Evergreen Art Lecture Series

from Christopher…

As an artist and community organizer, I construct immersive, interactive installations to connect diaspora communities. I’m interested in media infrastructure and its role in shaping what is knowable. I create portals for displaced peoples to reintegrate our stories across dimensions, devising passageways for us to connect, hear from, and care for one another. I generate art objects as time-capsules to vault these experiences, questions, and memories in the future. My practice deals with continuance, analog internets, rites of passage, the production of history, and the construction of satellites. Painting and sculpture are my prayer language; laced with vestiges of mediation and hearsay; embedded with questions for another time and place.

BIO
(b. 1990) Christopher Paul Jordan integrates virtual and physical public space to form infrastructures for dialogue and self-determination among dislocated people. Jordan’s paintings and sculptures are time-capsules from his work in community. His 7000 sqft panoramic mural from #COLORED2017 is now buried into the walls of the Carpenter’s Union Building in Tacoma where it can only be rediscovered through demolition.

Jordan’s installations and public projects have been implemented internationally including Trinidad and Tobago, Taiwan, and Mexico. His work has been recognized by the Neddy Artist Award in painting, the James W Ray Venture Project Award, the Jon Imber Fellowship, the GTCF Foundation of Art Award, and the Artist Trust Fellowship.

Based in Tacoma, WA, USA

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung is a painter, writer and teacher who grew up in Olympia, Washington (attended TESC), and participated in Riot Grrl in her formative years (the 1990s.) Now she is working and grocery shopping and taking walks in Connecticut with her girlfriend and dog. She is an autodidact who is opening her attention to pattern and repetition, difference, learning, feedback loops, nostalgia, dolls, Victorian collage and textiles, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Gees Bend quilts, the effects of soul lag on humans, high theory, low theory, kitsch, Modernism, affect theory, coloring crayons, tissue paper, the parergon, tactility, Elizabeth Bishop, the color of the light in the bare woods, and the emotional landscapes of students, friends, colleagues and strangers alongside whom she lives.

Also, she is a full time Lecturer in Yale School of Art, Department of Painting and Printmaking. She has shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The 2014 Whitney Biennial, The Program at ReMap in Athens, Greece, Kadel Willborn in Karlsruhe, Germany and many many others. In 2013, she received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. She is a frequent guest lecturer at many schools across the country, including, in the past year, Princeton University, The University of Texas at Austin, University of Indiana at Bloomington, University of Alabama, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Low Residency Program, and Columbia University, She is represented by Corbett vs Dempsey in Chicago and Rachel Uffner Gallery in NYC.

Michael Mejia is the author of the novels TOKYO and Forgetfulness, and his writing has been published in many journals and anthologies. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Mejia is editor-in-chief of Western Humanities Review , co-founding editor of Ninebark Press, and a professor of creative writing at the University of Utah.

Book signing/sales available after the talk.

An independent curator based in New York and Seattle, Meade has served as Artistic Director (2015-17) and Senior Curator, Cross-Disciplinary Platforms (2014-15), at The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, where he headed the Visual Arts Department. He has been a faculty member at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2009-2014), and in the MFA Program for Visual Arts, Columbia University (2009-2014).

Exhibitions at the Walker Art Center included the retrospective survey Merce Cunningham: Common Time, curated for the Walker and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, group exhibitions Question the Wall Itself, Less Than One, the first U.S. solo exhibition of German artist Andrea Büttner and the Walker Art Center’s presentation of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, featuring work from the 1960s to the present.

He also oversaw commissions of public artworks for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Walker campus by Theaster Gates, Nairy Baghramian, and Philippe Parreno. He has previously been a curator at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA, and at SculptureCenter, New York, where exhibitions included Scene, Hold, Ballast with David Maljkovic and Lucy Skaer, and the group exhibitions Time Again and Knight’s Move, a survey of new sculpture in New York, among others.

He served as Director of Grant Programs at Artist Trust, Seattle (2003-2006), as a writing instructor and consultant for Richard Hugo House, Seattle (2001-06), and as a lecturer at the University of Washington. The recipient of an Arts Writer Grant from Creative Capital (2009) and the Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship (Fall 2014), he holds a M.F.A. in Poetry from Columbia University (1999) and an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from CCS Bard (2009), and received his B.F.A from Evergreen State College.

Credit: KELLY O / THE STRANGER

Robert Rhee is a collector of accidents, a rubbernecker. He is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and organizer of collaborative artist projects. He teaches in the interdisciplinary Foundations Program at Cornish College of the Arts.

In his work he pursues situations which are on the precipice of formlessness, where a system is engaged but not controlled. His studio work and writing shape each other as parallel practices. He uses time (duration) to move ideas back and forth between modes: a sculpture conceived like a story, a poem worked on with power tools.

He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally. A selected list includes the Ilmin Museum of Art in Seoul, the Ferdinand Van Dieten Gallery in the Netherlands, the Arario Gallery, Dorsky Gallery for Curatorial Projects, Fisher-Landau Center for the Arts, and White Columns in New York.

His blog, robottree.com, was shortlisted for Creative Capital’s Arts Writers Grant and his writing has been published in art magazines and literary journals such as Art in America, Arcade, Monday: The Journal of the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington, Heck, and La Norda, and Columbia: A Journal of Arts and Letters.

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 The Evergreen State College, where he has been a Visiting Member of the Faculty since 2013.  

He has also taught courses on Shakespeare, Early Modern Poetry, critical theory, rhetoric, poetry, and poetics at the University of Chicago (where he got his Ph.D. in English), Bard College (where he got his B.A.), and Mills College. 

In the early 21st century 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). 

In 2010 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”). 

The bulk of his study in the classroom and beyond revolves around two questions: “What needs to be the case for things to be otherwise?,” and “How do we make our knowledge common?”

Bob Leverich is an architect, sculptor, and craftsman, and a faculty member at The Evergreen State College, where he teaches visual art, craft, and sustainable design. He has building projects, sculpture, and furniture works in public and private collections across the country and in Canada.  His architectural experience includes commercial, public, residential, and religious projects, as well as preservation of historic structures.

His sculpture and craft works have addressed expressive and functional themes in a variety of materials.  His recent sculpture has focused on carved stone and wood, using iconic landscape and body forms, and includes large, site specific, multi-part public art works in Maine and Washington State. Bob regards drawing as a foundational tool in his working process, and he sees architecture, sculpture, and craft as connected by their substantiality and character as kinesthetic experiences, both in making and in use. Meaning gained through making is fundamental to his work and to his teaching.

photo credit: Jessi Wahnetah

Kaia Sand is a poet, artist, and community organizer. She is author of three books of poetry—interval (Edge Books 2004), a Small Press Traffic book of the year; Remember to Wave (Tinfish Press 2010); and A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost its Puff (Tinfish Press 2016); and co-author with Jules Boykoff of Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space (Palm Press, 2008).

Sand works across genres and media, dislodging poetry from the book into more unconventional contexts. From 2013-2015, she served with Garrick Imatani as artists-in-residence at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center, responding to historical surveillance files on local political activists; and then she created textile art with street vendor Marcia Rodrigues Braga during her Despina International Artist Residency in Rio de Janeiro in 2015.  Much of her work has focused on economic injustice and homelessness, from a magic show she created about the financial collapse to the Right 2 Survive Ambassador Program she co-founded for housed people to learn from people experiencing homelessness.

She is the executive director of Street Roots, a weekly newspaper sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and poverty as means of earning an income.

Heide Hatry grew up on a pig farm in the south of Germany. She left home at the age of 15 to enroll in a sports school. She studied art at various German art schools and art history at the University of Heidelberg. She taught at a private art school for 15 years while simultaneously conducting an international business as an antiquarian bookseller. Since moving to New York in 2003 she has curated numerous exhibitions and has shown her own work at museums and galleries around the world. She has produced about 200 artist’s books and edited more than two dozen books and art catalogues. Her book Skin was published by Kehrer, Heidelberg, in 2005, Heads and Tales and Not a Rose by Charta, Milan/New York in 2009 and 2012 and Icons in Ash by Station Hill Press, Barrytown, NY in 2017.

Heide Hatry is best known for her body-related performances and her work employing animal flesh and organs. Among her fundamental preoccupations are identity, gender roles (and specifically what it means to be a woman), the nature of aesthetic experience and the meaning of beauty, the effects of knowledge upon perception, the human exploitation of the natural world, and the social oblivion that permits atrocity to persist in our midst.

MARY ANN PETERS is an artist whose combined studio work, installations, public art projects and arts activism have made noted contributions to the Northwest and nationally for over 30 years. Most recently her work has focused on the overlap of contemporary events with splintered histories in the Middle East.

Her awards include the 2016 ArtMatters/Jerome Foundation fellowship at the Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France; 2015 Stranger Genius Award in Visual Art; a 2013 Art Matters Foundation research grant; the MacDowell Colony Pollock Krasner Fellowship (2011); the Civita Institute Fellowship (2004) and the Behnke Foundation Neddy Award in Painting (2000).

She is a founder of COCA (Center on Contemporary Art), a recipient of the Artist Trust Leadership and Arts Award, and former board member and board president of NCFE (National Campaign for Freedom of Expression), the seminal group who defended artist rights and the First Amendment during the Helms era.

She lives and works in Seattle, Washington.