APSU Department of Art + Design announces 2020-21 visiting artist schedule
(Posted Sept. 8, 2020)
The Department of Art + Design at Austin Peay State University is excited to announce its 2020-21 season of visiting speakers. Generously supported by the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts (CECA), the Department of Art + Design can bring nationally/internationally recognized artists and thinkers directly to Clarksville with programming that is free and open to the public.
The New Gallery will host five exhibitions showcasing contemporary art from regional and national artists, as well as the annual juried student exhibition.
“I say this every year, but we are super excited about this year’s slate of exhibitions and speakers,” Michael Dickins, gallery director and Visiting Artist program chair, said. “We’re beginning our fourth year in the new Art + Design building, and though we are currently in a global pandemic, we are continuing to bring world-class artists directly to Austin Peay and the residents of Clarksville.
“With invaluable support from CECA, this excitement will continue as The New Gallery will host an exciting exhibition lineup of contemporary artists that will challenge, awe and inspire our students to push themselves in their individual practices; and our Visiting Artist Speaker Series will allow our students and community to directly interact with the influential artists of our time.
“Of course, this year will be a little different,” Dickins continued. “To mitigate the spread of COVID-19, The New Gallery has shifted to reduced hours, and all of our speaking engagements will be held virtually. We’ve invested in new technology that will give art lovers the experience of being in The New Gallery with 360º video walkthroughs for each exhibition, and we’re able to offer our artist lectures to the rest of the world via Zoom. You can now engage with our top-quality programming from the comfort and security of your home.”
To see the exhibition schedule for the coming year, click here.
The 2020-21 CECA Visiting Artists Speaker Series features artists from Los Angeles, Oakland and four based in New York City. The lectures will be hosted via Zoom where registration is required.
- 6 p.m. Oct. 6, 2020: Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She is currently working on Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place (2018-2022), an investigation of intimacy at the scale of immediate families. She will be creating a new piece specifically for this lecture.
- 6 p.m. Oct. 13, 2020: Cassils is a visual artist working in live performance, film, sound, sculpture and photography. Cassils has achieved international recognition for a rigorous engagement with the body as a form of social sculpture. Drawing on conceptualism, feminism, body art, gay male aesthetics, Cassils forges a series of powerfully trained bodies for different performative purposes. It is with sweat, blood and sinew that Cassils constructs a visual critique around ideologies and histories. Cassils will also discuss their current project #inplainsight.
- 6 p.m. Jan. 27, 2021: Debbie Millman, was named “one of the most creative people in business” by Fast Company and “one of the most influential designers working today” by Graphic Design USA. Millman is also an author, educator, curator and host of the podcast Design Matters. For 20 years, Millman was the president of Sterling Brands, one of the world’s leading branding consultancies. She arrived there in 1995 when the company was 2 years old and had 15 employees in one office. Under her leadership, Sterling grew to 150 employees in five offices and she was instrumental in the firm’s acquisition by Omnicom in 2008. Omnicom is one of the world’s largest holding companies. While there she worked on the logo and brand identity for Burger King, Hershey’s, Haagen Dazs, Tropicana, Star Wars, Gillette and the No More movement. Millman will also conduct a virtual workshop with design students via Zoom.
- 6 p.m. March 2, 2021: Paula Scher is one of the most influential graphic designers in the world. Described as the “master conjurer of the instantly familiar,” Scher straddles the line between pop culture and fine art in her work. Iconic, smart and accessible, her images have entered into the American vernacular. Scher has been a partner in the New York office of Pentagram since 1991. She began her career as an art director in the 1970s and early ’80s, when her eclectic approach to typography became highly influential. In the mid-1990s her landmark identity for The Public Theater fused high and low into a wholly new symbology for cultural institutions, and her recent architectural collaborations have reimagined the urban landscape as a dynamic environment of dimensional graphic design. Her graphic identities for Citibank and Tiffany & Co. have become case studies for the contemporary regeneration of American brands.
- 6 p.m. March 24, 2021: Eliza Evans experiments with sculpture, print, video and textiles to identify disconnections and absurdities in social, economic and ecological systems. The initial parameters of each work are carefully researched and then evolve as a result of interaction with people, time and weather. Evans was born in a Rust Belt steel town and raised in rural Appalachia. She currently splits her time between New York City and the Hudson Valley. She will be conducting a reiteration of her piece, Time Machine, on the lawn of the Arts Quad on March 25 (eight-hour day performance).
- 6 p.m. April 5, 2021: Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Using critical wit and collaborative co-creation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic and flows of capital to investigate issues of economies and empire. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship. For 2019/2020 she is a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC. She is featured in Season 9 of the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. Syjuco will also conduct an open discussion with Art + Design students from her studio on Oakland on April 6 via ZOOM.
The New Gallery will be open 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Friday or by appointment. Curator-guided tours are also available upon request for groups smaller than 15. Closed on weekends and holidays and follows the university’s academic calendar. For more information on the exhibitions or lectures, contact Michael Dickins, gallery director, at dickinsm@apsu.edu.
Dates are subject to change. To stay informed of upcoming events or scheduling changes, follow the Department of Art + Design on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
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