Welch Visiting Artist and Scholar Series 2025–26

Announcing the 2025–26 Welch Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series at Georgia State University. This year-long calendar of art lectures provides GSU students with intellectual access to a diverse group of acclaimed artists, art historians, curators, and scholars. Our guests conduct on-campus talks about their art, research, and careers, adding to the pedagogical discourse of contemporary art in the classroom and studio. All VAS events are free and open to the public, an important educational program for the regional art scene. 

Past visiting artists have included Nicole Eisenman, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Carmen Winant, Kevin Jerome Everson Amanda Ross-Ho, Paul Sepuya, Sonya Clark, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, Mark Dion, CASSILS, Charlotte Cotton, Ghada Amer, Leigh Ledare, Elle Perez, A.K. Burns, Barbara Takenaga, Eileen Quinlan, Jose Villalobos, Chris Wiley, Dianna Cohen, Steffani Jemison, Ryan McLaughlin, Nnenna Okore, The Propeller Group, Jaap Blonk, Math Bass, Art Werger, Bibiana Obler, and Steve Locke, among others. For a full list of recent visitors and more information, visit our VAS page.

This year’s series has been sponsored in part by the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, BURNAWAY, the Ernest G. Welch Foundation, and the College of the Arts Brad Ferrer Artist Talk Series.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Wednesday, November 19, 5:30pm

In her methodically layered compositions, Njideka Akunyili Crosby combines painted depictions of people, places, and subjects from her life with photographic transfers derived from her personal image archive as well as Nigerian magazines and other mass media sources. The resulting works are visual tapestries that vivify the personal and social dimensions of contemporary life while evocatively expressing the intricacies of African diasporic identity. Njideka Akunyili Crosby was a participant in La Biennale di Venezia, 58th International Art Exhibition, a MacArthur Fellowship (2017) and is held in significant museum collections throughout the world. She currently resides in Los Angeles. 

Nikita Gale
Tuesday, December 2, 5:30pm

Nikita Gale is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. The artist holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and an MFA in New Genres from UCLA. Gale's work explores the relationships between material, power, and attention and examines the ways in which silence, noise, and visibility function as political positions and conditions. 

David Altmejd
Monday, January 26, 5:30pm

David Altmejd’s work is a unique and heady mix of science and magic, science fiction and gothic romanticism: a post-apocalyptic vision which is at the same time essentially optimistic, containing as it always does the potential for regeneration, evolution and invention. Altmejd studied at the University of Québec in Montréal and graduated with an MFA from Columbia University, New York in 2001. His numerous international exhibitions include a major survey exhibition ‘Flux’, which travelled from Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris to MUDAM in Luxembourg and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (2014–15). He was born in Montreal, and currently lives in Los Angeles.

Julia Bryan-Wilson
Wednesday, February 18, 5:30pm

Dr. Julia Bryan-Wilson is Professor of Art History and LGBTQ+ Studies at Columbia University.  She is also Curator-at-Large at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, where she most recently co-curated the exhibition Queer Histories.  She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009); Fray: Art and Textile Politics (2016); and Louise Nevelson's Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (2023).  She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim, the Frank Jewett Mather Award, the Robert Motherwell Book Prize, and the ASAP Book Award. 

Dave McKenzie
Tuesday, March 31, 5:30pm
College of the Arts Brad Ferrer Visiting Artist Talk Series

In videos, sculptures, performances, and installations, Dave McKenzie explores how public space and the private self are simultaneously alienated, connected, and restricted.  At the heart of this diverse practice lies a quest for interactions that lay bare the complications of social rules and obligations with which we navigate personal relationships. McKenzie’s recent solo exhibitions include AEIOU, at Galerie Barbara Wien; An Intermission, University Art Museum, State University of New York, Albany; And sometimes y, Vielmetter Los Angeles; and Dave McKenzie, Aspen Art Museum. McKenzie was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and currently works in New York. 

About the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design
With accredited MFA, MAT, BFA, and BA programs in ten disciplines, the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design fosters excellence through experimentation, cross-disciplinary pursuits, and critical analyses of existing ideas about art, pedagogy, and art history. As a member of the College of the Arts at Georgia State University, the school offers an affordable and transformative education to one of the nation’s most diverse student populations.

Our MFA and MAT application season is now through February 1, 2026. Visit our website for more information and to apply. If you are interested in a tour and getting to know the program, don't miss our MFA Open Studio Party on November 14!