Artist/poet Jen Bervin will deliver a free public lecture at University Galleries on November 9 at 4 p.m.
Bervin’s practice is rooted in multiple disciplines including art, writing, and science. She describes her work as exploring “acts of reading, writing, listening, often through the lens of textiles or traditional crafts, to facilitate cross-cultural encounter, exchange, and feminist critique.” Three of Bervin’s The Dickinson Composites—large-scale embroideries that “depict Emily Dickinson’s variant marks in her manuscripts”—are on view in University Galleries’ current exhibition, Strange Oscillations and Vibrations of Sympathy. This presentation is one of the keynote addresses for Oscillations of Gender and Genre, a symposium taking place at University Galleries in conjunction with the exhibition.
Bervin’s work has been exhibited at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MCA Denver; The Power Plant, Toronto; and BRIC, Brooklyn, among others. She has published nine books, including Nets, Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems, and The Desert. She has received a Creative Capital grant and residencies at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and SETI Institute.
All events at University Galleries are free and open to the public. You do not need to be a registered conference participant to attend Bervin’s talk or any of the other symposium presentations. To arrange a special accommodation, please contact University Galleries at (309) 438-5487 or gallery@ilstu.edu.
This event was made possible by a generous grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and additional funding was provided by the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation.
