Visiting Artist Lectures at Mount Royal [Spring 2023]

SRESHTA RIT PREMNATH 

Tuesday February 21, 2023, 4:00 pm, Lazarus Auditorium

Sreshta Rit Premnath (born 1979, Bangalore, India) works across multiple media, investigating systems of representation and reflecting on the process by which images become icons and events become history. He has had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego, MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge, the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, the Contemporary Art Vancouver, KANSAS, New York; Gallery SKE, Bangalore; The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago; Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin; Wave Hill, New York; Art Statements, Art Basel; as well as numerous group exhibitions at venues including The Logan Center, Chicago; Queens Museum, New York; YBCA, San Francisco; Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris; 1A Space, Hong Kong and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York. He is the founder and co-editor of the publication Shifter. Premnath completed his BFA at The Cleveland Institute of Art, his MFA at Bard College, and has attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. He has received grants from Art Matters and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.

JENNIFER WEN MA 

Tuesday February 28, 2023, 4:00pm, The Phillips Auditorium

This lecture is part of Conversations with Artists and is organized in partnership with The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

Jennifer Wen Ma’s interdisciplinary practice bridges installation, drawing, video, public art, design, performance, and theater. The ongoing theme of the artist’s work is the exploration of the human condition with all its contradictions and utopian and dystopian aspirations. Merging elements from Chinese traditional art with minimalist aesthetic, she creates three-dimensional forms and immersive, participatory installations that carry beauty, poignancy, and emotional depth. Since 2008, Ma’s work has increasingly focused on highlighting social tensions, inequalities, and disparities. These projects are often designed to be platforms for research, experimentation, and collaboration, as well as direct engagement with the public. 

Ma (b. 1973, Beijing, China) has exhibited worldwide, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, NC; Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; Qatar Museums; Ullens Center For Contemporary Art, and the National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Biennale of Sydney; Singapore Biennale; Cambio Cultural, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; and 5x5 Nonument Park, and The Phillips Collection, Washington DC, among others. Ma’s public art installations include Nature and Man in Rhapsody of Light at the Water Cube, The National Aquatic Center, Beijing; In-Between World—Daydream Nation, Digital Beijing Building, Beijing; and Aeolian Garden, city of Colle di Val d’Elsa, Italy, to name a few. In 2019, Ma was a recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Award and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the exhibition Cry Joy Park—Gardens of Dark and Light. The installation opera Paradise Interrupted that she conceived, visually designed, and directed, won the prestigious international award from Music Theatre Now in 2016. In 2008, she received an Emmy for the US broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, where she was a member of the core creative team and the chief designer for visual and special effects. Ma teaches in the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and lives and works between New York and Beijing.

Ma will be joined in conversation with Vesela Sretenovic, Director of Contemporary Art Initiatives and Academic Affairs, The Phillips Collection.

TOMMY HARTUNG

Tuesday April 18, 2023, 4:30 pm, Lazarus Auditorium

Tommy Hartung (b. 1979, Akron, OH) currently lives and works in New York. Exploring the didactic potential of the moving image, Hartung’s videos analyze the creation and dissemination of cultural narratives through entertainment. Often taking the major themes of modernism as his subject matter, his work has addressed colonial expansion and exploration, evolution, conquest, and innovation. He received his BFA from SUNY Purchase in 2004 and his MFA from Columbia University in 2006. Hartung’s work has been in a major solo exhibition at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, MA and in the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. His work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art , the Hammer Museum, the Rose Art Museum, and the Dimitris Daskalopoulos Art Collection.

 RINA BANERJEE

Tuesday May 4, 2023, 4:00 pm, Lazarus Auditorium

This lecture is possible with the support of the Tour de Force Foundation.

Rina Banerjee lives and works in New York City. She was born in Kolkata, India, and lived briefly in Manchester and London before arriving in New York. Drawing on her multinational background and personal history as an immigrant, Banerjee’s work focuses on ethnicity, race, and migration and American Diasporic histories. The artist’s sculptures feature a wide range of globally sourced materials, textiles, colonial/historical and Domestic objects, while her drawings are inspired by Indian miniature and Chinese silk paintings and Aztec drawings. In 2018, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the San José Museum of Art co-organized the artist’s first solo retrospective, Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World. The retrospective’s North American tour includes exhibitions at the Fowler Museum at University of California and Frist Art Museum, with a final showing at Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in 2021. Banerjee has exhibited internationally, spanning 14 biennials including Venice Biennial, Yokohama Triennale, and Kochi Biennial. The artist’s works are included in many private and public collections such as the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, San Jose Museum of Art, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum.