The University of Houston School of Art is thrilled to announce its spring 2020 visiting speaker series featuring practitioners and thinkers at the forefront of contemporary art and design. These distinguished guests offer a rich range of approaches to the most pertinent issues facing today’s makers and scholars. Join us for these compelling talks.
All lectures take place in Dudley Recital Hall, located in the School of Art on the University of Houston campus, beginning at 6:30pm with a 5:30pm welcome reception. All events are free and open to the public.
Margaret Wertheim is an internationally noted writer, artist and curator whose work focuses on relations between science and the wider cultural landscape. Her work is animated by a two-fold proposition: that science is both a field of conceptual enchantment, and a socially embedded activity with political and communal consequences. The author of six books, including The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace and Physics on the Fringe, she has written for the New York Times, The Guardian, Cabinet, Aeon and many others. Margaret and her twin sister Christine are founders of the Institute For Figuring, a Los Angeles-based practice devoted to the aesthetic dimensions of science and mathematics—theiff.org. The sisters have created exhibitions for the Hayward Gallery (London), Science Gallery (Dublin), Mass MOCA (MA), Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles), and elsewhere. Their Crochet Coral Reef project has been shown nationally and internationally including at the Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), Museum of Arts and Design (New York), Deutsches Museum (Munich), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (Washington D.C.), and the 2019 Venice Biennale. Margaret has worked professionally on all seven continents and stood on the South Pole.
RaMell Ross earned a BA in both English and Sociology from Georgetown University and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. His photographs have been exhibited internationally and his writing has appeared in such outlets as The New York Times and Walker Arts Center. He was part of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2015, and a New Frontier Artist in Residence at the MIT Media Lab. In 2016, he was a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, winner of an Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant and a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow. In early 2017, he was selected for Rhode Island Foundation’s Robert and Margaret Maccoll Johnson Artist Fellowship. RaMell is currently on faculty at Brown University’s Visual Arts Department. HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING is his first feature documentary.
David Rokeby’s early work, Very Nervous System (1982–1991) was a pioneering work of interactive art, translating physical gestures into real-time interactive sound environments. It was presented at the Venice Biennale in 1986, and was awarded a Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction for Interactive Art in 1991. Several of his works have addressed issues of digital surveillance, including Taken (2002), and Sorting Daemon (2003). Other works engage in a critical examination of the differences between human and artificial intelligence. The Giver of Names (1991–) andn-cha(n)t (2001) are artificial subjective entities, provoked by objects or spoken words in their immediate environment to formulate sentences and speak them aloud. He has exhibited and lectured extensively in the Americas, Europe and Asia. His awards include a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2002), a Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art (2002), and a British Academy of Film and Television Arts “BAFTA” award in Interactive art (2000). He is the Director of the BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies and AI at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto.
The University of Houston School of Art is a collection of impressive resources—both human and material—focused on creating and sustaining the intellectual, emotional and physical environments necessary to cultivate young artists, designers, theorists, critics and art historians.
The School of Art faculty is comprised of 26 full-time members and prestigious visiting instructors who are practicing professionals well known in their respective fields. School of Art faculty have received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Getty Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy in Rome, the Fulbright Foundation and many others. Faculty have exhibited their works in major museums and galleries around the world, and in important exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial, São Paulo Art Biennial, and Venice Biennale.
Houston (our extended campus) is the fourth largest city in the country and third largest visual arts center outside of New York and Los Angeles. It is a city with world-class cultural institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Menil Collection and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
The University of Houston, founded in 1927, is the most ethnically diverse research university in the nation and the leading urban teaching and research institution in Texas.
