Artists, Art Scholars On Tap
The long-running Art Studio Visiting Artist Lecture Series at UC Davis has a bigger lineup than usual along with a new, more public location for the new year. The series, featuring a wide range of artists and art scholars, will be held in the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art that opened in November. All the talks are free and open to the public and start at 4:30 p.m.
The series begins in February with three talks including back-to- back lectures by Adrian Forty, a retired professor of architectural history at University College London, on Feb. 1, and Briony Fer, professor of art history at University College London, on Feb. 2.
Forty is author of Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750, Concrete and Culture: A Material History and Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture. His talk is titled “Was Concrete Modern?”
Fer’s books include Gabriel Orozco: Thinking in Circles, Eva Hesse Studiowork, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism and On Abstract Art. She will give the lecture "The Transactions of Detail: Manet and Still Life.”
Dona Nelson, known for her two-sided paintings, is a professor at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith in 2014 called Nelson “one of the best artists working today." She has had 12 solo exhibitions and was in the 2013 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial. Her work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Boston Museum of Fine Art. Lecture on Feb. 9.
For the second annual Betty Jean and Wayne Thiebaud Endowed Lecture, realist painter Catherine Murphy will be in conversation with curator and critic Karen Wilkin.
Murphy has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and won the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in 2013. Her work is in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and The Museum of Modern Art. The event takes place March 9, 2017.
Sharon M. Louden’s work ranges from drawings to animations to installations. Her art has been shown at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Drawing Center, Weisman Art Museum and National Gallery of Art and is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art and Yale University Art Gallery. Louden is editor of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life book series.
Her most recent book, The Artist as Culture Producer, comprised of essays by 40 artists, will be published in March. A book signing will follow her talk.
Lecture on April 6.
Sondra Perry is an interdisciplinary artist who works in video, installation, computer-based media and performance. She has been in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art/PS1, Seattle Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Lecture on May 18.
The series is co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History, Cinema and Digital Media Program, Department of Design, the UC Davis Humanities Institute, the Department of History, UC Davis Landscape Architecture major and the Manetti Shrem Museum.
— Jeffrey Day, content strategist in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science