2019-2020 Art Lecture Series

The Mills College Department of Art and Visual Culture is pleased to announce the lineup of the 2019-2020 Art Lecture Series!

Organized in conjunction with the faculty, students in the Studio Art MFA program and the Mills College Art Museum, this year's series consists of a diverse group of artists and scholars from the Bay Area and beyond with backgrounds in film, performance, sculpture, ceramics, social practice and more.

THE SPEAKERS

Dario Robleto

Wednesday, October 2nd, 2019, 7 PM

Danforth Lecture Hall

Dario Robleto makes research-based works informed by collaborations with experts from a variety of scientific disciplines. He has explored the mysteries of the human heart, outer space, and the deep sea, creating sculptural works that take the form of reliquaries designed to attract the attention of alien life forms, and curio cabinets that organize and enumerate found collections of fossils or shells. Inspired by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s Golden Record project, he embeds historical recordings of the human heart or songs that are personally meaningful to him into his sculptures and installations by scraping and sprinkling audiotape onto the objects. His work gives physical dimension to the invisible force of longing and desire that drives so much human interaction. 

Dario Robleto has had numerous solo exhibitions since 1997, most recently at the McNay Museum, San Antonio, TX (2018); Menil Collection, Houston, TX (2014); the Baltimore Museum of Art (2014); the New Orleans Museum of Art (2012); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2011). His work has been profiled in numerous publications and media including Radiolab, Krista Tippet's “On Being”, and the New York Times.

Daniel Nevers

Wednesday, October 23rd, 2019, 7 PM

Mills College Art Museum

Daniel Nevers expands on themes and ideas raised in the exhibition In Plain Sight. Nevers received an MFA in studio art from Mills College ('08) and is currently executive director at the Berkeley Art Center. He has taught studio art and curated independent projects at colleges and galleries throughout the Bay Area. 

Jennifer A. González, “Speech as Medium, Democracy as Metaphor”

Wednesday, November 13th, 2019, 7 PM

Lisser Hall

Jennifer A. González is Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and also teaches at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has published in Frieze, Bomb, Diacritics, Camera Obscura, Open Space, Art Journal, the Journal of the Archives of American Art and numerous exhibition catalogs including most recently Jimmy Durham: At the Center of the World (2017). Her first book Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (MIT Press, 2008) was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. Her second book focused on the MacArthur-award-winning artist Pepón Osorio (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). She is chief editor of the recently released Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press, 2019). She has lectured extensively at universities and art museums nationally and internationally, including the Guggenheim, LACMA, SFMOMA, Smithsonian, Terra Foundation, and Whitney Museum. Supported by the Jane Green Endowed Lecture in Art History. 

Stephanie Syjuco

Wednesday, November 20th, 2019, 7 PM

Danforth Lecture Hall

Stephanie Syjuco creates large-scale spectacles of collected cultural objects, cumulative archives, and temporary vending installations, often with an active public component that invites viewers to directly participate as producers or distributors. Using critical wit and collaborative co-creation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies and empire. This has included starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods, presenting parasitic art counterfeiting events, and developing alternative vending economies. She is featured in Season 9 of the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. Recent exhibitions include Being: New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Public Knowledge at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, This Site is Under Revolution at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and Disrupting Craft: the 2018 Renwick Invitational at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. She lives and works in Oakland, California. Supported by the Herringer Graduate Lecture Series.

Angela Hennessey 

Wednesday, February 12th, 2020, 7 PM

Danforth Lecture Hall

Angela Hennessy is an Oakland-based interdisciplinary artist and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts where she teaches courses on visual and cultural narratives of death and contemporary textile theory. Through writing, studio work, and performance, her practice examines mythologies of blackness embedded in linguistic metaphors of color and cloth. Her current project, The School of the Dead, is a program for the decolonization of death and grief through the radical inquiry of aesthetic and social practices that mediate the boundary between the living and the dead.

She leads workshops and lectures nationally. Recent talks and performances include Death Salon Seattle, University of Cincinnati, CTRL+SHIFT Artists Collective, You’re Going to Die, IDEO/Reimagine End of Life, Disclose Silence: We See Violence and Dead Black at Nook Gallery. Supported by the Herringer Graduate Lecture Series.

Kari Marboe

Wednesday, February 26th, 2020, 7 PM

Danforth Lecture Hall

Kari Marboe is a Bay Area artist and Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley and a BFA from California College of the Arts. Marboe’s research-based, ceramic works have been presented at 500 Capp Street/Southern Exposure, CA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, CA, The Museum of Craft and Design, CA, Wave Pool Gallery, OH, The Museum of Northern California Art, CA, Jacksonville University, FL, and the Waffle Shop Billboard, PA.

Her current project, Duplicating Daniel, is a collaborative exhibition project with Mills College Art Museum (MCAM). The exhibition traces Marboe’s attempts to recreate an original sculpture, recorded as missing from MCAM’s permanent collection, by the influential but under-recognized ceramicist Daniel Rhodes. The only remaining evidence of this sculpture is its accession date (1975, gift of the artist) and a murky black and white photograph.

Minerva Cuevas

Wednesday, March 11th, 2020, 7 PM

Danforth Lecture Hall

Minerva Cuevas creates research-based projects that allow the audience an insight into the economic and political organization of social spheres through site-specific actions and artworks. She is the founder of Mejor Vida Corp. (1998) and the International Understanding Foundation (2016), and has been a member of irational.org since 1999. Recent exhibitions featuring her work include Soft Power at SFMOMA and Down to the Left: Reflections on Medixo in the NAFTA Era at the Armory Center for the Arts, as well as shows at Museo Jumex (Mexico) and daadgalerie (Berlin). She is represented by kurimanzutto in Mexico City. Supported by the Herringer Graduate Lecture Series.

Ajay Gehlawat

Wednesday, March 18, 2020, 7 PM

Danforth Lecture Hall

Ajay Gehlawat is Professor of Theatre and Film at Sonoma State University. He is the author of numerous studies of popular Hindi cinema, including Reframing Bollywood (2010) and Twenty-First Century Bollywood (2015). Most recently he co-edited The Evolution of Song and Dance in Hindi Cinema (2019). His research and teaching interests include popular Hindi cinema (aka Bollywood), postcolonial studies and popular culture. 

Sofía Córdova

April 8th, 2020, 7 PM

Danforth Lecture Hall

Born in 1985 in Carolina, Puerto Rico and currently based in Oakland, California, Sofía Córdova's work considers sci-fi and futurity, dance and music culture(s), the internet, mystical objects, extinction and mutation, migration, and climate change under the conditions of late capitalism and its technologies. 

She is one half of the music duo, XUXA SANTAMARIA. In addition to discrete projects, performances, and albums the duo collectively scores all of her video and performance work. Supported by the Herringer Graduate Lecture Series.