Events & Discussions

BFA Fine Arts presents artist Dana Schutz discussing her work. Best known for her wildly expressive figures, Schutz has had solo exhibitions at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemoranea di Trento e Roverto, Italy; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; and the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, among others. Her work is part of the collections at the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others. Schutz is represented by Petzel Gallery in New York and Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin.

BFA Fine Arts presents conceptual artist Adam Pendleton discussing his multi-disciplinary practice, which incorporates painting, publishing, photographic collage, video and performance. Pendleton's work centers on an engagement with language, figuratively and literally, and the re-contextualization of history through appropriated imagery to create “a future dynamic where new historical narratives and meanings can exist.”

Lizzi Bougatsos works in sculpture, collage, installation, writing, and performance. She appropriates cultural and commercial detritus such as posters and advertising and re-purposes them with painted or collaged elements to expose the narratives that are woven into the visual fabric of the city and popular media. Her practice is deeply responsive to the politics of media representation, and does not shy away from controversial issues such of climate change and human rights. Bougastsos frequently employs comedy and humor as a means to disarm and to comment on the moment in which we live. Her sculptures in ice are regarded as performances; they exist only for a short period of time, and as such, they are an escape from the ever prevalent realities of everyday life.

Artist Martin Kersels discusses his work. Kersels was born in Los Angeles, California, and holds a BFA and MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. His body of work ranges from collaborative performances with the group SHRIMPS (1984 – 1993) to large-scale sculptures such as Tumble Room (2001). His interest in machines, entropy, sound and dissolution has produced work that examines the dynamic tension between failure and success, the individual and the group and the thin line between humor and misfortune. Since 1994, his work has been exhibited in such venues as the 1997 and 2010 Whitney Biennials, Centre Georges Pompidou, J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), MAMCO (Geneva), MOCA (Los Angeles), Kunsthalle Bern and Tinguely Museum (Basel). He has taught at the California Institute of the Arts, and is director of the graduate sculpture department at the Yale School of Art. Kersels lives and works in Connecticut and is represented by the galleries Mitchell-Innes & Nash, in New York, and Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, in Paris.

Mara Haseltine is an international artist known for he sculptural renditions of microscopic life forms. She was an early pioneer in the translation of bioinformatics into three-dimensional forms. She is an ardent environmentalist and co-founder of The Green Salon, an international think tank devoted to environmental solutions. She has exhibited and worked throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. She lives and works in New York City.

Artist Susan Silas discusses her work.

The artist talks about her work in video, photography and performance addressing the human psyche when confronted with physical and environmental extremes, including recently visually compelling and remote landscapes.

A lecture by artist and 2013 Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost, whose first U.S. solo show is on view at the New Museum beginning February 2014.

Elise Goldstein is a researcher and performance artist working at the intersections of psychoanalytic traditions, religious ritual and sexual practices. She stages encounters, performances and exchanges with others to explore issues of trauma, recollection and transference. A trained hypnotherapist, Goldstein also holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives and works in Basel, Switzerland.