Visiting Artists

The student experience in the Interdisciplinary Arts Department is enriched by our Visiting Artist program that provides a number of opportunities for interaction with internationally renowned practitioners. We are committed to critical discourse on contemporary art practice through an array of activities: visiting artists provide critiques, deliver public lectures, conduct seminars, and present technical skills and conceptual strategies through hands-on workshops. Our roster of visitors includes John Boesche, Arnold Dreyblatt, Keith Hennessey, Alison Knowles, Margot Lovejoy, Mary Lucier, Christina McPhee, Julia Meltzer & David Thorne, Bill Viola and Paul Wong.   

Fall 2009 Schedule
Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss
Public Lecture: November, 11, 7PM: 1000 S. Wabash Room 150
Studio Visits: November 12, 10am–4pm
Contact Melissa Potter (mpotter@colum.edu) to schedule a studio visit
Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss is an architect and founder of Normal Architecture Office and founding member of School of Missing Studies. His books: Almost Architecture explore architecture vis-à-vis emerging democratic processes and Lost Highway Expedition Photobook witness to rapid urbanization of Europe’s South East. His work on the preserving public space from Socialist era is best known through designs and activism for Handball Stadium in the city of Novi Sad. He was recently selected by Herzog & de Meuron architects and artist Ai Weiwei as one of 100 architects to design a villa in Ordos, Inner Mongolia. Srdjan is an Assistant Professor at Tyler School of Art_Architecture at Temple University and lectures at Harvard and Penn. He is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths College, University of London. For more about Srdjan, visit www.thenao.net

Spring 2009 Schedule
Julia Meltzer & David Thorne
Public Lecture: March, 13, 7PM: 1000 S. Wabash Room 150
Workshop: March 14, 10am–4pm & March 15, 9am–12pm
Julie Meltzer and David Thorne will talk about their process of research, interviewing, footage gathering, writing, and the development of an unconventional documentary structure, as well as the use of a composed sound track and our process of developing a language to talk about the image/sound relationship with composer, Chris Kubick. Julia Meltzer and David Thorne produce videos, photographs, and installations. From 1999 to 2003, their projects centered on secrecy, history, and memory. Current works focus on the ways in which visions of the future are imagined, claimed, and realized or relinquished, specifically in relation to faith and global politics. Recent projects have been exhibited at the Walraff-Richartz Museum (Köln), Argos Center for Art and Media (Brussels), the Wexner Center (Columbus, Ohio), the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the 2006 California Biennial, Akbank Sanat Gallery (Istanbul), Apex Art (New York), and as part of the Hayward Gallery's (London) travelling exhibition program. Video work has been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Video Festival, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival, among many others.

Christina McPhee
Public Lecture: Friday, April 17, 7pm: 1000 S, Wabash Room 150
Workshop, March 18 & 19: 10am–4pm
Visiting artist Christina McPhee will offer a workshop with Columbia students. Christina McPhee works with data land-scapes and assemblage, interpreting large scale technological installations, often in remote areas. She creates topologic site assemblages in layered baroque suites involving onsite photographs, video, drawing, and interactive new media. Her films have most recently screened at San Francisco Cinematheque at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and in Drift/In Transitions, Russia 2008 at the National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow and Ekaterinaberg, Russia. Exhibitions in 2008-9 include War as a Way of Life at the 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica; Bucharest Biennial 3: Being There: Mapping the Contemporary in Bucharest and The Map: Navigating the Present, Bildmuseet, Umea (Sweden), Bad Moon Rising at Boots Contemporary, Saint Louis, 2009; and twice upon a time, at Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna, 2008-9. A new collaborative graphic project Pharmakon Library premiered in October 2008 with Silverman Gallery at the New York Art Book Fair. Upcoming screenings include an invitational for Videoformes, Clermont-Ferrand, France, in March 2009; and a solo show at Silverman Gallery, San Francisco in the autumn of 2009.

Paul Wong
Public Lecture: May 6, 7pm: 1000 S. Wabash Room 150
Workshop: May 7, 12–3pm. May 8: Studio visits by appointment.
Master papermaker and Artistic Director of Dieu Donne Papermill, NYC will join the Center for an artist talk, pulp painting demonstration, and studio visits.

Fall 2008
Keith Hennessey
Keith Hennessy is an award-winning performer, choreographer, teacher and organizer. He was born in Canada, lives in San Francisco and tours internationally. His interdisciplinary research engages improvisation, spectacle, ritual and public action as tools for investigating and revisioning political realities.  Hennessy directs Circo Zero, a contemporary circus, in intimate spectacles for stage and street. He was a member of the collaborative performance companies: Contraband (85-94), CORE (95-98), and Cahin-caha, cirque bâtard (98-02). His work is featured in several books and documentaries, including How To Make Dances in an Epidemic (David Gere, Univ of Wisconsin: 2004), Gay Ideas (Richard Mohr, Beacon: 1992), and Dancers in Exile (RAPT Productions, 2000). Hennessy is a co-founder of 848 Community Space/CounterPULSE a thriving performance and culture space in San Francisco.  Recent awards include a Goldie (2007) and the Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship in Dance (2005). Keith’s 2005-08 teaching includes University of San Francisco, New College of California, JFK University, UC Davis, dance and improvisation festivals in Budapest, Seattle, Stolzenhagen (Germany), Zipfest/Orvieto (Italy), Moab, Vienna/imPulsTanz, Moscow/TSEH, the Aerial Dance Festival (Boulder), and grass-roots workshops in Arcata, Chicago, Toronto, Victoria BC, Madison, and Earthdance (Northampton MA). http://www.circozero.org

Alison Knowles
Alison Knowles is a genuinely interdisciplinary artist.  One of the original members of the Fluxus group in the 1960s, she was a founder of Something Else Press (with her husband Dick Higgins), the source of numerous iconic publications connected to Fluxus.  Her works have encompassed performances, sound, conceptual art, sculptural work incorporating found objects, pieces made from handmade paper, printmaking, and artists’ books.  Her work is collected internationally, and she has an active career as a practicing artist and as a guest lecturer and teacher.  In 2008 alone, she has done residencies in New York; Minneapolis; Durham, NY; London; Cologne; Cardiff, Wales; and Genova, Italy.  After her visit to Columbia College, she will be performing in Berne and Zurich, Switzerland, and have an exhibition of her series “Rake’s Progress” in Berlin.

Academic Year 2007 / 2008
Arnold Dreyblatt
Arnold Dreyblatt is a Media Artist, and Composer.  He studied Compostion and Ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University at Buffalo, New York.  He now lives in Berlin, Germany, and he was voted to lifetime membership in the Akademie der Kunste (Academy of Art) Visual Arts Section, Berlin in 2007.  He has exhibited extensively internationally and won many honors, including 1st Prize International Public Art Competition, Art Institute, Braunschweig in 2007. http://www.dreyblatt.net

Academic Year 2006 / 2007
Margot Lovejoy
Margot Lovejoy is Professor of Visual Arts at the State University of New York at Purchase and author of Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age (Routledge 2004). Amongst many other honors, she is recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Arts International Grant in India. Her web and installation work has been shown internationally and is in the collection of, among others, the Whitney Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; the Getty Institute; and the Neuberger Museum. Her website TURNS was featured on the Whitney Museum?s 2002 Biennial and was included in the inaugural exhibition of the Institute for Contemporary Art, Taiwan and Banquet at ZKM In Karlsruhe, Germany and the Media Lab, Madrid, Spain. She has published several visual bookworks: "Labyrinth"; "The Book of Plagues"; "paradoxic mutations"; and "manifestations?. She is at present under contract, (with other editors C. Paul and V. Vesna) with Minnesota Press for a new book to be published in 2007-- CONTEXT PROVIDERS: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts. http://www.margotlovejoy.com

Academic Year 2004 / 2005
Bill Viola
Bill Viola (b.1951) is considered a pioneer in the medium of video art and is internationally recognized as one of today's leading artists. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. For over 35 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast. Viola's video installations, total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound, employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. They are shown in museums and galleries worldwide and are found in many distinguished collections. His single channel videotapes have been widely broadcast and presented cinematically, while his writings have been extensively published, and translated for international readers. Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences, birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness, and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. Using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide audience, allowing viewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way. http://www.billviola.com

John Boesche
John Boesche (scenery and projections) is a former instructor of holography, laser sculpture and laser imaging at the School for the Art Institue of Chicago. His designs for theater include scenery and projections for Tannhauser at Austin Lyric Opera, live video projections for the world premiere of John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer, projected scenery for the Lyric Opera of Chicago productions of Tannhauser and The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, and projections for the world premiere of Dominic Argento's Valentino at Washington Opera. He designed projections for Emily Mann's Greenboro at the McCarter Theater, Henry IV directed by Joanne Akalitis at the New York Shakespeare Festival, On the Open Road, directed by Robert Falk at the Goodman Theater, Slaughterhouse Five adapted and directed by Eric Simonsen at Steppenwolf Theatre, and Libra, adapted and directed by John Malkovich, at Steppenwolf Theatre, and the 50th anniversary production of The Glass Menagerie at Broadway's Roundabout Theatre.

Mary Lucier
Exploring light and landscape as agents of visual perception and memory, Mary Lucier examines 19th-century art historical and literary traditions through the lens of technology. In elegant "pictorial-narrative" works, she investigates the American pastoral myth in "an ironic dialogue between past and present, mundane and poetic, real and ideal." Lucier's metaphoric use of light evokes transcendence and the sublime.

DEPARTMENTAL CONTACT INFORMATION
Department Chair: Michelle Citron
Graduate Contact: Kris Johnson
Office Information: 916 S. Wabash Ave. Suite 203
Phone: 312-369-7669
Email: kjohnson@colum.edu