International and Regional Visiting Artist Lecture Series

SMU Meadows Division of Art is pleased to announce an international array of artists for its 2017–18 Visiting Artist Lecture Series. Artists are selected based on their merit and their outstanding insights on arts entrepreneurship, leadership and technique. Lectures are made possible with generous support from Debbie and Eric Green, Anonymous donor, Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo, the Dorothea Leonhardt Fund at the Communities Foundation of Texas Inc. and Ignite Art Dallas.

Monday, September 25, 7pm
Robyn O’Neil is an American artist best known for large-scale graphite on paper drawings. Numerous exhibits; based in Los Angeles. 

Saturday, October 14, 3-5pm
Conversation with curator Laura Wellen, artists Hellen Ascoli and Reyes Josué Morales, and SMU Meadows Division of Art Chair James Sullivan. 

  - Laura A. L. Wellen is a writer and curator. Her texts and exhibitions find points of connection between people’s emotional lives and their regional histories and landscapes; based primarily in Houston and Guatemala City.

  - Hellen Ascoli is an artist, weaver and educator who investigates material culture to understand relationships and identity. Guatemala City and Madison, Wis.

  - Reyes Josué Morales works with a combination of theater, visual art, education, psychology, human development and cultural studies, and is interested in the connections between phenomenology, ritual, ancestral cultures and art. Totonicapán, Guatemala.

  - James Sullivan’s sculpture is centered on the body, located in the figurative image itself as well as through objects that construct a more haptic abstraction of bodily forms, spaces and experiences. 

Wednesday, October 18, 7pm
Jenni Sorkin writes on the intersection of gender, material culture and contemporary art, and presents lectures at art institutions across the globe. Dr. Sorkin is assistant professor history of art and architecture at University of California Santa Barbara. 

Wednesday, November 8, 7pm
Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates public life interventions that re-imagine individual, group and institutional behavior. Exhibited worldwide; associate professor and graduate director, School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. 

Wednesday, November 15, 7pm
MAOF (materials and crafts) examines the local culture of use and consumption of resources through relationships with the material environment, landscape, objects, ways of working, rhythms, scales and motives to produce. Directed by Diego Andrés de la Cruz Gaitán, Mario Gracia Otero and Gabriel Maldonado Andréu. Projects conducted in Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Mexico and New York City. Lecture made possible with support from Ignite/Arts Dallas. 

Wednesday, January 31, 7pm
COBRA, Tokyo-based artist and member of the artist run space XYZ Collective. XYZ is best known for presenting exhibitions which playfully question otherwise accepted assumptions behind art world presentation. Exhibited in New York, Tokyo and Warsaw, among other locales.

Monday, February 5, 7pm
Mariko Paterson, Vancouver-born artist specializing in ceramic works and sculpture, now based in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, where she focuses on producing a subversive strain of ceramic work as well as serve the community with an education of the arts.  

For more information, contact Sofia Bastidas, T (214) 768 4439 or Laura Hearn, Division of Art/Art History Coordinator, T (214) 768 2698.