MFA Spring Lecture Series
Join us via zoom: https://nec.zoom.us/j/99059375703
Ben Bertocci, Thursday, February 16, 8pm ET
Ben Bertocci was raised in Stockbridge Massachusetts, and attended Bard College at Simon’s Rock, UMASS Amherst, and worked as Visiting Assistant professor of Printmaking at Southern Illinois University. One could argue that Bertocci is using oil paint not to impose forms upon the paint, but to unlock the potential of pure pigment to create an ineffable mesh-like realm wherein the pigment can behave independent of formal constraints: his own painterly “plane of consistency”. Bertocci primarily shows with VonAmmonco Gallery in Washington DC, and he lives with his small family and works out of his studio in Queens, New York.
Harmonia Rosales, Thursday, March 16, 8pm ET
Harmonia Rosales (born 1984) is an Afro-Cuban American artist from Chicago. Influenced by her multicultural Afro- Cuban background, Rosales’ primary artistic concern focuses on Black female empowerment through a diasporic lens. Her work entwines the oral narratives and deities of West African Yorùbá religion, Greco-Roman mythology, and Christianity. Reimagining hegemonic narratives preserves the memory of her ancestral lineage and functions to champion resilience and question Eurocentric notions of beauty. While her subjects serve as conduits for the internal struggles of a disempowered society, they encourage sympathy, empathy, and empowerment.
Alteronce Gumby, Thursday, April 27, 8pm ET
Alteronce Gumby is an artist and local of New York City. His artistic practice includes painting, ceramics, installation and performance. Gumby’s work has been exhibited at galleries such as Hauser & Wirth, Gladstone Gallery and Camden Arts Centre. In his recent exhibition Cross Colours at Bode Projects in Berlin, the power of complementary
colours is presented in works that reference colour exercises in Joseph Albert’s Interaction of Colour. Through Gumby’s fluorescent and chromatic spectrum of iridescent colour, the artist engages the viewer and expands the notions through which we perceive form and colour, the subjectivity on identity, the materiality on earth, and in cosmic space.
Lisa Sigal, Thursday, May 25, 8 ET
Lisa Sigal was born in Philadelphia, PA. In her recent work, Sigal has been painting on walls and making forms that combine painting with architecture. Her work suggests a mutable delineation between interior and exterior and explores their meaning both socially and politically. Utilizing and expanding upon notions of space, she investigates how art can challenge set ideas about property, containment and freedom. Her work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and has been exhibited at the New Museum, PS1, Sculpture Center, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Albright Knox, the Brooklyn Museum, the Essl Museum in Vienna, a recent solo exhibit at LAX ART space in Los Angeles and at Samson Projects in Boston. Sigal received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art in 1985 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1989. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Ruth Campau,Thursday, June 29, 6pm ET
Ruth Campau works in an expanded field where the work’s interaction with the surrounding environment is essential. Her mark is the idea that with a concentrated brushstroke, she can convey presence by translating and freezing it solid onto a surface; brushstrokes immortalize the body’s movement. Her jumping off point is the notion of an infinite
painting, where what she is showing is merely a segment of a larger painting and, as such, merely a kind of representative of a human presence. Accordingly, the complex of issues that are prevalent in the very execution takes on a great deal of importance and the body, motion and time become decisive key factors in her work.
Campau lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark
