Beatriz Cortez

Tuesday, September 17, 5:30pm, Florence Kopleff Recital Hall

The work of Beatriz Cortez explores simultaneity, multiple temporalities, and speculative imaginaries. Cortez has an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a PhD in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of California, Davis.

Cortez has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including the most recent 60th International Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere and the 14th Shanghai Biennial, Cosmos Cinema. Recent solo exhibitions have been at Storm King Art Center, Williams College Museum of Art, Commonwealth and Council and Craft Contemporary Museum of Art.

Cortez is the recipient of the Latinx Artist Fellowship, Borderlands Fellowship, and Artadia Los Angeles Award, among others. Her work has also exhibited her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; TEOR/éTica, San José, Costa Rica; Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Panamá; MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego, among others.

 

 

Carmen Winant

Monday, November 18, 5:30pm, Student Center Speaker's Auditorium

Carmen Winant is an artist and the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at the Ohio State University. Her work utilizes archival and authored photographs to examine feminist care networks, with particular emphasis on intergenerational, multiracial, and sometimes transnational coalition building. Winant's recent projects have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Sculpture Center, Wexner Center of the Arts, ICA Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and el Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. Winant's artist’s books include My Birth (2018), Notes on Fundamental Joy (2019), and Instructional Photography: Learning How To Live Now (2021); Arrangements, A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures (both 2022), and The last safe abortion (2024). Winant is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography, a 2020 FCA Artist Honoree and a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters award recipient. She is a community organizer, prison educator, and mother to her two children, Carlo and Rafa, shared with her partner, Luke Stettner.

Dr. Chelsea Frazier

Monday, February 17, 5:30pm, Florence Kopleff Recital Hall

CHELSEA MIKAEL FRAZIER, PhD is a Black feminist ecocritic—writing, researching, and teaching at the intersection of Black feminist theory and environmental thought.  Across a diverse array of platforms, all of Dr. Frazier’s work is geared toward creating paths toward harmonial Worlds that no longer rely on the harm of Black people, the destruction of our environment, or the exploitation of femininity to keep spinning.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

In 2019, she founded Ask An Amazon, an educational hub where she designs educational tools, curates community gatherings, gives lectures, and provides consulting services meant to help students, professionals, and organizations with their intellectual and creative development. She also sits on the Cornell University Department of Literatures in English faculty where she teaches students and trains emergent scholars in the fields of African American Literature and Culture, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Environmental Humanities.

Dr. Frazier is currently at work on her first book manuscript which is a culmination of a years-long ecocritical investigation of contemporary Black women artists, writers, and activists. In her analyses, she illuminates the cultural histories and creative contributions of Black women who’ve carved-out a rich and transformative practice of ecological ethics alternative to the “environmentalisms” that are readily legible in Western society.

Dr. Frazier earned her Ph.D in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University. Additionally, she earned her Master of Arts from the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern, her Master of Arts from the American Studies program at Purdue University, and her Bachelor of Arts from the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College.

As an award-winning interdisciplinary researcher, Dr. Frazier's scholarship spans the fields of Black feminist literature and theory, visual culture, ecocriticism and the broader environmental humanities, political theory, science and technology studies, and Afrofuturism. Her work has been generously supported by the Northwestern University Presidential Society of Fellows, the Science in Human Culture program at Northwestern University, the Buffett Institute for Global Studies, the Social Science Research Council, the Alumni Association of Barnard College, the Purdue University Lynn Fellowship, and the Mellon Mays Fellowship program.

 

 

Trenton Doyle Hancock

Monday, March 10, 5:30pm, Florence Kopleff Recital Hall

For almost two decades, Trenton Doyle Hancock has been constructing his own fantastical narrative that continues to develop and inform his prolific artistic output. Part fictional, part autobiographical, Hancock’s work pulls from his own personal experience, art historical canon, comics and superheroes, pulp fiction, and myriad pop culture references, resulting in a complex amalgamation of characters and plots possessing universal concepts of light and dark, good and evil, and all the grey in between.

Hancock transforms traditionally formal decisions— such as his use of color, language, and pattern—into opportunities to create new characters, develop subplots and convey symbolic meaning. Hancock’s works are suffused with personal mythology presented at an operatic scale, often reinterpreting Biblical stories that the artist learned as a child from his family and local church community. His exuberant and subversive narratives employ a variety of cultural tropes, ranging in tone from comic-strip superhero battles to medieval morality plays and influenced in style by Hieronymus Bosch, Max Ernst, Henry Darger, Philip Guston and R. Crumb. Text embedded within the paintings and drawings both drives the narrative and acts as a central visual component. The resulting sprawling installations spill beyond the canvas edges and onto gallery walls.

As a whole, Hancock’s highly developed cast of characters acts out a complex mythological battle, creating an elaborate cosmology that embodies his unique aesthetic ideals, musings on color, language, emotions and ultimately, good versus evil. Hancock’s mythology has also been translated through performance, even onto the stage in an original ballet, Cult of Color: Call to Color, commissioned by Ballet Austin, and through site-specific murals for the Dallas Cowboys Stadium in Dallas, TX, and at the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, WA.

Trenton Doyle Hancock was born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, OK. Raised in Paris, Texas, Hancock earned his BFA from Texas A&M University, Commerce, and his MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia. Hancock was featured in the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, at the time becoming one of the youngest artists in history to participate in the prestigious survey. In 2014, his exhibition, Skin & Bones: 20 Years of Drawing, at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston traveled to Akron Art Museum, OH; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, VA. In 2019, a major exhibition of his work, Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass, opened at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA. In November 2020, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston unveiled Color Flash for Chat and Chew, Paris Texas in Seventy-Two, Hancock’s monumental tapestry commission, which will remain on permanent display in the Museum’s new Kinder Building. In November 2024, The Jewish Museum in New York will present Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston, bring together for the first time two trailblazing American artists from different generations.His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Locust Projects, Miami, FL; Menil Collection, Houston TX; Temple Contemporary, Philadelphia, PA; the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO; the Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL; the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL; the Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah and Atlanta, GA; The Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro, NC; The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. TX; The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL; Institute for Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Olympic Sculpture Park at the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Hancock’s work is in the permanent collections of several prestigious museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Studio Museum, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; the Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, TX; Akron Art Museum, OH; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; and il Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea, Trento, Italy. The recipient of numerous awards, Trenton Doyle Hancock lives and works in Houston, Texas.

This speaker has been generously co-sponsored by Burnaway, an Atlanta-based, non-profit magazine of contemporary art and criticism from the American South.