The Low-Res Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series resource guides contain upcoming speakers' biographies, articles, video and audio content, related publications in the Flaxman Library, and additional online resources. These guides may be used in preparation for the public lecture, studio visits, and post-lecture discussion.
Hamza Walker: Thursday, June 20, 7:00 - 8:00 p.m. CT
SAIC Ballroom
Hamza Walker is Director of LAXART, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles. Prior to joining LAXART in 2016, he was director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a non-collecting contemporary art museum. Recent exhibitions at LAXART include Nikita Gale, Takers, 2022; Kandis Williams/Cassandra Press’ The Absolute Right to Exclude (2021); and Postcommodity’s Some Reach While Others Clap (2020).
Photo credit: Todd Gray
Black Is, Black Ain't
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Taking its title from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, exhibition Black Is, Black Ain't (April 20 - June 8, 2008) explored a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a present moment where racial identity is being simultaneously rejected and retained. Curated by the Renaissance Society's Associate Curator and Education Director Hamza Walker, the exhibition brought together works by twenty-seven black and non-black artists whose work collectively examines a moment where the cultural production of so-called "blackness" is concurrent with efforts to make race socially and politically irrelevant. The publication features essays by Huey Copeland, Darby English, Greg Foster-Rice, Amy M. Mooney, Kymberly N. Pinder, Krista Thompson, Hamza Walker, and Kenneth Warrren.
Freestyle
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Kerry James Marshall
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Kerry James Marshall's Mementos is a sadly beautiful reminder of the Civil Rights movement - a reminder that provokes us to question the closed-book, "memorial" status that history has attributed to this moment of inspired social action. In Marshall's banner-like paintings appear bittersweet visions of 30 years past, in which the heroes of modern black history appear as ghosts frozen in time, and in oversized stamps, the empowering slogans of the movement are rendered uncomfortably silent. This catalogue of the Renaissance Society's 1998 exhibition of Mementos features magnificent reproductions illuminating the stunning detail and formal grace of Marshall's work. In addition, Cheryl I. Harris, UCLA professor of law, offers a poignant account of Marshall's imagery in light of recent history and Richard J. Powell, Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, walks us through the exhibition installation, weaving memory and metaphor into the rich fabric of Marshall's work. Included also are excerpts from Will Alexander's Hambone #7, and Above the Human Nerve Domain, which infuse the ethereality of Marshall's imagery and its powerful message to transcend history in a revolution of the spirit.
Made in L. A. 2016
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Made in L.A. has established itself as an important platform for a wildly diverse population of artists. The biennial exhibition offers a view onto the current trends and practices developed within and throughout Los Angeles, one of the most active and energetic art communities in the world. Under the direction of co-curators Aram Moshayedi and Hamza Walker, the 2016 iteration promises to offer a mix of the local and international perspectives that are an important part of the city's identity.
Mary Ellen Carroll
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Despite an oeuvre spanning more than 20 years and a disavowal of any signature style, Mary Ellen Carroll has throughout her career been investigating a single, fundamental question: What is a work of art? The resulting multifarious, provocative and often wry outpouring in architecture, writing, performance, photography, filmmaking, printmaking, sculpture and painting has been collected into this book--the New York conceptual artist's long-awaited first monograph. Carroll's work interrogates the relationship between subjectivity, language and power; at its core is a dedication to political and social critique. The touchstones of her practice are the double, the imitation and the copy, and these motifs are applied to a range of ends--from conjuring the unheimlich to probing the means of distribution and interpretation of the work of art. A Carroll piece may involve something as seemingly effortless as trademarking an idea by another artist or as complex and bold as walking out the door penniless with only her passport and the clothes on her back to spend six weeks in a foreign country. Carroll imbues all her work with a strong performative element; even a new opus, involving the rotation of a Houston tract home on its foundation, is conceived as a way of making architecture perform.
Picturing People: Dawoud Bey
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Since 1975, photographer Dawoud Bey has developed a body of work distinguished for its commitment to portraiture as a means for reflecting social circumstances. Ranging from street encounters to studio portraits, Bey has investigated numerous photographic methods to find increased engagement with his subjects. The Renaissance Society exhibition this catalogue accompanies (May 13 - July 13, 2012) included selections from Bey's work spanning the thirty years from 1982 to the present. The exhibition offered a comprehensive look at Bey's oeuvre, and provided an opportunity to explore related subjects in art history and social discourse, such as the presentation of self, race, site, and the relationship between artist and subject. Includes essays by Arthur Danto and Julie Bernson as well as an interview between Bey and the Renaissance Society's Associate Curator and Director of Education, Hamza Walker.
Theaster Gates: Black Archive
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Transferring what has been rejected from everyday life or urban space into art and thus supplying it with a new usefulness, is one of Theaster Gates? fundamental artistic strategies. The sculptures and often spatially invasive works for Kunsthaus Bregenz, some of them new, follow this position. A selection of the collection that Gates calls 'Negrobilia', which has been compiled over the years by Edward J. and Ana J. Williams with the intention of removing these objects from the market and matter of-course visibility, is shown for the first time Contributions by Romi Crawford and Jackie Stewart broach Gates? complex Black Archive, as a critical confrontation with social and political themes. Thomas D. Trummer examines the artistic concept that underlies the exhibition in Bregenz. Large-format illustrations of earlier work and in particular the new works realized for Bregenz, as well as a carefully compiled biography and bibliography, offer a comprehensive insight into the work of the American artist. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Theaster Gates: Black Archive at Kunsthaus Bregenz, 23 April -- 26 June 2016. English and German text.
Steve Mcqueen
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Explore the work of Turner Prize-winning artist and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen Steve McQueen (b. 1969) is one of the most important artists, filmmakers, and screenwriters working today. Over the last 25 years he has been hugely influential in expanding the way artists work with film. He has created some of the most seminal works of moving image designed for gallery-based presentation, as well as four major award-winning films: Hunger(2008); Shame(2010); 12 Years a Slave(2013), which won Best Picture at the 2014 Academy, Golden Globe, and BAFTA awards; and Widows (2018). This book, which accompanies a major exhibition at Tate Modern, London, brings together all the video and film installations McQueen has made since 2000, including such large-scale video installations as Caribs' Leap/Western Deep(2002) and more recent films such as Ashes(2002-15), as well as new work.
Scott Short
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This catalogue accompanies the first solo museum exhibition of painter Scott Short. In Short's work notions of color and abstraction are boldly reinterpreted. His method of generating compositions is to make a black and white photocopy of a sheet of colored construction paper, and then makes a copy of a copy of a copy, until the result is hundreds of times removed from the original. Short then selects one of these many copies, enlarges it, and painstakingly copies it in paint on canvas. Despite its labor intensiveness, the procedural aspect of Short's paintings is subordinate to their effect. Visually, Short's paintings are Abstractions with a capital A. Once the photocopies have undergone the shift of scale and material that occurs when Short transcribes them as paintings, they become as a species of abstraction even Greenberg would acknowledge. The fact, however, that Short is dedicated to copying makes his painting the keepers of their own dialectic, in which roles become reversed. Although it is the photocopier that performs the creative role of abstracting, Short's mechanical manual labor allows the copy to become the original and the abstract to lay claim to being strictly representational. Michelle Grabner's essay explores the ideological intersections of copying, repetition, and manual dexterity in art practice. Hamza Walker's essay discusses how Short's practice nullifies the distinction between abstraction and figuration.
The Renaissance Society
Online archive of his work (see especially the collection of brief exhibition essays).
MONUMENTS at The Brick
