The University of Houston School of Art is proud to announce its 2022–23 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. See links to the visitor’s websites below.
All lectures are in Dudley Recital Hall on the UH campus. They are free and open to the public. You may also attend virtually via Instagram Live! View our archive of past lectures on our YouTube Channel.
Rachel Weiss: September 15, 3–4:30pm
Gina Beavers: September 29, 3–4:30pm
Mary Maggic: November 29, 6–7:30pm
Liza Enebeis: February 2, 6:30–8pm
William Camargo: February 16, 3–4:30pm
Samara Golden: February 23, 3–4:30pm
Rachel Weiss is a writer, educator, and lapsed curator, currently Professor of Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Weiss has published extensively on contemporary art in journals, magazines, and newspapers in the US, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Australia. Major publications includeMaking Art Global: The Third Havana Biennial (Afterall Books), To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art (University of Minnesota Press), Por América: la obra de Juan Francisco Elso Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas: co-author and editor), and On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias by Luis Camnitzer (University of Texas Press: editor). Major curatorial projects include Global Conceptualism 1950s–1980s: Points of Origin (Queens Museum of Art, NYC: co-director with with Luis Camnitzer and Jane Farver), Ante América (Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá, and traveled in South, North, and Central America: co-curator, with Gerardo Mosquera and Carolina Ponce de León), and The Nearest Edge of the World: Art and Cuba Now (traveled throughout the US: co-curator with Gerardo Mosquera).
Gina Beavers is an artist who lives and works in Newark, New Jersey. She holds a BA in Studio Art and Anthropology from the University of Virginia (1996), an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2000) and an MS in Education from Brooklyn College (2005).
She creates paintings and installations from photos culled from the Internet and social media and rendered in high Acrylic relief. Series include paintings based on the creative realms of body painting, social media user’s photos of their meals, make-up tutorials, memes, and body builder selfies.
Mary Maggic is a nonbinary artist and researcher working within the fuzzy intersections of body and gender politics and capitalist ecological alienations. Their interdisciplinary projects span amateur science, participatory performance, installation, documentary, and speculative fiction. Since 2015, Maggic frequently uses biohacking as a xeno-feminist methodology and collective practice of care that can serve to demystify invisible lines of molecular biopower. After completing their Masters at MIT Media Lab (Design Fiction) in 2017, their project “Open Source Estrogen” was awarded Honorary Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica in Hybrid Arts, and in 2019 they completed a 10-month Fulbright residency in Yogyakarta, Indonesia investigating the relationship between Javanese mysticism and the plastic pollution crisis. Maggic is a recipient of the 2022 Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship, and has recently published essays in Plastic Ocean: Art and Science Responses to Marine Pollution (2022) and the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (2022). Maggic is a current member of the online network Hackteria: Open Source Biological Art, the laboratory theater collective Aliens in Green, the Asian feminist collective Mai Ling, as well as a contributor to the radical syllabus project Pirate Care and to the CyberFeminism Index collections.
Liza Enebeis is Partner and Creative Director at Studio Dumbar/DEPT®.
Studio Dumbar/DEPT® is an award-winning international agency with a Dutch heritage, specialising in visual branding and motion. Liza is directly involved with all main projects such as the visual identity for Amsterdam Sinfonietta, D&AD Creativity festival, brand refresh of the van Gogh Museum and co-initiator of DEMO - Design in Motion Festival. She is an MA Design graduate from the Royal College of Art, London. Before joining Studio Dumbar she worked for Pentagram London for several years. In 2004 Liza co-founded and co-hosts the podcast station Typeradio.org. Typeradio has an archive of more than 500 interviews for download of established and upcoming designers from all around the world. As of 2018 she has been elected member to the prestigious design association AGI, Alliance Graphique Internationale. In 2020 she was appointed as co-chair of the ADCN—the Advertising and Design Club of Creativity in the Netherlands. And since 2021 is part of the D&AD Board of trustees—the Design and Advertising Association in the UK.
William Camargo is a photo-based artist and educator born and raised in Anaheim, California. He is currently the Chair of the Heritage and Culture commission in Anaheim and a lecturer in photography at the University of California San Diego. He attained his M.F.A from Claremont Graduate University, a BFA from Cal State Fullerton, and an AA at Fullerton Community College. William is the founder and curator of Latinx Diaspora Archives, an archive Instagram page that elevates communities of color through family photos.
He uses photography, installation, public interventions, and archives to address issues of gentrification, police violence, and Chicanx/Latinx histories. William has held residencies at the Latinx Project at NYU, Light Work in Syracuse, New York, TILT institute for Contemporary Image in Philadelphia, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY. He was a runner-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize 2021 and was included in the Latinx edition of Aperture Magazine in the Winter of 2022. In addition, he has given lectures at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, Gallery 400 (Chicago), University of San Diego, Stanford University, Syracuse University, USC Roski School of Art, and upcoming at Scripps College
Samara Golden (b. 1973, Ann Arbor, Michigan) has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and CANADA, New York. Her monumental installation The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes was on view in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. She has shown large scale installations in group exhibitions at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai. Golden was featured in the 2014 Hammer Biennial, Los Angeles, and in Room to Live at MOCA Los Angeles. In 2015, a monograph on Golden was published by MoMA PS1, and her work has been written about in publications including ArtForum, Art in America, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Mousse Magazine. Golden’s work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; LACMA and MOCA in Los Angeles; Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana; Zabludowicz Collection, London; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai. Golden lives and works in Los Angeles.
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.
