September 30–December 9, 2013
Pratt Institute
200 Willoughby Avenue
Brooklyn, New York, NY 11205
Pratt Institute’s Fine Arts Department will present lectures by four renowned artists as part of its long-running Visiting Artist Lecture Series (VALS). The esteemed international participating artists will speak to the Pratt community about their influences, artwork, and careers. Current graduate students in Pratt’s Fine Arts Department helped select and invite the artists to campus to speak and to participate in studio visits with students. Past speakers include The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Latoya Ruby Frasier, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Diana Al-Hadid, Rashaad Newsome, Mary Mattingly, and Ursula Von Rydingsvard. The 2013–2014 VALS is made possible in part by a generous grant from The Robert Lehman Foundation.
Lectures will be held on Mondays at 7pm in Memorial Hall Auditorium at 200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn. Please click here for directions to Pratt’s Brooklyn campus and here for a map of the Brooklyn campus.
Tom Sachs
Monday, September 30
Tom Sachs is a sculptor who is well known for his elaborate recreations and transformations of modern icons of capitalist culture. Examples of his work include a McDonald’s built out of plywood, glue, and assorted kitchen appliances and Hello Kitty and her friends depicted in materials ranging from foam core to bronze. Sachs has exhibited internationally, and has work in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.
Aura Satz
Monday, October 7
Aura Satz is a London-based artist and writer who investigates the fusion of human and machine through film, sound, performance, and sculpture. Her narrative work explores the understanding of obsolete technologies, how the body experiences technology and sound, and the materiality of memory among other phenomena. She has performed, exhibited, and screened her work internationally at venues including the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea di Trento in Italy; the Zentrum Paul Klee in Switzerland; and Whitechapel Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum, and Tate Modern in England.
Leigh Ledare
Monday, November 18
Photographer Leigh Ledare documents his eroticized relationship with his mother, investigating how identity is formed and how desires, motivations, and aspirations contribute to the creation of an individual as a subject. His has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including venues in New York, London, Berlin, and Prague.
Judith Bernstein
Monday, December 9
Judith Bernstein is a feminist artist and activist with a career that has spanned over four decades. Bernstein was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, the first venue dedicated to showing woman artists and was an early member of art and activist organizations including Guerilla Girls, Art Workers’ Coalition, and Fight Censorship. The aggressive, sexual drawings for which she is best known reveal layers of political, personal, and artistic struggle, and were on display in a solo show at New Museum in early 2013.
