The University of Houston School of Art is proud to announce its fall 2021 visiting speaker series featuring practitioners and thinkers at the forefront of contemporary art, criticism and design. Distinguished guests offer a diverse range of perspectives on the most pertinent issues facing today’s makers and scholars. The series is a key component of students’ experience at the School of Art. In addition to presenting their work to a large audience of students and community members, speakers spend extended periods engaging directly with students in small gatherings for focused debate and conversation, in formats tailored to their individual practice. Past enagements have included hands-on workshops, master classes, studio visits, demonstrations, and interactive performances. Recent guests include Derrick Adams, Charlene Villaseñor Black, Aruna D’Souza, Beverly Fishman, Coco Fusco, Nicholas Galanin, Jeffrey Gibson, Lisa E. Harris, Rob Hopkins, Miwa Matreyek, De Nichols, David Rokeby, RaMell Ross, Richard The, and Margaret Wertheim.
This fall we return to an online format, welcoming audiences from across the globe. All lectures are free and open to the public and will be broadcast via Zoom and YouTube Live. Check our website for connection information. An archive of past lectures is on our YouTube channel.
John Yau has been publishing reviews and essays on art and literature since 1978. He currently writes for the online magazine, Hyperallergic Weekend, which he co-founded in 2012. Yau has published monographs on Thomas Nozkowski, Catherine Murphy, Philip Taaffe, and Jasper Johns. Currently, he is working on a monograph on Liu Xiaodong, which will also be the subject of his lecture.
Dr. Julia Guernsey is the D.J. Sibley Family Centennial Faculty Fellow in Prehistoric Art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and publications focus on the Middle and Late Preclassic periods (1000 BC to 250 AD) in ancient Mesoamerica. Her most recent book, Human Figuration and Fragmentation in Preclassic Mesoamerica: From Figurines to Sculpture (Cambridge University Press, 2021), examines the relationships between human figuration, fragmentation, bodily divisibility, personhood, and community in ancient Mesoamerica. Her previous books include Sculpture and Social Dynamics in Preclassic Mesoamerica (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Ritual and Power in Stone: The Performance of Rulership in Mesoamerican Izapan Style Art (University of Texas Press, 2006), and her co-edited volumes include The Place of Stone Monuments: Context, Use, and Meaning in Mesoamerica’s Preclassic Transition (Dumbarton Oaks, 2010), Sacred Bundles: Ritual Acts of Wrapping and Binding in Mesoamerica (Boundary End, 2006) with a third, Early Mesoamerican Cities: Urbanism and Urbanization in the Formative Period (Cambridge University Press) due out at the end of 2021. Guernsey also continues to participate with ongoing analysis of materials from archaeological excavations at the site of La Blanca, Guatemala.
Candice Lin is an artist whose practice utilizes installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. Her solo exhibition, Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping, is currently on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Other recent solo exhibitions include the Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (2021); Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2020); ICA, NYU Shanghai (2020); Pitzer Galleries, Claremont, CA (2020); and the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Art Center, Canada (2019). Lin has been included in recent group exhibitions including the 2021 Prospect Biennial, 2021 Gwangju Biennial, the 2019 Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale, 2018 Taipei Biennale, the 2018 Athens Biennale, and Made in L.A, 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. She is the recipient of several residencies, grants and fellowships, including the American Academy in Berlin Fellowship (2021), the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019), The Artists Project Award (2018), Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2017), the Davidoff Art Residency (2018) and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2009). She received her BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics from Brown University, in 2001, and MFA in New Genres from San Francisco Art Institute, in 2004; and she is currently Assistant Professor of Art at UCLA and lives and works in Los Angeles.
At the UH School of Art, we celebrate the centrality of art and design as drivers of culture and recognize their importance to the vitality of a civil society. We train artists, designers, and art historians who will inform, engage and move us toward a better understanding of each other and the communities we inhabit. We do this by making a commitment to connect the creativity of art to the practice of global citizenship, equipping our students with strategies for making and tools for living that value diverse human expression, ethics and social engagement.
