2018-19 Visiting Artist Lecture Series Announced

The SMU Meadows Division of Art announces its 2018-19 Visiting Artist Lecture Series, which will feature public talks by five national and international artists this fall and spring. The annual lecture series brings diverse artists to the SMU campus to provide perspective on current ideas and practices in the contemporary art world. All lectures take place in O’Donnell Hall, Room 2130 in SMU’s Owen Arts Center, 6101 Bishop Blvd., Dallas 75205. Admission is free, and no reservations are needed. The lecture series is made possible with generous support from Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo, Debbie and Eric Green, the Dorothea Leonhardt Fund at the Communities Foundation of Texas, an anonymous donor and Ignite/Arts Dallas. For more information, visit the lecture web page or call 214.768.2787.

Simonetta Moro
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
7 p.m.
Simonetta Moro is a visual artist whose work focuses on painting, drawing and mapping practices. Through an interpretation of the phenomenological world, places become repositories of memory, points of departure for imaginary journeys, vectors of time and space, and sites of exploration and intervention. Moro studied art in Italy and the UK, and currently lives in New York City. She is the director and associate professor at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in Portland, Maine. For more about the artist, visit here.

Nyugen E. Smith
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
7 p.m.
Nyugen E. Smith is a Caribbean-American interdisciplinary artist and educator who lives and works in Jersey City, N.J. His practice consists of found object sculpture, installation, writing, video and performance and is influenced by the conflation of African cultural practices and the remnants of European colonial rule in the black diaspora. He holds an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in 2016 won a two-year Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing and Visual Arts, with which he conducted fieldwork in the Caribbean on mythical and historical figures from Caribbean and American literature. For more about the artist, visit here.

José “Tony” Cruz Pabón
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
7 p.m.
Artist Tony Cruz Pabón lives and works in Puerto Rico. His work has been shown in New York, London, Glasgow, Tenerife (Spain), Cuba and throughout Central and South America. It has also been featured in biennials in Ecuador, Dominican Republic and Havana, and most recently in the 2018 Berlin Biennale. Pabón received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2014. He was the co-director and co-founder of the cultural space Beta-Local in San Juan, which includes a production program, experimental education project and platform for critical discussion. He is a graduate of the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Puerto Rico. For more about the artist, visit here.

Signe Pierce
Wednesday, February 6, 2019
7 p.m.
Signe Pierce is a multimedia artist whose work straddles performance, photography, video, social media, light design and installation. She is a self-described “reality artist” whose work is inspired by the concept of reality as an artistic medium, and the idea that an artist’s life and work can both be viewed within a similar context. Her ideology often explores the myriad facets of perception involved in discerning what is “real” within the burgeoning era of hyperreality, new media and technological singularity. Over the past two years, Pierce has partaken in multiple performances, installations and exhibitions, including solo shows at Times Square Space in New York, Annka Kultys Gallery in London and Galerie Nathalie Halgand in Vienna; a performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and an artist’s talk at Yale University. She is the star and co-creator of the acclaimed short film American Reflexxx, which has received multiple awards and been screened in over 15 countries. For more about the artist, visit here.

Holly Walker
Monday, April 1, 2019
7 p.m.
Artist’s demonstration: April 1-4 in the Doolin Gallery, Owen Arts Center, 6101 Bishop Blvd. on the SMU campus
Ceramicist Holly Walker is known for inventive terracotta forms that are spare, architectonic and Shakeresque. Pinched coils create a visual tempo and rhythm that is inherent in the process of building. Abstract geometric structure maps the geography of the pot, enlivened by painterly brushing of colored slips and glazes. Walker’s work has been exhibited at venues including AKAR, The Clay Studio, Harvard University and The Philadelphia Museum, among others, and is part of numerous collections including the Museum of Contemporary Craft (Portland, Ore.) and San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts. She has taught courses at Rhode Island School of Design and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and presented lectures and workshops around the country. She has served as director of Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (Maine), and as gallery assistant, archivist and educational outreach director at Penland School of Crafts (N.C.). She is a recent recipient of a Frog Hollow/Vermont Craft Association Artisan Grant and a Vermont Arts Council Development Grant. For more about the artist, visit here.