Illinois State University Wonsook Kim School of Art presents the spring 2022 Visiting Artist Lecture Series. Beginning February 1 and running every Tuesday through April 12, each lecture will begin at 1 p.m. and feature the following artists. Lectures are open to the public and will be offered via Zoom (Meeting ID: 944 1789 2154).
Tuesday, February 1
Maria Carolina Baulo holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Buenos Aires (Honor Diploma). She has been an independent curator since 2009 with more than 30 exhibitions developed together with prominent visual artists in important Argentine art galleries, museums, and cultural centers. She works as contributing editor for Sculpture Magazine, a publication of the International Sculpture Center (U.S.A) and is a writer-critic for several national and international media publications specialized in contemporary art such as Diario Clarín-Cultura (Argentina), Revista Ñ (Argentina), Revista de Semiótica Ad Versus (Argentina), and Hoornik Collection Art Magazine (Argentina), among others.
Since 2013, Baulo has been a postgraduate professor at the University Del Salvador. She also works as an adviser to artists, collectors, and art spaces. With studies in the field of cinema, theater, and photography, among other activities, she coordinates study of aesthetics and contemporary art. Baulo is a member of the Argentine Association of Art Critics (Asociación Argentina de Críticos de Arte – AACA).
Tuesday, February 15
Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. Her work spans formats and durations, including sound performances at a military site in New Haven (Sounds for Liberation); long-term public art interventions at the largest jail in the country (96 Acres Project); appropriations of museum archives (Brown Brilliance Darkness Matter); and audio-video works documenting a jail located in her childhood neighborhood (On the Border of What is Formless and Monstrous).
Gaspar’s projects have been supported by the Art for Justice Fund, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Gaspar has received the United States Artists Fellowship, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including the MoMA PS1, New York; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the African American Museum, Philadelphia; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, holds an MFA in studio arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
See title image for work created by artist Maria Gaspar.
Tuesday, March 1
Matthew Girson is a painter and citizen of the United States. These characteristics are essential to his work that intersects recent histories of painting and politics as we drift further and further away from late modernism, the period that is written into the narrative of art history as a high point in the western tradition. His work has been exhibited in the United States, Europe, and Asia; most recently at Kunsthal, Ghent, Belgium, and Aspect Ratio Projects in Chicago. He is a faculty member in The Art School at DePaul University in Chicago. His cat is called Jelly, short for Fra An-Jelly-co.
Tuesday, March 15
M. Rachael Arauz is an independent curator of modern and contemporary art, with a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Pennsylvania. She has organized exhibitions and contributed to museum catalogues in the United States, Mexico, and Europe, on topics including mid-century abstraction, Mexican photography, language and text in contemporary art, non-figurative portraiture, sound sculpture, and weaving. She has also written about her museum experience as a “minority intern” in the 1990s and served as juror and visiting critic for various organizations. Arauz was co-curator of the 2019 exhibition In the Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950-1969 for the Portland Museum of Art, Maine.
Tuesday, March 29
Aaron Turner is a photographer and educator currently based in Arkansas. He uses the 4×5 view camera to create still-life studies on identity, history, blackness as material, and abstraction. Turner received his M.A. from Ohio University and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He was a 2018 Light Work Artists-in-Residence at Syracuse University, the 2019 EnFoco Photography Fellow, a 2020 Visual Studies Workshop Project Space A-I-R, a 2020 Artist 360 Mid-America Arts Alliance Grant Recipient, the 2021 Houston Center for Photography Fellowship Recipient, and a recipient of the 2021 Creators Lab Photo Fund from Google’s Creator Labs & the Aperture Foundation.
Tuesday, April 12
Ishan Khosla (b. Fort Kochi, 1976) is a South Asian visual artist, designer, researcher, and educator with an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York City, and a B.S. in computer science from the University of Washington. Currently, he is an associate professor at UPES Dehradun.
Khosla’s work as an artist is influenced by the images he captures on the streets of India. These become a repository that helps him distil his observations, thoughts, and ideas into artworks. His artistic practice reflects the visual quality of his commercial work as a type and graphic designer. His art addresses the larger socio-cultural contexts as well as the quotidian and employs tropes such as parody, irony, and subversion.
Exhibitions include; Indian Ocean Craft Triennial, Australia; Handcraft for the digital: Type design from India at Atelier Muji Ginza, Tokyo; Crossing Visions V: The Ecology of Creation, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; BOLD — Graphic Design from India, London Design Festival; Fracture: New Directions on Contemporary Textiles, Devi Art Foundation. Works created for Porosity Kabari at Studio X, Mumbai in 2016 have been shown at Serendipity Arts Festival; Continental Shift: Contemporary art and South Asia (Bunjil Place) Australia; Nishi Gallery, Canberra; the Australian Design Center, Sydney; and Hawkesbury Gallery, Australia. Works were collected the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan and the Powerhouse Museum, Australia.
His academic papers — “Godna: from skin to screen,” on the typeface made from tribal tattoos has been published in the National Museum Institute book, Art, Design and Society; while “After Life: lessons on Product Longevity from the Informal Economy” has been published in State-of-the-Art Upcycling Research and Practice [Springer].
Khosla’s work has been published in Bi-Scriptual — Typography and Graphic Design with Multiple Script Systems; Typographic Universe; Found Type; India Contemporary Design: Fashion, Graphics, Interiors; Tokyo Type Directors Club; New Graphic Design; and Asian Graphics Now! among others. He has given talks at Fukuoka Asian Art Museum; the Powerhouse Museum; Maison de Sciences de l’Homme; Semi-Permanent, the University of Edinburgh; College of Fine Arts (Sydney); Konstfack (Stockholm); Aalto University (Helsinki); the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art; Typographics (Type @ Cooper); Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI); Type Drives Communities; Typo Berlin; TypoDay; TypeWknd 21; London Design Festival; Pune Design Festival; and Kyoorius Design Yatra.
For more information about the Visiting Artist Program email VisitingArtists@IllinoisState.edu.
