Visiting Artist & Scholar (VAS) lecture series 2024–25

This year-long calendar of art lectures provides students with intellectual access to a diverse group of acclaimed artists, art historians, curators, and scholars. Our guests conduct on-campus talks about their art, research, and careers, adding to the pedagogical discourse of contemporary art in the classroom and studio. All VAS events are free and open to the public, an important educational program for the regional art scene. 

Past visiting artists have included Amanda Ross-Ho, Paul Sepuya, Wafaa Bilal, Sonya Clark, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, Mark Dion, Charlotte Cotton, Ghada Amer, Leigh Ledare, Elle Perez, A.K. Burns, Barbara Takenaga, Eileen Quinlan, CASSILS, Jose Villalobos, Nicole Eisenman, Chris Wiley, Dianna Cohen, Steffani Jemison, Ryan McLaughlin, Nnenna Okore, The Propeller Group, Jaap Blonk, Math Bass, Jess T. Dugan, Art Werger, Bibiana Obler, and Steve Locke, among others. For a full list of recent visitors and more information, visit our VAS page. 

This year’s series has been sponsored in part by the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, BURNAWAY, and the Ernest G. Welch Foundation.

Beatriz Cortez
Tuesday, September 17
Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist born in El Salvador and based in Los Angeles and Davis, CA. Her work explores simultaneity, multiple temporalities, and speculative imaginaries. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at Storm King Art Center (2023); Williams College Museum of Art (2023); Commonwealth and Council (2022); Pitzer College Art Galleries (2022); and Craft Contemporary Museum of Art (2019). Currently, her work is on view at the 60th International Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere; Manetti Shrem Museum in Davis, California; Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California; Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California; and Commonwealth and Council, Mexico City. Cortez is the recipient of the Latinx Artist Fellowship (2023), Borderlands Fellowship (2022-24), and Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020), among others. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a PhD in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She is associate professor of art at the University of California, Davis.

Carmen Winant
Monday, November 18
Carmen Winant is an artist and the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at the Ohio State University. Her work utilizes archival and authored photographs to examine feminist care networks, with particular emphasis on intergenerational, multiracial, and sometimes transnational coalition building. Winant’s recent projects have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Sculpture Center, Wexner Center of the Arts, ICA Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and el Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. Winant’s artist’s books include My Birth (2018), Notes on Fundamental Joy (2019), and Instructional Photography: Learning How To Live Now (2021); Arrangements, A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures (both 2022), and The last safe abortion (2024). Winant is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography, a 2020 FCA Artist Honoree and a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters award recipient. She is a community organizer, prison educator, and mother to her two children, Carlo and Rafa, shared with her partner, Luke Stettner.

Dr. Chelsea Mikael Frazier
Monday, February 17
Chelsea Mikael Frazier, PhD is a Black feminist ecocritic—writing, researching, and teaching at the intersection of Black feminist theory and environmental thought.  Across a diverse array of platforms, all of Dr. Frazier’s work is geared toward creating paths toward harmonial Worlds that no longer rely on the harm of Black people, the destruction of our environment, or the exploitation of femininity to keep spinning.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

In 2019, she founded Ask An Amazon, an educational hub where she designs educational tools, curates community gatherings, gives lectures, and provides consulting services meant to help students, professionals, and organizations with their intellectual and creative development. Frazier sits on the Cornell University Department of Literatures in English faculty where she teaches students and trains emergent scholars in the fields of African American Literature and Culture, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Environmental Humanities. Dr. Frazier earned her PhD in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University. Additionally, she earned her Master of Arts from the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern, her Master of Arts from the American Studies program at Purdue University, and her Bachelor of Arts from the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College.

Trenton Doyle Hancock
Monday, March 10
For almost two decades, Trenton Doyle Hancock has been constructing his own fantastical narrative that continues to develop and inform his prolific artistic output. Part fictional, part autobiographical, Hancock’s work pulls from his own personal experience, art historical canon, comics and superheroes, pulp fiction, and myriad pop culture references, resulting in a complex amalgamation of characters and plots possessing universal concepts of light and dark, good and evil, and all the grey in between. 

Trenton Doyle Hancock earned his BFA from Texas A&M University, Commerce, and his MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia. Hancock was featured in the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, at the time becoming one of the youngest artists in history to participate in the prestigious survey. In November 2020, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston unveiled Color Flash for Chat and Chew, Paris Texas in Seventy-Two, Hancock’s monumental tapestry commission, which will remain on permanent display in the Museum’s new Kinder Building. In 2019, a major exhibition of his work, Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass, opened at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA. In 2014, his retrospective, Skin & Bones: 20 Years of Drawing, at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston traveled to Akron Art Museum, OH; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, VA.