College of DuPage announces Visiting Artist Series for 2019-2020
The College of DuPage Fine Arts program, in collaboration with the Cleve Carney Museum of Art, welcomes six artists to campus for lectures and workshops as part of the 2019-2020 Visiting Artist Series.
All lectures are free and open to the public and take place in either the Playhouse Theatre or Belushi Performance Hall of the McAninch Arts Center, located on the Glen Ellyn campus, 425 Fawell Blvd. To learn more, visit www.cod.edu.
In its fifth year, the Visiting Artist Series provides opportunities for the community to engage with leaders in the fields of contemporary art, design and culture.
This year's series highlights artists who are committed to engaging with materiality through diverse mediums and practices.
The Visiting Artists Series begins at 1 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 18, with a lecture by messenger, artist and educator Nick Cave in Belushi Performance Hall.
Cave, described as a Renaissance artist, works between the visual and performing arts through a wide range of mediums, including sculpture, installation, video, sound and performance. His solo exhibitions have expanded globally from the United States through France, Africa, Denmark, Asia, South America and the Caribbean.
Cave is most famous for creating "Soundsuits," sculptural costumes enveloping the wearer's body in everyday objects. "Soundsuits" camouflage the body, masking and creating a second skin that conceals race, gender and class, forcing the viewer to look without judgment.
Cave also works as a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
• Multidisciplinary artist Mie Kongo discusses how her work is driven by a sense of curiosity, discovery, realization and learning through everyday life at 11 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 22, in Belushi Performance Hall.
Kongo creates multidisciplinary work with diverse materials, including ceramic sculptures, installations and porcelain designed objects. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent exhibitions at the Arts and Literature Laboratory in Madison, Wis., 4th Ward Project Space in Chicago, Grunwald Gallery of Art at Indiana University Bloomington and the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago.
Her residencies include Shigaraki Ceramics Cultural Center in Japan, the European Ceramic Work Centre in the Netherlands and Intonation Deidesheim in Germany. She is an adjunct associate professor in the ceramics department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
• Artist Aden Kumler shares her extensive knowledge of medieval art history at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 20, in Belushi Performance Hall.
Kumler is an associate professor in the departments of Art History and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago and an affiliated faculty member of the University of Chicago's Medieval Studies program, Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and Divinity School. She is the co-editor of the International Center of Medieval Art's "Viewpoints" book series, a new forum for experimental books on medieval art history, co-published by the International Center of Medieval Art and Penn State University Press.
• Installation artist Paola Cabal discusses the intersection between physics and perception at 11 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 20, in the Playhouse Theatre.
Cabal is best known for her rigorous observational studies of daylight over time - movements the artist photographs on-site, then paints directly into spaces trompe l'oeil-style using spray paint.
As an artist and educator, Cabal co-teaches a course called "Articulating Time and Space" alongside astrophysicist Kathryn Schaffer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Cabal has received a fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council, an Individual Artist award from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, a joint commission for the Chicago Transit Authority and the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, and a residency at the Chicago Cultural Center.
• Visual artist Mary Mattingly discusses her work that explores issues of sustainability, climate change and displacement at 1 p.m. Wednesday, March 18, in Belushi Performance Hall.
Based in New York, Mattingly creates photographs, sculptures and large-scale public art projects addressing climate change by drawing connections between the social and economic forces that make up the current political ecology impacting our environment.
In 2016, she launched a floating food forest on a barge called "Swale," a social sculpture where people are invited to pick food from an edible landscape in order to circumvent public land laws in New York City that disallow public foraging.
Mattingly recently transplanted a group of edible palm trees to upstate New York to show that the introduced vegetation accounts for predictions in climatological shifts. Mattingly's artwork has been featured in The New York Times, Le Monde, New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal as well as on CBS, BBC, NBC and PBS's Art21.
• Chicago-based architect, Vladimir Radutny closes out the series with a discussion about his architecture studio's belief that architecture is an art form at 11 a.m. Wednesday, April 8, in the Playhouse Theatre.
In 2008, Radutny founded his Chicago-based architecture and design studio. Radutny's multidisciplinary architecture practice focuses on innovative design solutions that challenge the conventional interpretations of space, function and material use.
His studio's approach is ideas-driven, relying on imagination and experience to identify the creative nuances within each project. He believes in architecture as an art form with capacity to not just alter space, but to change perceptions, feelings and habits, transcending the workplace, home or in-between.
His practice has been recognized with numerous AIA design awards and, in 2017, Radutny was awarded the Dubin Family Young Architect Award. In addition, he teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture.