To limit the spread of COVID-19, some events may be held remotely. If you have questions about a specific event, please contact the event organizer or see the event description in the UO Calendar.
There is always something happening in the College of Design. Join us for art exhibits, guest lectures, conferences, research symposia, and more. Most events are free and open to the public. You can join our email list to receive our Upcoming Events weekly announcement and stay in the know about the latest happenings.
9:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.
noon
Instructor Simone Ciglia will give a talk on: The exhibitionary complex: Harald Szeemann, for example. A conversation with Pietro Rigolo.
Zoom link: https://uoregon.zoom.us/j/98493048580
4:00 p.m.
University of Oregon Winter 2022 Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research
Lectures will also live stream on the UO IS Media Services YouTube.
In 1967 the radical feminist and writer Valerie Solanas sold copies of her newly authored SCUM Manifesto on the streets of New York’s Greenwich Village, charging $1 ($2 if the buyer was a man). It opens with an incisive description of her project: “[. . .] SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men), which will eliminate through sabotage all aspects of society not relevant to women (everything), bring about a complete female take-over, eliminate the male sex and begin to create a swinging, groovy, out-of-sight female world.”
This lecture will follow the trajectory of Justine Kurland’s photography ending with her new collage work, SCUMB Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books). These object-based, tactile continue themes explored in her earliest body of work, Girl Pictures (1997–2002), and again in Mama Babies (2004–07). Seeking and picturing freedom, imagining a matriarchal paradise is at the core of much of Kurland’s work. It is located here in the artistic act itself: the nature of collage—heterogeneous, pulled apart, shape shifting, disrupted, cyborg, fantasy—has long made it a feminist strategy in life and in art.
Justine Kurland, known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and their fringe communities, has spent the better part of the last twenty years on the road. In her recent work, Kurland cuts and collages the pages of photography books in her personal library authored by canonized white men. These tactile objects are a continuation of Kurland’s ongoing project of creating space for women. Kurland (born in Warsaw, New York, 1969) received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA from Yale University. Her work is in the public collections of institutions including the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and International Center of Photography, among others.
5:00–6:00 p.m.
New artwork by Jack Buechler.
9:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.
New artwork by Jack Buechler.
4:00 p.m.
University of Oregon Winter 2022 Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research
Lectures will also live stream on the UO IS Media Services YouTube.
Lezley Saar will be talking about the different series that she’s done and the various themes that deal with notions of race, gender, sanity, literature, heritage, escapism, and marginalization. These series include: Anomalies, Mulatto Nation, Autist’s Fables, Madwoman in the Attic, Monad, Gender Renaissance, A Conjuring of Conjurors, and Black Garden. She will delve into her decision-making process for her next theme/exhibition, which takes forever, as well as all the research. She will touch on her materials and the role they play in illuminating the subjects of her portraits. She will also mention a bit about her past, what she finds interesting today, and her hopes for the future.
Lezley Saar is a mixed media artist currently living in Los Angeles. While majoring in communications at San Francisco State University, she worked at KPFA radio in Berkeley as part of a collective; The Souls of Black Folk. There she started illustrating for her writer friends. In the 80s, she began making altered books. Her works now include paintings, drawings, altered books, banners, collages, dioramas, and installations. Saar’s various recent series; Anomalies, Mulatto Nation, Tooth Hut, Autist’s Fables, Madwoman in the Attic, Monad, Gender Renaissance, A Conjuring of Conjurors, and Black Garden deal with notions of race, gender, beauty, normalcy, escapism and sanity. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and is in museum collections such as The Kemper Museum, CAAM, MOCA Los Angeles, LACMA, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Ackland Art Museum, The Crocker Art Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston,The Schnitzer Museum, Oregon, and The Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
Co-sponsored by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and the Department of Art.
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
"Elite Uighurs as Cultural Middlemen of Buddhist Books and Woodcuts in the Mongol Empire"
Presenter: Shih-shan Susan Huang, Associate Professor, Rice University, Department of Transnational Asian Studies.
Elite Uighurs active in China under Mongol rule in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries played major roles as cultural middlemen in Buddhist book culture. This talk examines selected individuals as sponsors, users, and transmitters of Buddhist books over long distances. It draws on Buddhist woodcuts excavated in Turfan, and epigraphic sources found in southeast and northwest China. Taken together with the Mongol postal system, the elite Uighurs’ vast network extending from China to the Uighur homeland in Central Asia, and to Buddhist countries in South and Southeast Asia can all shed light on how Buddhist books and woodcuts were circulated.
Zoom link: TBA
5:30–7:00 p.m.
Gena Wirth, RLA, is design principal at SCAPE who works with cities, community advocates, and landowners to reveal the ecological and cultural potential of public landscapes. As design principal, Gena translates research into practice and leads the design of complex urban landscapes including public and private waterfronts, regional trail systems, parks, plazas, and resilience plans. Her portfolio includes the Hudson Highlands Fjord Trail, a master plan for a seven-mile linear waterfront park that connects Hudson Valley communities to the river, and the recently constructed Midtown Center Plaza, a forested public commons in the heart of Washington, DC.
The Fuller Lecture is an event of the Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes, an internationally recognized center for research-based design and design as research, focused on the role of place in cultural sustainability, and grounded in the arts and humanities.
View and handle works by Black artists from the Design Library's Artists' Books collection. This is a free drop-in event open to all. (Image credit: Kara Walker)
11:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
View and handle works by Black artists from the Design Library's Artists' Books collection. This is a free drop-in event open to all. (Image credit: Kara Walker)
5:30 p.m.
Michael Schreffler is an associate professor at Notre Dame specilaizing in 16th–17th Century Spain and Latin America. He is also the associate dean for the Artscult and will give a lecture on the images of the Virgin Mary (polychromed wooden statues) in 17c Spanish America.
Zoom link: TBA
11:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m.
Explore and handle unique artists' books made with plant dyes in this one-time pop-up exhibit. Organized in celebration of this year's Common Reading selection, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Limited copies of Braiding Sweetgrass will be available for attendees. This is a free drop-in event open to all.
4:00 p.m.
University of Oregon Winter 2022 Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research
Lectures will also live stream on the UO IS Media Services YouTube.
Vanishing Points is a long-term photography project that focuses on significant sites of Indigenous American presence, including sacred landforms, earthworks, documented archaeological sites and contested battlegrounds. The sites Sherwin chooses to visit and photograph are literal and metaphorical vanishing points. They are places in the landscape where two lines, or cultures, converge. While visiting these sites, Sherwin reflects on the monuments our modern culture will presumably leave behind and what the archaeological evidence of our civilization will reveal about our time on Earth. A major monograph on the Vanishing Points project was published in July 2021 by Germany-based publisher, Kehrer Verlag, one of the leading publishers of fine art photography in the world.
Michael Sherwin is a multimedia artist exploring scientific, cultural, and historical interpretations of the natural world. He has won numerous grants and awards for his work and has exhibited widely, including recent exhibitions at the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, Morris Museum of Art, Huntington Museum of Art, and the Center for Fine Art Photography among others. Reviews and features of his work have been published on numerous outlets, including The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Lenscratch and on National Public Radio. He has also lectured extensively about his work at universities and conferences across the nation. Sherwin earned an MFA from the University of Oregon in 2004, and a BFA from The Ohio State University in 1999. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Art in the School of Art and Design at West Virginia University.
This lecture is made possible by the LaVerne Krause Lectures and Exhibitions Endowment.
noon
Emily Scott, Environmental Studies and History of Art and Architecture; 2021-22 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.
“This chapter of my monograph, Uneven Geology: Notes from the Field of Contemporary Art, examines art about air pollution, including the asymmetrical nature of its production, distribution, and effects. More broadly, the book—at the intersection of contemporary art history, critical geography, environmental humanities, and Anthropocene studies—explores art and design practices that track environmental violence as it is writ into land, air, and water. It asks how aesthetic practices help make largely invisible processes more sensible and legible, even while they simultaneously underscore the uneven, contingent, and mutable nature of material evidence itself.”
5:30 p.m.
Sun-Young Park is an Associate Professor at George Mason University.
She is a cultural and architectural historian who specializes in nineteenth-century France. Her research focuses on the ways in which architectural history, urban history, and the history of medicine intersect.
The lecture will be framed around her current research and book about 19th-century disability and design.
Zoom link: TBA