Five to present Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar lectures this month

Clockwise from upper left: David Baskin, Behnaz Farahi, Andy Cavatorta, Jeff Fontana and Jim Richard will present Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar lectures this month.
Clockwise from upper left: David Baskin, Behnaz Farahi, Andy Cavatorta, Jeff Fontana and Jim Richard will present Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar lectures this month.

Five artists and scholars will present Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar lectures this month. All of the lectures are at 5:30 p.m. and are free and open to the public.

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s 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.

• Sculptor David Baskin will present a lecture on Wednesday, Sept. 26 at 5:30 p.m. in Richards Hall Rm. 15. Baskin has taught at the Cooper Union School of Art and the New York Institute of Technology and was a visiting critic at the School of Visual Arts, New York City; Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, and the University of Buffalo, New York. His honors and awards include a McDowell Colony Fellowship; a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant; a Yaddo residency; and a commission through Brookfield Properties for a lobby installation at the Grace Building in New York City. Baskin was one of the original members of the Brooklyn based non-profit art organization Smack Mellon. He received his bachelor of fine arts degree from The Cooper Union.

• Behnaz Farahi will present a lecture on Oct. 4, and Andy Cavatorta will present a lecture on Oct. 5. Both of these lectures are in conjunction with the Mid-America College Art Association Conference and will take place at the Embassy Suites at 11th and P streets in Lincoln. Farahi's lecture is at 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 4; Cavatorta's lecture is at 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 5.

Farahi is a designer and creative technologist working at the intersection of fashion, architecture and interaction design. Trained as an architect and specializing in 3D printing and physical computing, her ultimate goal is to enhance the relationship between human beings and their environment by following morphological and behavioral principles inspired by natural systems.

Farahi's lecture is titled "Emotive Matter from Fashion to Architecture." How can material in the environment foster new empathetic interactions with users? What if matter could detect people's physical movement and emotional states, and respond accordingly? Illustrated with a series of experiments, prototypes and interventions inspired by natural systems, this presentation will address emotive material interfaces that respond to the behavior of the human body and its emotions through the implementation of emerging technologies.

Cavatorta is an artist and researcher working with physical sound and robotics. His work explores technologically mediated emotions, opportunities to express the previously inexpressible, and how we make meaning with sound. This work is entirely new, but also part of a centuries-long tradition of exploring the artistic possibilities opened by every new technological or scientific development. His talk is about the surprising history of music and technology, his own work, the pleasures and perils of working in unexplored spaces, and the importance of fake rules.

Cavatorta is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab. He is the recipient of the Lincoln Prize. His recent collaborations include Björk and Matthew Herbert. His recent exhibits include MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), TED, The Royal Opera House and short documentaries by National Geographic, Vice and Stella Artois.

• Jim Richard will present a lecture on Oct. 10 in Richards Hall Rm. 15. Richard’s paintings, drawings and collages can be found in the collections of Guggenheim Museum, The New Orleans Museum of Art and the Houston Museum of Fine Art. He has an extensive exhibition record that includes the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Drawing Center, Oliver Kamm Gallery and Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York. His honors and awards include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation award. He lives and works in New Orleans, where he taught painting for many years at the University of New Orleans.

• Jeff Fontana will present a lecture on Oct. 31 in Richards Hall Rm. 15. Fontana is Associate Professor and Harry E. Smith Distinguished Teaching Professor in Art History at Austin College in Sherman, Texas, where he is currently Chair of the Art and Art History Department. An Italian Renaissance scholar by training, he focuses on the career of the painter Federico Barocci, on whose work he has published articles and acted as an exhibition consultant. His interest in the interpretation of the Italian Renaissance in French and American art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries intersects with his study of drawings and drawing practice in his research on the painter, draftsman and educator George B. Bridgman.

The remaining lectures in the series are:
• Nov. 7: Kim Dickey & Simon Levin, ceramics. With financial support from the Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series, the UNL Clay Club is bring Dickey and Levin to campus for demonstrations Nov. 7-10 and consecutive public lectures on Nov. 7. Dickey received her MFA from Alfred University. She has had solo shows in New York, Los Angeles, Kansas City and Denver and has participated in invitationals in Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Dickey has made permanent installations at MCA Denver, The Lab at Belmar; the Danish Ministry of Culture in Slagelse, Denmark; and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. She is Processor of Art at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Levin has been working in clay since 1990, when an elective ceramics course in college changed the direction of his life. He is a full-time studio potter working exclusively with wood firing. His award-winning work is exhibited internationally and appears in several contemporary ceramic books. Levin is a writer for many ceramic journals, and in 2013 he traveled to Taiwan as a Senior Fulbright scholar researching local materials. As a kiln builder, Levin has built wood fired kilns for both U.S. colleges and universities, as well as schools in Taiwan and China.

• Nov. 14: Lynne Avadenka, printmaking. Avadenka is an American artist/printmaker who creates multimedia work informed by explorations of text, image and the Jewish experience. Avadenka received a Kresge Fellowship in 2009 and has received individual artist grants from The National Endowment for the Arts and The Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. Avadenka’s work is exhibited and collected internationally at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Hague, The Netherlands; and The British Library, London; as well as at The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; The New York Public Library; and The Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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.