Three lectures remain in the School of Art, Art History & Design’s Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist and Scholar series.
Each lecture takes place at 5:30 p.m. in Richards Hall Rm. 15. The lectures are free and open to the public.
• Oct. 26: Christine Hult-Lewis, this interim pictorial curator at the Bancroft Library, the special collections library at the University of California Berkeley.
Hult-Lewis holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California Berkeley, where she majored in humanities with an emphasis in American art and literature and a Ph.D. in American studies from Boston University with an emphasis in photographic history.
Hult-Lewis has taught classes on the history of photography and photographs of the American West at Boston University and the University of California Berkeley, and she has written on 19th century culture and photography.
At Bancroft, she curated several exhibitions on California painting, the history of photobooks, community and identity in Western photography, and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
She co-authored the award-winning study of 19th century landscape photographer Carleton Watkins titled “Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs” (Getty, 2011), and her most recent publication is an essay on postwar women’s photobooks in the award-winning book “What They Saw: Historic Photobooks by Women” (10x10Photobooks, 2021).
• Nov. 9: Sama Alshaibi, who works between photography, video, performance and installation. In 2021, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow in photography.
Her work explores the notion of aftermath: the fragmentation and dispossession that violates individuals and communities following the destruction of their social, natural and built environments. She uses her body as both subject and medium, a site of encounter, periphery and refuge, all while carrying the effects of war and dislocation.
Alshaibi’s powerful feminized representations resist a pretext for the subjection of Middle Eastern communities, re-calibrating and challenging a Western and patriarchal social order.
Alshaibi is professor of photography, video and imaging at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
• Nov. 16: Aaron Spangler, is a sculptor and printmaker best known for monumental carved wooden sculptures and for contemporizing the traditional art of bas relief.
His themes emerge from his rural roots in northern Minnesota, and his first bas reliefs (carved with a sharpened screwdriver) turned darkly calamitous, chaotic and monochromatic when he moved to New York City in 1999.
The work in his first solo shows at Zach Feuer in Chelsea in the early 2000s was full of enigmatic, often surrealistic narrative scenes—twisted tree roots, limbs, and extinct hand tools—that illustrated various social and political breakdowns of rural society. Since moving back home to his house and studio in the Two Inlets Forest in Minnesota in 2009, his work has grown in a more smoothly abstracted, heavily patterned, and intimate direction. In bas relief, freestanding sculpture, and in woodblock and hand-rubbed prints, he continues to explore and provoke the ineffable truths and mythologies of the rural ethos.
Since 1998 Spangler’s work has been the subject of many national and international exhibitions, including solo shows in galleries in New York and Berlin.
The University of Nebraska–Lincoln 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.
For more information on the series, contact the School of Art, Art History & Design at (402) 472-5522 or e-mail schoolaahd@unl.edu.