MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
Department of Art, Art History, and Design
2021-2022 STANLEY & SELMA HOLLANDER VISITING ARTIST, DESIGN, AND SCHOLAR LECTURE SERIES
FALL 2021
Dan Paz | Wednesday, September 29 | Virtual on Zoom | 6 pm
Dan Paz, 2021-2022 Artist-in-Residence: Critical Race Studies is a visual artist and educator who explores the labor of imaging production to query the ability of documentary processes to be manipulated – to be multiplied and replicated, stopped and started, rewound and advanced. Paz works within the impossibilities of absolute replication to question the very ability of the image to truly represent. Paz has worked on The sun never knew how great it was until it struck the side of a building, an interdisciplinary project that explores the conditions of youth incarceration, architecture, and grassroots activism. Motivated by familial relationships to incarceration, the project builds a genealogy of how power articulates itself through image production and access to information.
Elka Stevens | Monday, October 4 | Virtual on Zoom | 6 pm
Elka Stevens, 2021-2022 Artist-in-Residence: Critical Race Studies is a textile and mixed media artist whose scholarly interests lie at the intersections of visual and material culture, international trade, gender, and identity. She uses textiles and clothing as a lens of analysis, inspiration, and media for her work to explore themes of sizeism, repurposing, pedagogy, digital humanities, archival methodologies, and social justice. Stevens is an Associate Professor at Howard University.
Karyn Olivier | Monday, October 18 | Virtual on Zoom | 6 pm
Karyn Olivier is an Associate Professor of sculpture at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. who creates sculptures, installations and public art. Olivier’s artistic practice merges multiple histories and collective memory with present-day narratives.
Martha Russo | Tuesday, November 9 | Virtual on Zoom | 6 pm
Martha Russo teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Russo’s ceramic sculptures and installations embrace the precarious by extending into space, hovering in mid-air, barely holding on, piled up, and sometimes on the verge of disappearing into dust, speaking to the immediacy and transient nature and the fragility of life.
T.J. Demos | Thursday, December 2 | Virtual on Zoom | 6 pm
T. J. Demos’ is a professor and the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Demos’ research focuses on the intersections of contemporary art, radical politics, and ecology—particularly where art, activism, and visual culture oppose racial, colonial, and extractive capitalism, and where they work towards social, economic, and environmental justice. He is the author of numerous books, including: Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Duke University Press, 2020), Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016), and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, (Sternberg Press, 2017). Demos’ will serve as the 2021 Art History & Visual Culture Symposium Keynote Speaker.
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SPRING 2022
Kelly Walters | Tuesday, March 17 | Zoom Webinar | 6pm
Kelly Walters is a designer, educator and founder of the multidisciplinary design studio Bright Polka Dot. Her ongoing design research interrogates the complexities of identity formation, systems of value, and the shared vernacular in and around Black visual culture. She is the author of Black, Brown + Latinx Design Educators: Conversations on Design and Race published by Princeton Architectural Press and a co-editor of The Black Experience in Design. Kelly is an Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the BFA Communication Design Program at Parsons School of Design at The New School in New York.
Jens Hauser | Thursday, April 14 | Hybrid | 6pm
Jens Hauser is a Paris and Copenhagen based media studies scholar and art curator focusing on the interactions between art and technology, trans-genre and hybrid aesthetics. He’s currently a researcher at University of Copenhagen’s Medical Museion, following a dual post-doctoral research position at the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, and coordinates the (OU)VERT network for Greenness Studies. He is also a senior postdoc researcher at the Medical University Vienna, a distinguished affiliated faculty member of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University, where he co-directs the BRIDGE artist in residency program, an affiliated faculty member at the Department for Image Science at Danube University Krems, a guest lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and at the University of Innsbruck, a guest professor at the Department of Arts and Sciences of Art at Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, and a researcher affiliated with École Polytechnique Paris-Saclay. Hauser has been the chair of the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts’ 2018 conference in Copenhagen. At the intersection of media studies, art history and epistemology, he has previously developed an aesthetic and epistemological theory of biomediality as part of his PhD at Ruhr University Bochum, and also holds a degree in science and technology journalism from Université François Rabelais in Tours.
Shane Darwent | Monday, April 18 | Virtual on Zoom | 6pm
Shane Darwent (b. 1983, Austin, TX) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice mines the commercial vernacular that lines American roadways to inform experimental photographic works, large-scale sculpture, and site-responsive installations. Within a landscape designed to overwhelm, Darwent’s practice seeks out a redacted formalism in order to meditate on the transitional nature of these spaces and the shape-shifting economic constructs of which they are a part. Exhibiting internationally, Darwent has been an artist-in-residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Ragdale, the Ucross Foundation and the Jentel Artist Residency Program, as well as a Core Fellow at Penland School of Crafts. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan (2017) and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2005). Darwent’s work is included in the recent publication, 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow, by Thames & Hudson (2019). Recent solo exhibitions include Sun Smoke, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York City (2021); Plaza Park, Boise State University (2019); The Setting Stone, University of Tulsa (2019); and Suburban Psalm, Spring Break Art Show, NYC (2018). He is currently an artist-in-residence at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship in Tulsa, Oklahoma
