Art Lecture Series // Spring, 2018
Week 2, 4/11 Eirik Steinhoff, writer, editor, educator, Evergreen faculty
Eirik Steinhoff teaches and co-teaches interdisciplinary programs with titles like “How to do things with words,” “Imperialisms,” “Forensics,” “A New Middle East,” “Literary Arts Toolkit,” “Words/Woods,” and “Gateways for Incarcerated Youth” at Evergreen. He was the editor of Chicago Review, and in 2009 his translations from Petrarch’s Rime Sparse appeared as Fourteen Sonnets from Albion Books (San Francisco). He taught at Green Haven Correctional Facility in NY state under the auspices of the Bard Prison Initiative, and in 2014 he co-facilitated a seminar with faculty at Al-Quds University in Palestine. He co-edits Black Box: A Record of the Catastrophe, and he works with students and teachers behind bars in Washington state under the auspices of the Black Prisoner Caucus’s T.E.A.C.H. program (“Taking Education and Creating History”).
Week 4, 4/25 Rob Rhee, “a rubbernecker, a collector of accidents, a writer, visual artist, and teacher”
Rob Rhee’s sculptures allegorize living-bodyness. They’re often about the tension between action and structure, a body in time and a body in space. The boundaries are often palpable and provocative. In 2015, Rhee brought together art and Airbnb. He offered an Eastlake condo on the short-term rentals site, with an art installation inside. Staying overnight, you cohabited with art rather than just visiting it glancingly. It was ingenious in that quiet Rhee way, where the work reveals itself in layers to not only the eyes or brain but also the body of the art-looker, who is also a dinner-eater, a tooth-brusher, a sleeper. Being in a body, said Rhee, who became a father this summer, “is a pretty awesome way of being in the world.”- Jen Graves
Week 6, 5/9 Fionn Meade, curator, writer and thinker specializing in museums and non-profits, Evergreen graduate.
Fionn Meade is a curator, writer and thinker specializing in museums and non-profits. Having curated over fifty exhibitions since 2001, Meade most recently served as Senior Curator and Artistic Director at the Walker Art Center (2015-2017), and has been a curator at SculptureCenter, NY and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. He has lectured on contemporary artistic practice at Columbia University, CCS Bard, and at universities and arts institutions across the United States and internationally.
Week 7, 5/16 Michael Mejia, writer (possibly joined by Anca Cristofovici)
Michael Mejia is the author of the novels TOKYO and Forgetfulness, and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many journals and anthologies. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, he is editor-in-chief of Western Humanities Review, co-founding editor of Ninebark Press, and a professor of English at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his wife and their Jack Russell Terrier.
Week 8, 5/23 Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, visual artist in painting and writing
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung’s style is characterized by experimentation and attention to materials and techniques. In a review of “Queen”, a show with Dana DeGiulio at Manhattan’s Lyles and King gallery, the New York Times called Zuckerman-Hartung’s work “a firestorm of techniques and effects: bleaching, dyeing, staining and sewing linen, silk and humble dropcloths”.[3] Hyperallergic remarked that “her abstract paintings often extend above the surface and outside the frame” and reflect “a deep engagement with process, material, and with painting’s long history.” Her work has been featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and shows at the Walker Art Center, ReMap4, MOCA Cleveland, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Diana Lowenstein, and Lyles and King. She earned a BA from Evergreen State College in 1998 and an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 -Wikipedia
Week 10, 6/6 PechaKucha: Students Present Projects
Note: For week 10 we are hoping to have advanced student work from a few different programs present their end of year projects. If you have a student to recommend, please email us.
Fall 2017
Week 2, 10/4 Storme Webber, interdisciplinary artist, writer
A writer, interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator, Storme Webber was born and raised in Seattle where she attended Lakeside School. She holds an MFA in interdisciplinary arts from Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont. She has performed and toured her work internationally, and consistently foregrounds the work of other marginalized artists, most recently founding Voices Rising: LGBTQ of Color Arts & Culture in Seattle. Her poetry collections include Diaspora and Blues Divine. She has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Black Women and Writing: The Migration of Subject, International Queer Indigenous Voices, and The Popular Front of Contemporary Poetry, and in the documentaries Venus Boyz, What’s Right with Gays These Days, and Living Two Spirit.Webber received the 2015 James W. Ray Venture Project Award, which is funded by the Raynier Institute & Foundation through the Frye Art Museum | Artist Trust Consortium. The award supports and advances the creative work of outstanding artists living and working in Washington State and culminates in her current exhibition, “Casino: A Palimpsest,” at the Frye Art Museum.
Week 4, 10/18, Thalia Field, interdisciplinary writer, performer
Thalia Field was born in Chicago in 1966. After attending lycée in France, she graduated with honors from Brown University, where she was awarded the first John Hawkes prize in fiction. Thalia Field’s most recent novel is EXPERIMENTAL ANIMALS (A Reality Fiction) from Solid Objects Press. Thalia Field also has three books published with New Directions: POINT AND LINE (2000) and INCARNATE: STORY MATERIAL (2004) and BIRD LOVERS, BACKYARD. A performance novel, ULULU (CLOWN SHRAPNEL) was published by Coffee House press in 2008, with film stills by Bill Morrison, and a hybrid essay/poem co-authored with French writer Abigail Lang, A PRANK OF GEORGES, was published by Essay Press. Thalia’s writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Chicago Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Theater, Central Park, Chain, and Conjunctions, where she served as editor and senior editor from 1995-1999. Performance works and plays include THE POMPEII EXHIBIT, composed by Toshiro Saruya, which was awarded an NEA commission grant in 1992, and HEY-STOP-THAT which was published in Theater magazine and produced at various US venues.
Week 6, 11/1, John Feoderov, visual artist
Born in Los Angeles of mixed Navajo (Diné) and European American heritage, John Feodorov grew up in the suburbs of Southern California while making annual visits to his family’s land on the Navajo Reservation. The time he spent with his grandparents on their homestead near the Anasazi ruins at Chaco Canyon New Mexico continues to inform his work. Feodorov is interested in creating art that both engages and confronts the viewer; often utilizing pop culture detritus, as well as sound and video, to create works that question ideas and assumptions about Spirituality, Identity and Place. His work explores the longing for spiritual (re)connection that can be easily exploited by charlatans, corporations and political forces. In addition, his paintings and drawings are experiments in creating hybrid mythical iconographies that respond to issues such as environmental disasters, consumerism, and post-Colonial identity.
Feodorov is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham Washington. In 2001 he was featured in the first season of the PBS television series, “Art 21: Art for the 21st Century” as well as in the companion book published by Harry N. Abrams. His work also appears in such publications as Time and Time Again, by Lucy R. Lippard; Manifestations, edited by Nancy Marie Mithlo; and A World of Art, edited by Henry M. Sayre. He served as an Arts Commissioner for the City of Seattle, worked as an artist/educator for various non-profit youth groups in the Seattle area
Week 8, 11/15 Bonnie Whiting, percussionist, musician
Bonnie Whiting performs and commissions new experimental music for percussion. She seeks out projects involving non-traditional notation, interdisciplinary performance, improvisation, and the speaking percussionist. Recent work includes a series of concerts at the John Cage Centennial Festival in Washington DC, and performance as a soloist in Tan Dun’s Water Passion under the baton of the composer himself. In 2011, she joined red fish blue fish percussion group in premiering the staged version of George Crumb’s Winds of Destiny directed by Peter Sellars and featuring Dawn Upshaw for Ojai Festival.
Whiting has collaborated with many of today’s leading new music groups, including eighth blackbird (the “Tune-in” festival at the Park Avenue Armory), the International Contemporary Ensemble (American premiere of James Dillon’s Nine Rivers at Miller Theatre), Bang on a Can (Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians for the LA Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series) and Ensemble Dal Niente (the Fromm Concerts at Harvard.) During the summer, she is a member of the Walden Players, enesmble in residence at the Walden School in Dublin, NH. She performs regularly with percussionist Allen Otte; they have presented concerts at The Stone in New York, The New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, throughout New Zealand, and at colleges and universities around the country. Her debut album, featuring an original solo-simultaneous realization of John Cage’s 45’ for a speaker and 27’10.554” for a percussionist, will be released by Mode Records in 2015.
Week 10, 12/6 Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, environmental justice educator and scholar
Dr. Sarah Jaquette is Program Leader of their new Environmental Studies program at Humboldt State University. Ray’s interests include environmental justice, cultural studies, critical human geography, disability studies, and issues of power, identity, and discourses ofnature. As she engages with each, she is passionate about putting the topics in conversation with each other: “I think it’s valuable to have a variety of activisms dealing with environmental issues,” she explains. “Some people may wonder why we need to be thinking about issues of identity, discourse, and social justice when the planet is at stake, and I hear that critique often. But I think this rhetoric of urgency is problematic, and I genuinely believe that we’re not going to save that planet unless we do so in ways that incorporate—as central to, not just as a byproduct of—concerns of social justice.”