Visiting Artist Katherine Behar Opens Lecture Series at UMass Amherst

Katherine Behar
Katherine Behar

AMHERST, Mass. – Interdisciplinary artist Katherine Behar will present a talk titled “Digitally Divided” on Thursday, Sept. 20 at noon in 240 Studio Arts Building at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The talk is the opening event for the Visiting Artist Program of lectures hosted by the university’s department of art.

Behar’s work spans performance, media, sculpture and writing exploring gender and labor in contemporary digital culture. Her work has appeared throughout North America and Europe. Pera Museum in Istanbul presented a comprehensive survey exhibition and catalog, Katherine Behar: Data’s Entry|Veri Girişi, in 2016. More information at http://www.katherinebehar.com/.

Artist Eric Gottesman will speak on Oct. 11 from 5:30-7:30 p.m. in 170 Olver Design Building. Gottesman photographs, writes, makes videos, teaches and uses art as a vehicle to explore aesthetic, social and political culture. In 2014 he co-founded For Freedoms, an artist-run Super PAC, with artist Hank Willis Thomas. His photographs have been shown internationally at many galleries and institutions. More information at https://www.ericgottesman.net/.

Arts administrator, consultant, writer and curator Lisa Dent will discuss “Professional Practice” on Nov. 15 at noon in 240 Studio Arts Building. Dent was most recently Creative Capital’s director of resources and award programs, leading the financial and advisory services programs and advising awardees. Dent received her BFA from Howard University, her MFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and completed the Whitney Museum independent study program in curatorial studies.

Didier William speaks on Feb. 21. Originally from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he received his BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University School of Art. He is currently associate professor of art and the chair of the MFA Program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Read more at http://www.didierwilliam.com/.

Artist Paul Pfeiffer will speak on March 14. Pfeiffer’s internationally acclaimed work employs video, installation and sculpture to manipulate mass media and “dissect the role it plays in shaping consciousness” (Art 21). Pfeiffer’s work received the inaugural 2000 Whitney Biennale Bucksbaum Award, a 2009 Herb Alpert Award in Visual Arts, and is held in the public collections of the Guggenheim Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D,C., and the Broad Contemporary in Los Angeles. He is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and Thomas Dane Gallery in London. https://art21.org/artist/paul-pfeiffer/.

The series concludes April 11 with a talk by Larry Ossei-Mensah, a Ghanaian-American curator and cultural critic who uses contemporary art and culture as a vehicle to redefine how we see ourselves and the world around us. He was recently named senior curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. He is the co-founder of the global collective ARTNOIR and serves as mentor in the New Museum’s incubator program NEW INC. He recently co-curated Allison Janae Hamilton: PITCH, on view at Mass MoCA through June 2019.