MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
Department of Art, Art History, and Design
2020-2021 VISITING ARTIST + SCHOLAR LECTURE SERIES
FALL 2020
Young Joon Kwak | Thursday, September 17 | Zoom Webinar | 6pm
Young Joon Kwak, 2020-2021 MSU Artist-in-Residence: Critical Race Studies. Kwak is an LA-based multi-disciplinary artist working primarily through sculpture, performance, video, and collaboration. Kwak’s work reimagines the form, functionality, and materiality of objects in order to propose different ways of viewing and interpreting bodies and the physical and social spaces that govern our everyday lives as mutable, inclusive, and open-ended. Kwak is the founder of Mutant Salon, a roving beauty salon/platform for experimental performance collaborations with their community of queer, trans, femme, POC artists and performers. Kwak is the lead performer in the electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner.
Malcom Mobutu Smith | Thursday, October 15 | Zoom Webinar | 6pm
Malcolm Mobutu Smith is the Director of Graduate Studies and an Associate Professor at Indiana University. As a ceramic sculptor, Smith is guided by improvisation merging the graphic with form in space, Smith’s work relies on wheel-thrown and hand-built forms. His work is most commonly presented as abstractions of cups, bottles, and vases. Informing these intersections are his interests in letterforms, graffiti art, and jazz.
Dr. Nick Kardulias | Thursday, October 22 | Zoom Webinar | 6pm
“Tracing the Role of Marginal Regions in the Ancient Mediterranean: The Archaeology of the Malloura Valley in Central Cyprus”
Dr. Kardulias is the Lewis M. and Marian Senter Nixon Professor of Classical Civilization, and Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at The College of Wooster. He also serves as chair of the Archaeology Program. With research interests in the archaeology and ethnography of the Mediterranean region, the archaeology of North America, political anthropology, world-systems theory, ancient trade systems, and analysis of stone tools, Kardulias is author of a monograph and the editor or co-editor of seven books, including Crossroads and Boundaries: The Archaeology of Past and Present in the Malloura Valley, Cyprus (2011), and The Ecology of Pastoralism (2015)
Ali Momeni | Wednesday, October 28 | Zoom Webinar | 6pm
Ali Momeni’s research interests include educational technologies, human-computer-interaction for performative applications of robotics, playful urban interventions, interactive projection performance, machine learning for artists and designers, interactive tools for storytelling and experiential learning, mobile and hybrid musical instruments, and the intersection of sound, music, and health. Momeni is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of California Berkley in the Center for New Music and UAudio Technologies. He has previously been a Visiting Professor of Practice at Brown University in the Brown Arts Initiative & Brown Data Science Initiative. As well as an Associate Professor working in the School of Art, within Sculpture and Installation at Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr. Kristin Romberg | Thursday, November 19 | Zoom Webinar | 6pm
“Russian Constructivist Tectonics and the Wegenerian Revolution”
Kristin Romberg is Associate Professor of Art History at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her book Gan’s Constructivism: Aesthetic Theory for an Embedded Modernism was published by University of California Press in 2018. Curatorial projects include Architecture in Print: Design and Debate in the Soviet Union, 1919-1934 (Wallach Art Gallery, 2005), Propositions on Revolution (Slogans for a Future) (Krannert Art Museum, 2017). She has also consulted and written for the catalogue for two major museum exhibitions: Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017, and Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, which opens at MoMA in New York in December 2020. This lecture serves as the keynote for the 2020 Undergraduate Art History & Visual Culture Symposium being held on Friday, November 20 from 2-5 pm.
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SPRING 2021
Tim Brown | Tuesday, February 9 | Zoom Webinar | 6pm
Tim Brown is the creative vision behind Allbirds, shoes, apparel, and accessories, where he combines his experiences as a World Cup soccer player for New Zealand with his background in business management and design. Brown is driven by a desire to do things better, his design practice is balanced with his active advocacy for sustainable practices in business, with a focus on renewable practices for the materials, packaging, sources, and manufacturing of Allbirds.
Please click here for more information and to register for this event.
Dr. Kathleen Bickford Berzock | Wednesday, February 17 | Zoom Webinar | 6pm
Dr. Kathleen Bickford Berzock is the Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs, at the Block Museum, at Northwestern, specializing in African art. Her co-edited book (with Christa Clark) Representing Africa in American Art Museums: A Century of Collecting and Display (2010) chronicles more than a century of building and presenting collections of African art in the United States.
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Kevin Huizenga | Friday, February 26 | Zoom Webinar | 7pm
Kevin Huizenga’s graphic novels include Curses, The Wild Kingdom, Gloriana, and the recently released The River at Night. His work has been translated into six languages, garnered five Ignatz awards, as well as nominations for Harvey and Eisner awards. In 2020, The Guardian named The River at Night one of the best comics of the past decade. Huizenga lives in Minneapolis where he taught in the Comic Art program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 2015-2019. Huizenga is the 2021 Comics Forum Creator Keynote Speaker.
Please click here for more information about the 2021 MSU Comics Forum.
Deborah Whaley | Saturday, February 27 | Zoom Webinar | 1pm
Deborah Elizabeth Whaley is an artist, curator, writer, Senior Scholar for Digital Arts and Humanities for DSPS, director of the Digital Humanities graduate certificate, and Professor of American Studies and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. In her recent book, Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime, Whaley explores graphic novel production and comic book fandom, looking in particular at African, African American, and multiethnic women as deployed in television, film, animation, gaming, and print representations of comic book and graphic novel characters. Whaley was a Resident Visiting Scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and was a recipient of a grant from the Monroe Trotter Institute for Black Culture for her research on responses to 9/11 in Black expressive art and in the public sphere. Whaley is the 2021 Comics Forum Scholar Keynote Speaker.
Please click here for more information about the 2021 MSU Comics Forum.
Tanner Woodford | Thursday, March 25| Virtual on Zoom | 6pm
Tanner Woodford is the founder and executive director of the Design Museum of Chicago. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and makes Iterative Work. His research includes design issues, social change, and design history. His belief that design has the capacity to fundamentally improve the human condition is rooted in all of his pursuits.
Please click here for more information and to register for this event.
Ann Hamilton |Friday, April 16 | Virtual on Zoom | 5pm
Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally acclaimed for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations. Her site-responsive process works with common materials to invoke particular places, collective voices, and communities of labor. Hamilton is a Distinguished University Professor at The Ohio State University. Hamilton’s lecture will serve as the Spring 2021 MSU College of Arts and Letters Signature Lecture.
Please click here for more information and to register for this event.
