Allison Smith
Wednesday, March 18, 6:00 p.m.
Trustees Room, 11th Floor, Tower Building
Allison Smith is a sculptor and installation artist whose body of work often features elements from history, craft, and queer culÂ-ture. A recent project, entitled The Muster, is a large-scale public art project inspired by the aesthetic and performative qualities of American Civil War reenactments. For the work, Smith sent out a «call to arms and art» and organized a gathering of troops from her artistic and queer communities to create art, make public pronouncements, and tackle the question, «What are you fighting for?» In another collaborative project, Smith adopts the social role represented by Victorian-era peddler dolls that held baskets of miniature handmade wares. These «Notion Nanny» dolls were originally created to commemorate the disappearing eighteenth century social custom of itinerant traders who roamed the counÂ-tryside selling their wares. For the project, Smith re-created the peddler doll, but life-size and in her own image, and filled the basÂ-ket with wares she made in collaboration with artisans, tradesmen, and craftspeople around the world. Smith has exhibited her work widely, including venues such as P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York; Palais de Tokyo in Paris; MassMoCA in North Adams; and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Edgar Arceneaux
Thursday, April 9, 6:30 p.m.
Trustees Room, 11th Floor, Tower Building
Edgar Arceneaux searches incongruent sets of data or seemingly unrelated subjects for unexpected patterns and happy coinciÂ-dences, finding beauty in the tangentially related. Through drawÂ-ing, photography, sculpture, and filmmaking he weaves together personal, cultural, and scientific cosmologies. Arceneaux’s early series Drawings of Removal, was an ongoing multi-venue perforÂ-mance project first seen in New York at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2002. Using the gallery as studio he repeatedly drew, erased, redrew, scored, cut up, and reassembled many dozen pencil on paper and velum images to make manifest various processes of memory. Another series from 2004, Borrowed Sun, was a meditation on the astronomer Galileo, musician Sun Ra, and artist Sol LeWitt. Through comparing their respective astronomiÂ-cal/religious, musical/racial, and conceptual/perceptual systems, Arceneaux teased out surprising consonances between them in charcoal drawings, sculptural elements, and film projections. Arceneaux, who lives and works in Los Angeles, was included in both the Whitney Biennial and California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art in 2008. He has also exhibited at the Center of Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv; the 2nd Moscow Biennial; San Francisco MoMA; the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, and elsewhere.
DJ Spooky/Paul D. Miller
Wednesday, April 22, 6:00 p.m.
Pozen Center, North Hall
DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) is a multimedia artist, writer, comÂ-poser and musician. Miller’s work as a media artist has appeared in a wide variety of contexts such as the Whitney Biennial; the Venice Biennial for Architecture; the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany; the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and many other museums and galleries. His work appeared in the Africa Pavilion of the 52 Venice Biennial and the Miami/Art Basel fair of 2007. Miller’s first collection of essays, entitled Rhythm Science came out on MIT Press in 2004, followed by Sound Unbound, an antholÂ-ogy of writings on electronic music and digital media, which was published in 2008. His written work has also appeared in The Village Voice, The Source, Artforum and Raygun. Miller’s interest in reggae and dub has resulted in a series of compi
