Calendar
Join us for our Arts, Cultural Management & Museum Studies Graduate Virtual Open House on Feb 25, from 6-7pm. We have extended our application deadline to March 15 and would love to have you join our faculty, students, and alumni for an open question and answer session. Anyone interested in learning more about our MA in ACM&MS or graduate certificates in either Museum Studies or Arts and Cultural Management, please sign up here to join us. A zoom link will be sent to you shortly before the open house. You can also visit our webpage for details or contact the director and organizer at kflatham@msu.edu anytime.
2021 University Interdisciplinary Colloquium
“Additional Training and Developmental Editing for Transdisciplinary Projects”
Johanna Schuster-Craig (German, Global Studies)
2/26/2021, 12PM-1PM
Zoom Link: https://msu.zoom.us/j/98504663406
Passcode: msuc4i
Methodological clarity is important for successfully completing an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary project. Developmental editing or training programs outside or adjacent to the University is one way to learn new writing methods. This presentation will discuss the various and sometimes atypical pathways scholars can take to learn new methodologies so that they can complete a multi year interdisciplinary project. Of specific interest for me is the intersection between social sciences and humanities.
Nikita Gale | March 17 | Virtual on Zoom | 4 PM EST
This event does not require pre-registration, if you are interested in joining our zoom webinar, please do so using the link and password below.
https://msu.zoom.us/j/97803340342 pw: mutants
Nikita Gale (b. 1983, Anchorage, Alaska; lives and works in Los Angeles) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California and holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and earned an MFA in New Genres at UCLA. Gale’s practice is often structured by long-term obsessions with specific objects and the ways these objects gesture towards particular social and political histories. Gale uses ubiquitous consumer technologies as frameworks to consider how individuals potentially reproduce their relationships to objects within their relationships to psychic space and political, social, and economic systems. For Gale, the term “reproduction” is as much a mechanical, technical process as it is a process rooted in sex, biology, and the organic.
On a more physical register, Gale’s work points to the ways that many technologies can be understood as instruments that extend or amplify the body through a relationship to touch. Reproduction connects humans to a desire for extension and amplification both biologically and through industrial processes. By engaging with materials that have properties that are simultaneously acoustic and protective, Gale’s recent work considers the role of the audience as a social arena and examines the ways in which silence and noise function as political positions and conditions.
Nikita’s work has recently been exhibited at MoMA PS1 (New York); LACE (Los Angeles); Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles); Matthew Marks Gallery (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); Rodeo Gallery (London); Ceysson & Benetiere (Paris); and in “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). Gale’s work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Art21, AQNB, Frieze, Vogue, and Flash Art. Nikita currently serves on the Board of Directors for GREX, the west coast affiliate of the AK Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems.
For more information about Nikita Gale and their work, please visit their website.
Science of Grief
MSU Broad in Partnership with Science Gallery Detroit
March 20th, 6PM EST – “Panel Discussion about Global Death Rituals”
March 21st, 3PM EST – “Ritual & Remembrance Performance”
Register HERE. Full flyer in PDF format available for download HERE.
In partnership with Science Gallery Detroit, join us for a panel discussion on the science of grief, moderated by Dr. John Waller (Associate Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at MSU).
Register for the free online zoom panel event at broadmuseum.msu.edu. Sunday’s event will take place live on Science Gallery Detroit’s YouTube page.
Amanda Ross-Ho | March 24 | Virtual on Zoom | 4 PM EST
This event does not require pre-registration, if you are interested in joining our zoom webinar, please do so using the link and password below.
https://msu.zoom.us/j/97803340342 pw: mutants
Amanda Ross-Ho’s work draws from a broad hierarchy of structures, mapping connectivity within the overlapping ecologies of personal and universal phenomena. Her evolving personal language combines forensic and theatrical gestures, diagramming the reflexive relationships between production, presentation, and the social contracts of viewership. Her sculpture, painting, photography, installation, and most recently, public works have been exhibited widely, nationally, and internationally.
Amanda Ross-Ho holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the Roski School of Art, University of Southern California. Solo exhibitions include Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles, Hoet Bekaert, Belgium, The Pomona Museum of Art, Mitchell-Innes and Nash New York, The Visual Arts Center, Austin, TX, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Middelburg, Netherlands, the Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany, The Approach, London, and Praz-Delavallade, Paris. Group exhibitions include Artists Space, New York, The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, The Orange County Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, The New Museum, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial. In 2013 she debuted her first large-scale commissioned public work at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and in 2015, she presented a new large-scale sculpture commission in City Hall Park, New York City through the Public Art Fund. Ross-Ho’s work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, ArtReview, Modern Painters, Art in America, Flash Art, Art + Auction, and Frieze among others. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
For more information about Amanda Ross-Ho and their work, please visit their website.
Tanner Woodford | Thursday, March 25| Virtual on Zoom | 6pm
Tanner Woodford is the founder and executive director of the Design Museum of Chicago. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and makes Iterative Work. His research includes design issues, social change, and design history. His belief that design has the capacity to fundamentally improve the human condition is rooted in all of his pursuits. This virtual event is free and open to the public.
To join please register using the link below:
https://msu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_qLfFAehIRLeYi7m0iVKAHw
SPARTAN SKIN
Young Joon Kwak | April 9 – May 21, 2021
Guarded on game day and integral to graduation photographs, the bronze cast of Leonard Jungwirth’s 1945 Spartan statue is the central symbol of Michigan State University. The Spartan is an exemplary body, an icon of race, gender, and physical fitness that reflects the university’s ideal virtues of tenacity and will. Arriving at MSU in the wake of a national reckoning with white supremacy that often used debate about historical monuments as a proxy for broader questions of justice, 2020-21 Artist-in-Residence in Critical Race Studies Young Joon Kwak models a different approach to public art. The artist takes a recuperative attitude toward the Spartan statue, while opening the symbol to careful consideration. What does it mean, Kwak’s work asks, to identify a university campus that reflects our diverse society with any one icon?
Having made molds of portions of the statue’s exterior, Kwak created sculptures in cold-cast metals that remake the Spartan’s skin. The artist lavishes attention on the statue’s surface, preserving details that show evidence of Jungwirth’s hand and draw attention to subtle fan interactions. Kwak’s sculptures include impressions left by the pennies glued to the statue by athletes seeking good luck. Surrounding the casts are a series of monumental prints made from the molds, in which the Spartan’s body deviates further from his original form. Presented in fragments, and in works that demand contemplation, Kwak provides a site for careful reconsideration of the meaning of the Spartan. Spartan Skin opens to the public on Friday, April 9 beginning at 12 pm at the MSU Union Art Gallery.
Young Joon Kwak (b. 1984 in Queens, NY) is the 2020 – 2021 Artist-in-Residence in Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University. Kwak is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA, and Lansing, MI, who primarily uses sculpture, performance, video, and community-based collaborations to reimagine bodies and the power structures that govern our everyday lives as mutable and permeable sites of agency. Kwak is the lead performer in the electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner, and the founder of Mutant Salon, a roving platform for collaborative installations and performances with their queer/trans/POC/mutant community.
We invite you to participate in several new original creative arts mental health exercises to promote healthy self-talk and self-care.
These exercises will be facilitated by MSU students in the IAH 241Creative Process course. Co-sponsored by the Director ofStudent Wellness for the College of Arts & Letters.
Join us for one of these days for a fun, free, and relaxing time to get your mind focused on the arts. Friday, April 9th OR Friday, April 16th From 1:00PM-3:00PM
SIGN UP HERE: HTTPS://WWW.SIGNUPGENIUS.COM/GO/30E094DA9AA29A13-CREATIVE
We invite you to participate in several new original creative arts mental health exercises to promote healthy self-talk and self-care.
These exercises will be facilitated by MSU students in the IAH 241Creative Process course. Co-sponsored by the Director ofStudent Wellness for the College of Arts & Letters.
Join us for one of these days for a fun, free, and relaxing time to get your mind focused on the arts. Friday, April 9th OR Friday, April 16th From 1:00PM-3:00PM
SIGN UP HERE: HTTPS://WWW.SIGNUPGENIUS.COM/GO/30E094DA9AA29A13-CREATIVE
The College of Arts & Letters and the Department of Art, Art History and Design are pleased to host internationally acclaimed visual artist Ann Hamilton as the Spring 2021 Signature Lecture. Hamilton is best known for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations. Her site-responsive process works with common materials to invoke particular places, collective voices, and communities of labor. Hamilton is a Distinguished University Professor at The Ohio State University.
This virtual event will be held on zoom and is free and open to the public but requires preregistration. To register please click here. For more information about Ann Hamilton and her work, please see this teaching resources packet, for MSU Students, Faculty, and Staff, accessible only with an MSU NetID and password, prepared by Lily Woodruff, Associate Professor, Art History and Visual Culture.
Signature Lecture Series
Originally founded as the Celebrity Lecture Series in 1998 by the College of Arts & Letters and the Dean’s Community Council, the series was later renamed the Signature Lecture Series in 2007 and allows notable public figures to interact and engage with the faculty, students, and greater community of Michigan State University through conversations and discussions.
Support for this series has come from sponsors both within the university community and the community at large. Their generosity has been critical in attracting the best and most qualified individuals to conduct an informed and wide-ranging discussion of contemporary ideas and creative achievements in the arts and humanities.
The popularity of this series has attracted some of the most illustrious scholars, critics, novelists, poets, film producers, and creative artists of our time, including Soledad O’Brien, Ken Burns, Oliver Stone, Richard Ford, and Maya Angelou, and most recently Claudia Rankine, just to name a few.