Dike Blair was born in Pennsylvania in 1952. Since 1980, his work has been shown in many exhibitions, including group exhibitions such as “Vanishing Point”, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; “Let’s Entertain”, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; “Elysian Fields”, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the “2004 Whitney Biennial”, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Currently a major exhibition of his work, “Now and Again”, is on view at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC. Blair is a frequent contributor to publications such as Bomb, Parkett and Flash Art and in 2007 published Again: Selected Interviews and Essays, with Whitewall Press. Since 1997 he has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design.

for more information go to http://www.thing.net/~lilyvac/

R.H. Quaytman is a painter living in New York City. She was a recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship in 1992 and was a founding member and the Director of Orchard, a cooperative gallery in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Her work is represented by Miguel Abreu Gallery in NYC and Vilma Gold Gallery in London. Her first museum exhibition is currently on view at the ICA in Boston and she will be included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. In addition she is preparing two exhibitions for the fall of 2010: a survey exhibition for the Neuberger Museum, at SUNY Purchase, New York and a project exhibition for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has also been included in group exhibitions at Greene Naftali Gallery, New York, Richard Telles, Los Angeles, Queens Museum of Art, The Kitchen, New York as well as the Lódz Biennial, Poland. Her book Allegorical Decoys is published by MER Press and is available at Printed Matter book store. She is currently on the faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Quaytman will join the art historian and critic Rhea Anastas, who was also a member of Orchard to discuss the activities of their collective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth on Tues March 23 at 7pm.

For more information about Orchard go to http://www.orchard47.org/

For more information about Quaytman’s work go to http://www.miguelabreugallery.com/R.H.Quaytman.htm

Kate Gilmore is a New York based sculptor best know for her humorous and physically demanding, masochistic performances. In her video work, Gilmore plays the role of the feminine hero, fashionably dressed but ready to knock down walls with high heels or push her neatly made-up face through small openings in plywood. Such strenuous physical feats are metaphorical acts created by the artist to address the challenges that contemporary artists face in today’s art world–specifically female artists. Her work depends on her own trial and error as she tirelessly makes valiant efforts towards success and in the process, in confronted with fear, failure and pain.

Gilmore received her MFA in 2002 from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and has exhibited widely in the United States as well as international venues in Turin, Madrid, Liverpool and Berlin. Currently Gilmore is included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial in New York.

For more information go to http://www.kategilmore.com/index.html

Ute Meta Bauer is an Associate Professor and Founding Director of the Program in Art, Culture and Technology at MIT. From 1996 to 2006, she was a Professor of Theory and Practice of Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Educated as an artist, Bauer has worked as a curator of exhibitions and presentations on contemporary art, film, video and sound, with a focus on transdisciplinary formats. She was a Co-curator of Documenta11 (2001-2002) in the team of Okwui Enwezor, has been the Artistic Director of the 3rd berlin biennial for contemporary art (2004) and in 2005 curated the Mobile_Transborder Archive for InSite05, Tijuana (MEX)/San Diego (USA). Furthermore Bauer has been the Founding Director of the Office For Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) and was the editor of numerous publications in the field of contemporary art, including: “What’s left…What remains? SITAC VI” (Mexico City 2009), “Education, Information, Entertainment. New Approaches in Higher Artistic Education” (Vienna, 2001) META 1 - 4 (Stuttgart, 1992-94), case (Barcelona, 2001; Porto, 2002) and Verksted # 1- 6 (Oslo, 2003-2006).

For more information go to http://web.mit.edu/vap/people/faculty/faculty_bauer.html

A native of New York, Bill Arning, writer, critic, and curator brings more than twenty years experience in the arts to his newly appointed role as the director of the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston. Mr. Arning served as director and chief curator at White Columns Alternative Arts Space in New York for over ten years and was a curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center for 9 years. Deemed the “Cowboy Curator of Contemporary Art”, Bill is known for his support of vibrant and progressive exhibitions such as, America Starts Here—Ericson and Ziegler—1985-1995 (Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY), AA Bronson’s Mirror, Mirror, Son et lumière and Sensorium at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Mr. Arning received his Masters in Art History from Tufts University in Massachusetts and his Bachelors degree from New York University.

This lecture is organized by the Student Art Association

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Guillermo Kuitca is a key figure in the
history of Latin American art whose work finds inspiration in the realms of
architecture, theater, and cartography.

Kuitca has exhibited worldwide including major solo exhibitions at Museo
Rufino Tamayo, Mexico DF (1993) Whitechapel Gallery, London (1995) and at
the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid and MALBA, Buenos
Aires (2003). Kuitca’s work has been included in significant group
exhibitions including the Bienal de São Paulo (1989), Documenta IX, Kassel
(1992), Carnegie International, Pittsburgh and Kwangju Biennale, South Korea
(1995), Istanbul Biennial (2001) and 52nd International Art Exhibition, La
Biennale di Venezia (2007). A mid-career retrospective was organized by the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Albright-Knox
Art Gallery, Buffalo and the Miami Art Museum , Miami , Florida for 2008 and
2009. Kuitca is represented by Sperone Westwater in New York and Hauser &
Wirth in Zurich and London. The artist lives and works in Buenos Aires

This lecture is organized in conjunction with the Dallas Museum of Art and the Dallas Opera.

for more information go to http://www.speronewestwater.com/cgi-bin/iowa/artists/record.html?record=6

Walead Beshty is an artist and writer living and working in Los Angeles.
Beshty holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from the Yale University
School of Art. His solo exhibitions include: Popular Mechanics, Wallspace,
New York, NY (2009); Walead Beshty: Legibility on Colored Backgrounds, The
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2009); Pulleys,
Cogwheels, Mirrors, and Windows, The University of Michigan Museum of Art,
Ann Arbor, MI (2009); Passages, LAXART, Los Angeles, CA (2009); Industrial
Pictures, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, Belgium (2008); Hammer
Project: Walead Beshty, The Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2006);
Walead Beshty, P.S.1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY
(2004). He is a regular contributor to Texte zur Kunst and Afterall Journal,
and has written for Artforum, Aperture, Art Review, and Art on Paper, among
others. He served on the faculty of UCLA, CalArts, UCIrvine, and USC and is
currently an Associate Professor at Art Center College of Design.

Hayes’ installation, video and performance work has been shown at P.S. 1
Museum of Contemporary Art, Andrew Kreps Gallery, the Whitney Museum of
American Art’s Independent Study Program, Dance Theater Workshop,
Performance Space 122, the Joseph Papp Public Theater, the New Museum of
Contemporary Art in New York, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and The
Project in Los Angeles. In addition she has shown in galleries, exhibition
or performance spaces in Bogotá, Berlin, Copenhagen, Malmö, Vienna and
Zagreb as well as in California, Florida, Rhode Island, Texas, and Vermont,
and in 45 lesbian living rooms across the United States.

Hayes was a 1999 MacDowell Colony Fellow. She also received a 1999 New York
Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She was a participant in the Whitney
Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and received an MFA from
the Interdisciplinary Studio at UCLA’s Department of Art. Hayes is
represented by Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin.

for more information go to http://www.shaze.info/

Walid Raad works with video, photography, and literary essays to investigate the contemporary history of war in his native Lebanon. Highly regarded for his project The Atlas Group, Raad grapples with the representation of traumatic events of collective historical dimensions and the ways film, video, and photography function as documents of physical and psychological violence. Represented by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, his work has been exhibited at Documenta 11 (Kassel), The Venice Biennale (Venice), The Whitney Biennial (New York), The Ayloul Festival (Beirut, Lebanon) and numerous other festivals in Europe, the Middle East, and North America. He lives and works in New York, where he is currently an associate professor at the Cooper Union School of Art.

This event follows a lecture by Raad at the Modern Art Museum of Ft Worth on Feb 10. On Feb 11, Raad will join Noah Simblist, Assistant Professor of Art and Sarah Rogers, the Elenor Tufts Pre-Doctoral Fellow in Art History in a conversation about his work.

For more information about Walid Raad’s Atlas Group project go to

http://www.theatlasgroup.org/aga.html

Sofia Ponte’s work merges photography, sculpture, video, performance and sound. Her installations establish inter-media relations that critically investigate art boundaries and artists participation in contemporary society. Sofia creates and participates in projects that examine current strategies that translate our social experience into knowledge and propose new ones. This might happen at a museum, school, library or within a group of enthusiasts in the public sphere.

Ponte is from Libson, Portugal. She received her BFA from the University of Oporto in Portugal and her Master of Science in Visual Studies from MIT in 2008. Sofia has exhibited internationally, including the Distrito Quinto Gallery, Barcelona, Spain; National Museum of Natural History, Lisbon, Portugal; Grand-Hall de La Villete, Paris, France; and Kasteliotissa Space, Nicosia, Cyprus.

This lecture is sponsored by the Student Art Association