The School of Art, Art History & Design’s Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist Lecture series will continue in October with three artists presenting lectures.
Painter Odalis Valdivieso will present a lecture on Wednesday, Oct. 6. Photographer Raymond Meeks will present a lecture on Wednesday, Oct. 13. And conceptual artist Mark Dion will present a lecture on Wednesday, Oct. 27.
Each of the lectures will take place at 5:30 p.m. in Richards Hall Rm. 15. The lectures are free and open to the public.
Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Valdivieso lives and works in Miami. She received a Masters of Fine Arts degree from Royal College of Art in London.
Among other awards, she is the recipient of a 2021 United States Artists/ NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Painting. Her paper objects have been exhibited internationally. She has been a resident artist at the Brooklyn Public Library in New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami.
Meeks has been recognized for his books and pictures centered on memory and place, the way in which a landscape can shape an individual and in the abstract and how a place possesses you in its absence. His books have been considered as a field or vertical plane for exploring interior co-existences, as life moves in circles and moments and events, often years apart, unravel and overlap, informing new meanings.
Meeks lives and works in the Hudson Valley (New York). His work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Bibliotheque Nationale, France; and the George Eastman House.
His recent solo exhibitions include Casemore Kirkeby in San Francisco and Wouter van
Leeuwen in Amsterdam. His book Halfstory Halflife (Chose Commune 2018) was
a finalist for the Paris Photo/Aperture Photobook of the Year Award. His
most recent book Ciprian Honey Cathedral, was published by MACK in late 2020.
Meeks is a recent recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography.
Dion was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1961. He received a B.F.A. and an honorary doctorate from the University of Hartford, Hartford Art School, and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program.
Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge and the natural world. Appropriating archaeological, field ecology and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between ‘objective’ (‘rational’) scientific methods and ‘subjective’ (‘irrational’) influences.
Dion also frequently collaborates with museums of natural history, aquariums, zoos and other institutions mandated to produce public knowledge on the topic of nature. By locating the roots of environmental politics and public policy in the construction of knowledge about nature, Dion questions the objectivity and authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society, tracking how pseudo-science, social agendas and ideology creep into public discourse and knowledge production.
He is the co-director of Mildred's Land an innovative visual art education and residency program in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania.
For more than two decades, Dion has worked in the public realm in a wide range of scales, from architecture projects to print interventions in newspapers. Some of his most recent large scale pubic projects include "The Amateur Ornithologist Clubhouse," a Captain Nemo-like interior constructed in a vast gas tank in Essen, Germany; and "Den," a large scale folly in Norway's mountainous landscape that features a massive sculpture of a sleeping bear in a cave, resting on a hill of material culture form the
neolithic to the present. Dion has also produced large-scale, permanent commissions for Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany; the Montevideo Biannale in Uruguay; The Rose Art Museum, Johns Hopkins University; the city of Stavoren, Holland; and the Port of Los Angeles.
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. Each visiting artist or scholar spends one to three days on campus to meet with classes, participate in critiques and give demonstrations.
The remaining lecture in the series is:
• Nov. 3: Brad Kahlhamer, painting. Kahlhamer lives and works in New York City. His work has been collected by institutions such as the Denver Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, among others.