National pioneer in multimedia art to speak on campus Tuesday
Janel Shoun-Smith |
Lipscomb University’s 2014 Jean Nunley Dennison Presidential Lectures on Art and Art History presents artist Jessica Stockholder, formerly of Yale University, at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 25, in Ward Hall.
Stockholder is a pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations that have become a prominent language in contemporary art. Her site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as “paintings in space.” Her complex installations incorporate the architecture in which they have been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling, and even spilling out of windows, through doors, and into the surrounding landscape.
In her work, she deploys a myriad of materials that might include bales of hay, fruit, toys, laundry baskets, curtains, heat lamps, fans, yarn, newspaper, bowling balls, automobiles and construction materials: bricks, concrete, plywood and sheetrock. Stockholder’s installations, sculptures and collages affirm the primacy of pleasure, the blunt reality of things, and the rich heterogeneity of life, mind and art amid a vortex of shifting polarities—abstraction/realism, classical order/intuitive expressionism and conscious thought/unconscious desire.
Stockholder is a professor in visual arts and chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago where she has worked since 2011. She was the director of graduate studies in sculpture at the Yale University School of art from 1999-2011. Her work has been exhibited at Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City; SITE Santa Fe; the Venice Biennale; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; among others. Born in Seattle, Washington, in 1959, Stockholder was raised in Vancouver, Canada. She studied visual arts at the University of British Columbia, received her BFA from the University of Victoria, and an MFA from Yale University School of Art.
The goal of the Jean Nunley Dennison Presidential Lectures on Art and Art History is to bring prominent art historians and practicing artists to the Nashville community to serve as a catalyst for further growth and discussion among our students and local artists.