Two guest artists remain in the School of Art, Art History & Design’s Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar series this fall.
Leilani Lynch, the curator of The Bass Museum of Art in Miami, will present a lecture on Wednesday, Oct. 28 at 5:30 p.m. via Zoom at https://unl.zoom.us/j/98522114370. Painter Robert Pruitt will present a lecture on Wednesday, Nov. 11 at 5:30 p.m. via Zoom at https://unl.zoom.us/j/91903456572. The lectures are free and open to the public.
Lynch has curated solo exhibitions with Mika Rottenberg (2017), Karen Rifas (2018) and Aaron Curry (2018) in addition to co-organizing exhibitions with Ugo Rondinone, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Laure Prouvost, and Paola Pivi at The Bass.
Originally from the San Francisco Bay area, Leilani relocated to Miami in 2011 when she was chosen for an Art Table Summer Mentored Internship at The Bass, assisting the Knight Curatorial Fellow in planning the museum’s public art program Temporary Contemporary. After the internship, Lynch joined The Bass as Assistant to the Director/Curatorial Assistant. Before rejoining The Bass in 2015, she served as Exhibitions Manager at Locust Projects, Miami’s longest-running alternative arts space, producing site-specific experimental exhibitions with international artists.
Leilani has recently participated in panels for ArtTable and ICOM, as well as served on juries for Art Center, South Florida and Apexart, New York. She received a B.A. in the History of Art from University of California, Berkeley, with an emphasis in modern and contemporary art.
Pruitt was born in Houston, Texas. He received his B.F.A. from Texas Southern Univeristy and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a founding member of the Houston artist collective Otabenga Jones & Associates.
Pruitt has had solo exhibitions at The Pennsylvania College of Art & Design; The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia; Contemporary Art Museum in Houston; McKinney Art Center in Dallas; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Bakersfield Museum of Art in California; and most recently, a solo exhibition at the California African-American Museum in Los Angeles.
Pruitt was a participating artist in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and the 2010 SITE Santa Fe Biennial. He is a recipient of the Artadia Artist Award, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award and Joan Mitchell Foundation award. He received a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in 2015 and the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans in 2016.
He works in a variety of materials, but his practice is chiefly centered on rendering portraits of the human body, specifically the black body. He projects onto these bodies a juxtaposing series of experiences and material references, denoting a diverse and radical black past, present and future.
For more on his work, visit http://www.robert-pruitt.com.
The School of Art, Art History & Design’s Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series brings notable artists, scholars and designers to Nebraska each semester to enhance the education of students.
Underwritten by the Hixson-Lied Endowment with additional support from other sources, the series enriches the culture of the state by providing a way for Nebraskans to interact with luminaries in the fields of art, art history and design.
For more information on the series, contact the School of Art, Art History & Design at (402) 472-5522 or e-mail schoolaahd@unl.edu.