ART NOW: Visiting Artists Lecture Series aims to introduce Willamette students and the greater Salem community to provocative contemporary artists working today. Through public lectures and studio workshops, ART NOW visiting artists will provide insight on their artwork and studio practice, as well as share their research and inspiration. 

"Hearing first-hand about the thought process, experimentation, and decision-making behind a piece of artwork illuminates the creative process for our students," says assistant professor Cayla Skillin-Brauchle. "Our goal is to bring in contemporary artists working with compelling concepts and processes."

Spring 2024

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Kanani Miyamoto
Wednesday, February 21, 2024, 7:00p.m.
Format: In person, HFMA 215, Roger Hull Lecture Hall

Kanani Miyamoto holds an MFA in Print Media from the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) and a bachelor's degree in Art Practices from Portland State University. Kanani Miyamoto is an artist, curator, and educator. Her artwork has been shown nationally. She is originally from Honolulu, Hawai`i, and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Kanani Miyamoto is an individual of mixed heritage and identifies most with her Hawaiian and Japanese roots. Essential to her work as an artist is sharing and celebrating her unique mixed background in our contemporary art world in hopes of representing her community and the beauty of intersectional identities. Miyamoto is a printmaker who uses traditional printmaking techniques to create large-scale print installations.

In addition to being a practicing artist, Miyamoto is an advocate for art education and a passionate community worker. She is the art coordinator for p:ear, a youth drop-in center that builds positive relationships with homeless youth through education, art, recreation, and job training to affirm personal worth and create more meaningful and healthier lives.

Fall 2023

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Akeil Robertson-Jowers
Wednesday, October 18, 2023, 7 p.m.
Format: In person, HFMA 215, Roger Hull Lecture Hall

Akeil Robertson-Jowers is an artist, educator, curator, student, returning citizen, and active member of the reentry community. Akeil is an ambassador and a skilled communicator able to bridge the gap between disparate peoples. His unique position as both an insider and critic gives him the ability to offer opinions and insights not previously gleaned.

Akeil is an multimedia artist, able to extend those skills to all he comes in contact with and uses these skills to create maps, prose, and bridges toward new thoughts and practices in criminal justice thinking and solutions. Akeil’s practice is based and steeped in an idea that critical thinking is central to the way forward. Shying away from easy answers or binaries that separate and divide our communities on opposite sides of a restorative justice framework, in his work and scholarship Akeil seeks to take an honest look the intersections we all share and help us form bonds that encourage the will remove barriers in our ability to find common ground.

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Nina Elder
Monday, November 6, 2023, 4:15 p.m.
Format: In-person, Ford 122
https://www.ninaelder.com/

Artist and researcher Nina Elder creates deep time perspectives where planets, geology, and ecosystems are in constellation with social issues and personal narratives. With a focus on changing cultures and ecologies, Nina advocates for collaboration, fostering relationships between institutions, artists, scientists and diverse communities. Her work takes many forms, including drawings, murals, performance, pedagogy, and long term community-based projects.

Recent solo exhibitions of Nina’s work have been organized by SITE Santa Fe, Indianapolis Contemporary, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, and university museums across the US. Her work has been featured in Art in America, VICE Magazine, Hyperallergic, and on PBS. Her writing has been published in American Scientist and Edge Effects Journal and other scientific publications. Nina’s research has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Rauschenberg Foundation, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. Nina migrates between projects, adventures, and her rural home in New Mexico.

Spring 2023

Nicole Pietrantoni headshot

Nicole Pietrantoni
Thursday, February 2, 2023, 12–1 p.m.
Format: Zoom
Zoom Meeting ID: 913 7155 6204
https://www.nicole-pietrantoni.com

Nicole Pietrantoni’s artwork explores the complex relationship between human beings and nature via installations, artists’ books, and works on paper. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a Fulbright to Iceland, an Artist Trust Fellowship, a Leifur Eiríksson Foundation Grant, the Manifest Prize, and a Graves Award for Excellence in Humanities Research and Teaching. Nicole has been awarded artist residencies at Meta Open Arts, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, La Maldita Estampa, and the Venice Printmaking Studio, amongst others. She received her MFA and MA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa and her BS in Human and Organizational Development and Art History from Vanderbilt University. Nicole served as the President of SGC International in 2016 - 18, the largest professional organization dedicated to scholarship in printmaking, book arts, and papermaking in North America. She is currently represented by Long-Sharp Gallery.

Photo of Sung Eun Park

Sung Eun Park
Thursday, April 27, 2023, 4:30–5:30 p.m., Ford 122
Format: In-person
https://parksungeun.com/home.html

Sung Eun Park is an artist working across the mediums of drawing, sculpture, and painting. In her current body of work, Park has been exploring life and death, specifically investigating the human attitudes towards value of death, funeral practice, and postmortem while delivering the focus to the point where we can make our lives more valuable. Her research is based on her personal viewpoint as a Korean-American woman. Her primary emphasis is that we should be concerned about the limited time of our life journey with seeking the value of life more than with accepting death naturally.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Park migrated to the United States. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art and an MFA from Indiana University Bloomington. Her work has appeared in print and exhibitions, such as Vox Populi, Wassaic Summer Exhibition, Museum of
Museums and CICA Museum. She has been an artist-in-residence at the studios at Wassaic Project, Playa Art & Science Residency, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Vermont Studio Center, and others. She is currently living and working in Oregon.

Fall 2022

photo by Genaro Molina

Daniela Naomi Molar
Monday, September 12, 2022, 4:15–5:15 p.m., Ford 122
Format: In-Person
www.danielamolnar.com

Daniela Naomi Molnar is an artist, poet, and writer working with the mediums of language, image, paint, pigment, and place. She is also a wilderness guide, educator, and eternal student. Her work was the subject of a recent Oregon Art Beat profile and a front-page feature in the Los Angeles Times. Her book CHORUS will be published in late 2022, the winner of Omnidawn’s 1st /2nd Book Prize, judged by Kazim Ali. Her work has been shown nationally, is in private and public collections internationally, and has been recognized by numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies. She founded the Art + Ecology program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and is a wilderness educator/guide and founding Board member of Signal Fire. She can be found in Portland, Oregon, exploring public wildlands, or at www.danielamolnar.com / Instagram: @daniela_naomi_molnar

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rubén garcía marrufo
Friday, November 4, 2022, 4:15-5:15 p.m., Ford 122

Format: In-person
https://rubengarciamarrufo.com/

The works of rubén garcía marrufo are an audiovisual fabulation of the awe-inducing instant, gathering phantasmagorical narratives, silences, and rituals which expand the ways we embrace the concept of border, going beyond its social, historical and political meaning, to manifest border as the site for a vital existence. With video, film, and sound experimentation as their principal medium, they project their pieces onto public spaces or edit them into fragmented montages that alter our perception of the moving image, in an exercise that fuses poetic fiction with documentary chronicles. garcía marrufo invites us to transcend the veil of lost moments that occur when we sense the pulse of our surroundings, through sequences and scenarios that present human life as a fluid passage from one place to the next, a translation of languages and symbols, oral testimonies that tell stories of loss and communion. This work is a place where we launch into a sensorial adventure of discovery, that intimate encounter with the pondering image and its ability to connect with us, residual moments where we witness something both fulminating and captivating, summoning us to reunite with the primal wonder of being-in-the-world.

Spring 2022

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Lucia Monge
Thursday, April 21, 2022, 4–5 p.m.
Format: In-person
luciamonge.com

Lucia Monge is a Peruvian artist whose work explores the ways humans position ourselves within the natural world and relate to other living beings, especially plants. Since 2010 she has been organizing Plantón Móvil, a yearly “walking forest” performance that leads to the creation of public green areas in cities such as Lima, Providence, Minneapolis, London, and New York. Other recent projects include a "fungi broadcast" about deforestation in Peru and sending potato seeds to space as messengers for non-colonial visions of the future.

Monge has shown her work internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lima, Queens Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, and the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP20) and has received grants from institutions such as Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC), Peruvian Ministry of Culture, COAL Art and Ecology, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among other. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from Universidad Católica del Perú.


Fall 2021

Avantika Bawa

Avantika Bawa
Friday, September 24, 2021, 4–5 p.m.
Format: Zoom
Zoom Meeting ID: 938 9626 2828
www.avantikabawa.net

Avantika Bawa lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Originally from New Delhi, India, she received an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in the same from the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, India.

She has participated in the Skowhegan, Ucross Foundation, MacDowell, Kochi Biennial Foundation, Yucca Valley Material Lab, and Djerassi residencies among others. Noteworthy solo exhibits include shows at The Portland Art Museum, OR, Schneider Museum, Ashland, OR, Suyama Space, Seattle, WA, The Columbus Museum, GA; Saltworks Gallery and the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, Atlanta, GA; Nature Morte and Gallery Maskara in India; White Box, Tilt Gallery & Project Space, and Disjecta, Portland, OR.

In April 2004 she was part of a team that launched Drain - Journal for Contemporary Art and Culture. www.drainmag.com.
In 2014 Avantika was appointed to the board of the Oregon Arts Commission. She is currently an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Washington State University, Vancouver, WA.

Jess Perlitz

Jess Perlitz
Tuesday, November 2, 2021, 7–8 p.m.
Format: In-Person and Zoom
Location: Ford 122
Zoom Meeting ID: 958 1107 4319
www.jessperlitz.com

Jess Perlitz creates sculptures, performances, and public art. Her work often engages with conceptions of landscape and the body’s place within it, finding points of incongruity and disruptions of established expectations. Born in Toronto, Canada, she is a graduate of Bard College, received an MFA from Tyler School of Art, and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance. Currently based in Portland, Oregon where she is Associate Professor and Head of Sculpture at Lewis & Clark College, Perlitz is a co-leader of the Portland’s Monuments & Memorials Project. She was named a 2019 Hallie Ford Fellow, and was awarded the Joan Shipley Award, and received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her project, Chorus, is currently installed at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA as part of the museum’s ongoing artists' installation series.


Spring 2021

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Ralph Pugay 
Monday, April 19, 2021, 5:30-6:30 p.m.
Zoom Meeting ID: 914 8209 3729
https://upforgallery.com/ralph-pugay 

Ralph Pugay (b. Cavite Philippines) draws, paints and organizes participatory projects in Portland, Oregon, where he lives and works. He employs the visual vernacular of late capitalism to render absurd fantasy worlds that allegorize the slippery and multifaceted experience of otherness. 

Notable solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Seattle Art Museum, Upfor, Vox Populi, FAB Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University, and King School Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at Dust to Dust Projects at High Desert Test Sites, AA|LA, PNCA Center for Art and Culture, The Art Gym, Salt Lake Art Center, Marinaro, and Ortega Y Gasset Projects, to name a few. 

Pugay has been artist-in-residence at Crow’s Shadow Institute for the Arts, PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab, Joan Mitchell Center, Rauschenberg Residency, Vermont Studio Center, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has received support from the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Program, the Betty Bowen Award, the International Sculpture Center, Regional Arts and Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, and the Ford Family Foundation. He studied art at Portland State University, where he was recently appointed as assistant professor of art practice.

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Carmina Eliason
Tuesday, February 2, 2021, 5:30–6:30 p.m.
Zoom Meeting ID: 949 8921 4435
www.carminaeliason.com

Carmina Eliason is an interdisciplinary artist who uses everyday objects to relate stories of human experience. Kitchen tables, coffee with milk, empty pickle jars, stained tablecloths, and handkerchiefs become the material to reflect on intimate experiences of identity, inner wounds and personal history. They also provide the spark for conversation and participation in her community-inspired and community-sourced artworks.

Eliason’s work reflects on the complex and interweaving stories of — and our relationship to — immigration, domestic violence, skin color, mental health and the labor of caregiving. In addition to using reclaimed household objects and textiles, Eliason uses written and spoken word, performance, and contemporary and historical photography practices.

Eliason’s mother immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico when she was pregnant. Born in the U.S. and a native English speaker, Eliason finds herself in a complex relationship with her skin color, Spanish as her second language, and Mexican identity. Also a descendent of Swedish-U.S. migration of the early 1900’s, Eliason is curious about the ways we connect to personal history while simultaneously relating to one another in the present.


Fall 2020

ashley stull meyers

Ashley Stull Meyers
Thursday, November 12, 2020, 5:30–6:30 p.m.
Zoom Meeting ID: 947 5149 3079
astullmeyers.com

Ashley Stull Meyers is a writer, editor and curator. She has curated exhibitions and public programming for a diverse set of arts institutions along the West Coast, including those in San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle and Portland. She has been in academic residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, Nebraska) and the Banff Centre (Banff, Alberta). She has worked as Northwest editor for Art Practical and contributed writing to Bomb Magazine, Rhizome, Arts.Black and SFAQ/NYAQ. In 2017, Stull Meyers was named director and curator of The Art Gym and Belluschi Pavilion at Marylhurst University, and was made co-curator of the 2019 Portland Biennial. Currently, she serves as director of the Multicultural Resource Center at Reed College. She is based in Portland.

 

julia bradshaw

Julia Bradshaw
Thursday, September 24, 2020, 5:30–6:30 p.m.
Zoom Meeting ID: 988 5420 7017
www.juliabradshaw.com

Julia Bradshaw’s projects often have an artful playfulness and are a response to her social environment such as being a foreigner, flying or reading. Other projects focus on photographic technologies and the intersection between science and art. She received her MFA in 2007 from San José State University with an emphasis on photography and video art. She is currently associate professor in the School of Arts and Communications at Oregon State University, where she has taught photography and video-art for seven years.

Bradshaw’s video-art and photography projects are on exhibit throughout the United States and internationally in Guatemala, The Netherlands, Poland and Germany. Her artist book, “Flying,” is in the Getty Research Collection. Her print, “Working Back-Up,” is in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco collection and the Oakland Museum of Art. In 2018, she was awarded residencies at Disjecta in California and Playa in Oregon. For both of these residencies, she was awarded support from the Ford Family Foundation. She is also a curator, most recently curating the exhibition, “Totality,” which consists of artworks relating to our human response to the cosmos at the Fairbanks Gallery at Oregon State University to coincide with the 2017 solar eclipse.


Spring 2020

Kathryn Cellerini Moore

Kathryn Cellerini Moore
Friday, January 31, 2020, 4–5 p.m.
https://www.kmoostudios.com/

For interdisciplinary artist Kathryn Cellerini Moore, art making is the active process of searching for visual moments that express our passive connection and active engagement with human beings, nonhuman relatives, and nonliving materials. Since it can be seemingly impossible to imagine just how interconnected we are to the visible and micro-visible life forms around us, Moore’s art offers a starting point from which to examine how we each play a role (willingly or not) in environmental, biological, and cultural ecosystems. Blending her interests of science and art, Moore plays with light, shadow, color and space to create abstractions of the natural world. In a political climate that aims to divide us from one another and our natural treasures, Moore feels urgency to create quiet moments for people to reflect on our interconnectedness to one another and our environment.

Kathryn Cellerini Moore's artwork was curated into the Month of Performance Art in Berlin, Germany, the Does Live Art Have to Be Experienced Live? performance art series at SOIL Gallery in Seattle, WA, and the experimental performance event Collective Becoming: Expressions of Love, Freedom and Resistance at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Her work was exhibited in venues including The Art and History Museum in Maitland, FL; Duplex Gallery in Portland, OR; The Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, OR; The McDonough Museum of Art in Youngstown, OH; The Center of Contemporary Art (CoCA) in Seattle, WA; Hunter College Times Square Gallery in NY, NY; and Besse Gallery at Bay College, Escanaba, MI. Moore presented her research at the first Mokuhanga Conference in Kyoto and Awaji, Japan, and was recently an artist-in-residence at PLAYA Summer Lake, TEDx, and Djerassi Artist Residency Program. In 2020, Moore will join the Oregon Art Commission’s Art in Public Places artist roster.


Fall 2019

V. Maldonado

V. Maldonado
Tuesday, November 12, 2019, 7–8 p.m.
https://victormaldonado.net/home.html

V. Maldonado is a multidisciplinary artist, freelance curator, and writer who lives and works in Portland, OR.  

Born in 1976 in Changuitirio, Michoacan, Mexico, they grew up in the Central San Joaquin Valley of California in a family of migrant field laborers. Currently Assistant Dean for Diversity and Inclusions at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Maldonado holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the California College of Art (2000), and their MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (2005).

Deploying both traditional media including painting, printmaking and drawing alongside contemporary strategies such as performance, installation and intervention, Maldonado expresses the power of identity to author experience and perception.  Their work is included in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA, the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR. 


Spring 2019

Nina Sarnelle, Bio_Sound for the Long Hole

Nina Sarnelle
Wednesday, February 13, 2019, 4:15–5:15 p.m.
http://ninasarnelle.com/

Nina Sarnelle is an artist and musician living in Los Angeles, with a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. She is a founding member of the Institute for New Feeling and dadpranks. In the last few years her work has been shown at Whitechapel Gallery, Hammer Museum, the Getty Center, Ballroom Marfa, MoMA (NY), Istanbul Modern, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, NADA Miami, Museum of Art, Architecture & Technology (Lisbon), Fundacion PROA (Buenos Aires), Black Cube (Denver), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Recess (NY), UNSW Galleries (Sydney), Project 88 (Mumbai), Villa Croce Contemporary Art Museum (Genova), Mwoods (Beijing), Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Human Resources (LA), and featured in Frieze, Art in America, Vogue Italy, Huffington Post, SFMoMA, Creators Project, FlashArt, and Hyperallergic.

 

Kirsten Marie Walsh

Kirsten Marie Walsh
Wednesday, May 1, 2019, 7–8 p.m.
http://kirstenmariewalsh.com/

Kirsten is an independent curator and arts administrator who believes in the power of ideas, objects and art to convey universal and personal stories. She strives to create exhibitions that are approachable, playful, transformative and educational to audiences of all kinds. Kirsten's creative endeavors aim to support curious minds through formal exhibitions, public interventions, and even, a podcast series.  Her work is driven by the core principal that curators are inherently translators. In 2015 Kirsten graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore with an MFA in Curatorial Practice. While at MICA she was the Graduate Curatorial Fellow at The Contemporary and a Graduate Teaching Intern for MICA's Exhibition Development Seminar. A born and raised Oregonian, Kirsten received her BA in Studio Art from Willamette University. For the last decade she’s been curiously exploring the worlds of artists, architects, and designers.


Fall 2018

Tabitha Nikolai

Tabitha Nikolai
Tuesday, October 2, 2018, 7–8 p.m.
https://www.tabithanikolai.com/

Tabitha Nikolai is a trashgender gutter elf and low-level cybermage raised in Salt Lake City and currently based in Portland, Oregon. Her artwork manifests as text, videogames, cosplay, and earnest rites of suburban occult. She is sometimes a stray cat and an attractive nuisance who is interested in reinvention, resistance, resilience, and making pocket worlds with people she loves. In the past she has taught at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and Portland State University, but is now a recovering academic. Her work has been shown at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Vox Populi in Philadelphia; and Ganka Gallery in Tokyo. She hopes you're doing okay.

 

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Samantha Wall
Friday, November 9, 2018, 4–5 p.m.
http://www.samanthawall.com/

Samantha Wall is an artist working in Portland, Oregon. Originally from Seoul, South Korea, Wall’s images explore identity through the push and pull of cultural diaspora and human interconnectedness. Her monochromatic figure drawings feature meticulously drawn women who embody Wall’s interest in navigating multicultural experiences. Her work has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions regionally and nationally. Wall graduated with an MFA in Visual Studies in 2011 from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and she is the recipient of awards and grants from organizations including the Oregon Arts Commission; Oregon’s Regional Arts & Culture Council; The Ford Family Foundation; The Hallie Ford Foundation, and The Joan Mitchell Foundation. Most recently, she is the winner of Portland Art Museum’s 2016 Contemporary Northwest Art Awards Arlene Schnitzer Prize. Samantha’s work is included in the collections of the Portland Art Museum, the City of Portland, and numerous private collections.


Past Visiting Artists 

Kelda Martensen                              
Thursday, April 26, 2018
https://keldamartensen.com/home.html

Anna Gray & Ryan Wilson Paulson
Friday, February 2, 2018
http://www.ryannaprojects.com/

Tannaz Farsi
Friday, December 1, 2017
https://www.tannazfarsi.com/
 
Garrick Imatani
Thursday, October 5, 2017
http://garrickimatani.com/
 
Lisa Jarrett
Monday, April 24, 2017
https://www.lisajarrett.com/
 
Julia Dolan
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
https://portlandartmuseum.org/collection/curators/
 
Juventino Aranda
Thursday, February 9, 2017
http://juventinoaranda.com/
 
Camella D. Kim
Thursday, November 7, 2016
http://www.dahngim.com/
 
Ryan Pierce
Monday, October 10, 2016
https://ryanpierce.net/home.html
 
Amy Thompson
Thursday, September 22, 2016
https://www.paperboatstudios.com/
 
Paula Portinga Booth
Thursday, April 21, 2016
 
Michael Ned Holte
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
http://michaelnedholte.com/
 
Farhad Bahram
Friday, February 5, 2016
http://www.farhadbahram.com/
 
Courtney Kessel
Thursday, November 19, 2015
https://courtneykessel.com/home.html
 
Mark Verabioff
Monday, November 9, 2015
 
Wendy Given
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
http://www.wendygiven.com/

Willamette University

Studio Art

Address
900 State Street
Salem Oregon 97301 U.S.A.
Phone
503-370-6136
503-370-6738 fax

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