The University of Houston School of Art is proud to announce its Fall 2020 Visiting Speaker Series, featuring practitioners and thinkers at the forefront of contemporary art, criticism, and design. Distinguished guests offer a diverse range of perspectives on the most pertinent issues facing today’s makers and scholars. The series is a key component of students’ experience at the School of Art. In addition to presenting their work to a large audience of students and community members, speakers spend extended periods engaging directly with students in small gatherings for focused debate and conversation, in formats tailored to their individual practice. Past engagements have included hands-on workshops, master classes, studio visits, demonstrations, and interactive performances. Recent guests include Charlene Villaseñor Black, Beverly Fishman, Coco Fusco, Jeffrey Gibson, David Rokeby, RaMell Ross, Richard The, and Margaret Wertheim.
This Fall our series goes online, broadcasting via Zoom, YouTube Live, and Facebook Live. All lectures are free and open to the public. Check our website for connection information.
Aruna D’Souza is a curator and critic who writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics. Her most recent book, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts, was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times. She is currently editing two forthcoming volumes, Making It Modern: A Linda Nochlin Reader, and Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space 1973-2018, and is co-curator of the upcoming retrospective of Lorraine O’Grady’s work, Both/And, which will open in March 2021 at the Brooklyn Museum.
De Nichols is a design activist, social worker, and global lecturer who mobilizes creative changemakers to address issues within the built environment through the production of interactive experiences, digital media, and social initiatives. She serves as the Principal of Design and Social Impact at the Civic Creatives consultancy in St. Louis, MO. She is a Transnational Fellow with Monument Lab and the Goethe Institut, a Citizen Artist Fellow of the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, and a 2018 Artist Fellow with the Regional Arts Commision in St. Louis, MO. De Nichols is currently a Loeb Fellow in residence at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
Nicholas Galanin(Tlingit/Unangax) makes work rooted in connection to land and broad engagement with contemporary culture. For over a decade, Galanin has been embedding incisive observation into his work, investigating and expanding intersections of culture and concept in form, image, and sound. His practice is expansive and includes numerous collaborations with visual and recording artists. His work is in numerous public and private collections and exhibited worldwide. Galanin apprenticed with master carvers and jewelers, earned his BFA at London Guildhall University in Jewelry Design and his MFA in Indigenous Visual Arts at Massey University in New Zealand. He lives and works with his family in Sitka, Alaska.
Derrick Adams was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1970. He received his MFA from Columbia University and BFA from Pratt Institute. Adams has been the subject of numerous solo shows, including exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design, NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, the California African American Museum, LA, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Adams’ work has been presented in public exhibitions, including Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth. (2019) by the Smithsonian Institution; PERFORMA (2015, 2013, 2005); The Shadows Took Shape (2014) and Radical Presence (2013–14) at The Studio Museum in Harlem. His work resides in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
At the UH School of Art, we celebrate the centrality of art and design as drivers of culture and recognize their importance to the vitality of a civil society. We train artists, designers, and art historians who will inform, engage and move us toward a better understanding of each other and the communities we inhabit. We do this by making a commitment to connect the creativity of art to the practice of global citizenship, equipping our students with strategies for making and tools for living that value diverse human expression, ethics and social engagement.
