Please join the MSU Department of Art, Art History, and Design for a special virtual lecture series titled Mutant Salon hosted by Young Joon Kwak, 2020-2021 Artist-in-Residence: Critical Race Studies. Mutant Salon is returning Spring 2021 and will feature talks by Beatriz Cortez, Kelly Akashi, Nikita Gale, and Amanda Ross-Ho. This series is will be held on Wednesdays at 4 pm EST, please see below for more information about the speakers and the specific dates that they will be offering their public talks.

This event does not require pre-registration, if you are interested in joining our zoom webinar, please do so using the link and password below.

https://msu.zoom.us/j/97803340342 pw: mutants

For the security of our events, please do not share the link and password on social media.

Beatriz Cortez | February 17 | Virtual on Zoom | 4 PM EST

Beatriz Cortez (b. 1970, San Salvador, El Salvador; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Studies from Arizona State University. Cortez’s work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities, and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration, and in relation to imagining possible futures. She has had solo exhibitions at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2019); Clockshop, Los Angeles (2018); Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles (2016); Centro Cultural de España de El Salvador (2014); and Museo Municipal Tecleño (MUTE), El Salvador (2012), among others. Cortez has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2019); Ballroom Marfa, TX (2019); Socrates Sculpture Park, New York (2019); John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); BANK/MABSOCIETY, Shanghai, China (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Centro Cultural Metropolitano, Quito, Ecuador (2016); and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016). Cortez is the recipient of the Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020), the inaugural Frieze Arto LIFEWTR Sculpture Prize (2019), the Emergency Grant from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts (2019), the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018), the Artist Community Engagement Grant (2017), and the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016).  

For more information about Beatriz Cortez and their work, please visit their website.

Kelly Akashi | February 24 | Virtual on Zoom | 4 PM EST

Material tactility, its possibilities, limitations, and transformation form the core of Kelly Akashi’s practice. Originally trained in analog photography, traditional processes and the materiality of documents continue to inform and fuel her sculptural explorations. Working in a variety of media, such as wax, bronze, fire, glass, silicone, copper, and rope, Akashi investigates the capacity and boundaries of these elements and their ability to construct and challenge conventional concepts of form.

Born in 1983 in Los Angeles, Kelly Akashi currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. The artist graduated with a MFA from University of Southern California in 2014. Akashi studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design in 2006.

Currently on view at the Aspen Art Museum is a new commissioned sculpture, Cultivator, which will be on view at the museum’s Crown Commons through March 2021. Winner of the 2019 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize the artist had a residency at the foundation in Ojai, California. Other residencies include ARCH Athens, Greece (2019) and at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2019) – both of which concluded with a solo exhibition. Other important solo exhibitions include Long Exposure curated by Ruba Katrib at the SculptureCenter, New York (2017). The artist’s work is currently featured in Ground/work at the Clark Art Institute and Possédé·e·s at MoCo Montpellier Contemporain in France. Other notable group exhibitions include the Hammer Museum’s biennial, Made in L.A. (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2017); LA: A Fiction, Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France (2017); Take me (I’m Yours), curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jens Hoffmann, and Kelly Taxter, Jewish Museum, New York (2016); Can’t Reach Me There, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2015).

For more information about Kelly Akashi and their work, please visit their website.

Nikita Gale | March 17 | Virtual on Zoom | 4 PM EST

Nikita Gale (b. 1983, Anchorage, Alaska; lives and works in Los Angeles) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California and holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and earned an MFA in New Genres at UCLA. Gale’s practice is often structured by long-term obsessions with specific objects and the ways these objects gesture towards particular social and political histories. Gale uses ubiquitous consumer technologies as frameworks to consider how individuals potentially reproduce their relationships to objects within their relationships to psychic space and political, social, and economic systems. For Gale, the term “reproduction” is as much a mechanical, technical process as it is a process rooted in sex, biology and the organic.
On a more physical register, Gale’s work points to the ways that many technologies can be understood as instruments that extend or amplify the body through a relationship to touch. Reproduction connects humans to a desire for extension and amplification both biologically and through industrial processes. By engaging with materials that have properties that are simultaneously acoustic and protective, Gale’s recent work considers the role of audience as a social arena and examines the ways in which silence and noise function as political positions and conditions.

Nikita’s work has recently been exhibited at MoMA PS1 (New York); LACE (Los Angeles); Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles); Matthew Marks Gallery (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); Rodeo Gallery (London); Ceysson & Benetiere (Paris); and in “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). Gale’s work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Art21, AQNB, Frieze, Vogue, and Flash Art. Nikita currently serves on the Board of Directors for GREX, the west coast affiliate of the AK Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems.

For more information about Nikita Gale and their work, please visit their website.

Amanda Ross-Ho | March 24 | Virtual on Zoom | 4 PM EST

Amanda Ross-Ho’s work draws from a broad hierarchy of structures, mapping connectivity within the overlapping ecologies of personal and universal phenomena. Her evolving personal language combines forensic and theatrical gestures, diagramming the reflexive relationships between production, presentation, and the social contracts of viewership. Her sculpture, painting, photography, installation, and most recently, public works have been exhibited widely, nationally and internationally.

Amanda Ross-Ho holds a BFA from the School of the Art institute of Chicago and an MFA from the Roski School of Art, University of Southern California.  Solo exhibitions include Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles, Hoet Bekaert, Belgium, The Pomona Museum of Art, Mitchell-Innes and Nash New York, The Visual Arts Center, Austin, TX, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Middelburg, Netherlands, the Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany, The Approach, London, and Praz-Delavallade, Paris. Group exhibitions include Artists Space, New York, The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, The Orange County Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, The New Museum, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial. In 2013 she debuted her first large-scale commissioned public work at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and 2015, she presented a new large-scale sculpture commission in City Hall Park, New York City through the Public Art Fund. Ross-Ho’s work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, ArtReview, Modern Painters, Art in America, Flash Art, Art + Auction, and Frieze among others. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

For more information about Amanda Ross-Ho and their work, please visit their website.