbiology.

Daniel Shea
September 25
Shea is a New York artist and previous resident artist at Light Work, Syracuse, and Columbia College Chicago. His work encompasses books, photographs, installation, and sculpture. His practice explores architecture, socioeconomic history, urbanism and mythology. He will publish a new book in the Fall of 2017 to coincide with a launch at the New York Art Book Fair and a solo show in London. 

Julian Hoeber
September 27
Hoeber’s work explores the structural and biomorphic, mathematical, and intuitive. His recent project, “Going Nowhere,” is centered on the design of a massive, imaginary architectural structure and has evolved into cribbing ideas from playground design, utopian modernism, and psychotherapy. He creates structures that operate as an architectural metaphor with the the radical potential of introspection.

Collective: mild climate
October 3
mild climate is an artist-run space and curatorial collective that aims to support experimentation, facilitate a dialogue between local and international emerging artists, and cultivates a contemporary art scene in Nashville, TN. The project began as a series of pop-up exhibitions in the unfinished Packing Plant building; now the mild climate gallery space hold regular exhibtions and off-site projects. 

Oli Rodriguez
January 16
Rodriguez works interdisciplinarily with a focus on spaces of geographic solidarity, queering, and (re)inserting POC into the art historical canon. He addresses concepts of queerness: notions of passing, visualizing the performativity of gender, explorations in appropriation, performative interactions with the public as collaborator. He is a faculty member at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and part of the monograph, Confronting the Abject. 

Paul Mpagi Sepuya
February 8
Sepuya lives in Los Angeles, where he makes photographs, books, and installations rooted in portraiture, homoerotic visual culture, and the function of the studio. He has participated in Artist-in-Residence programs at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Fire Island Artist Residency. He is a recipient of the 2017 Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s grant for emerging Los Angeles artists. 

Robin Vande Zande  
February 20 & 21
Robin Vande Zande has taught art in elementary, middle, high school, and higher education at Kent State University. Her research area is design education for K-12 students, with publications on teaching sustainable design and urban planning, design education and brain-based principles, design education as community outreach, the design process of problem-solving, and teaching aesthetics through everyday objects. 

Janet Biggs
March 21
Biggs is known for her work in video, photography, and performance, including images of individuals in extreme landscapes or situations. She has captured speeding motorcycles on the Bonneville Salt Flats, Olympic synchronized swimmers, kayaks performing a synchronized ballet in Arctic waters, sulfur miners inside an active volcano, and a camel caravan crossing the Taklamakan desert of Western China. 

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
April 16–17
Lehrer-Graiwer is an art writer, curator, and educator. She is the author of Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece and editor of “Pep Talk,” a publication series begun in 2009, which has focused past monographic issues on artists and writers. Graiwer runs a non-commercial, LA-focused, alternative art space in an apartment building in Los Angeles, The Finley Gallery.