DR. VESELA SRETENOVIĆ

Tuesday October 24, 2023, 4:00 pm, Lazarus Auditorium

Sretenović has been a long-time curator of modern and contemporary art with special interests in cross-disciplinary art practices and in bridging theoretical knowledge with hands-on experience. She has been at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC since 2009, first as a Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and now as a Director of Contemporary Art Initiatives and Academic Affairs. During her tenure, she initiated and oversaw a series of ongoing art projects called Intersections, inviting contemporary artists—national and international, emerging and established—to engage with the museum permanent collection and architecture and create new work(s). The participating artists included, A. Balasubramaniam, Sanford Biggers, Los Carpinteros, Linling Lu, Marta Perez, Ranjani Shettar, Alyson Shotz, and Richard Tuttle, among many others. In addition, Sretenović had organized monographic exhibitions of prominent artists including Robert Ryman, Ellsworth Kelly, Antony Gormley, and the first museum retrospective of Cuban artist Zilia Sanchez. Additionally, she works on independent research and curatorial projects, including a large group exhibition for the Gray Art Gallery at New York University featuring women-identifying visual artists who over the past 25 years were recipients of Anonymous Was A Woman Award (AWAW), founded by an artist-philanthropist Susan Unterberg. Prior to joining the Phillips, Sretenović was a curator at Bell Gallery, Brown University, while also teaching contemporary art and art theory at the Rhode Island School of Design. Earlier in her career, she worked for the University at Buffalo (SUNY), and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. She holds a BA in Art History from University of Belgrade, Former Yugoslavia, an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Doctoral degree in Humanities from Syracuse University.

 

 MATTHEW MONAHAN

Tuesday October 31, 2023, 4:00 pm, Lazarus Auditorium

 

Los-Angeles based Matthew Monahan works in a variety of artistic disciplines that incorporate mixed media and found objects such as "foam, folded and crumbled construction paper," glass vitrines, and drywall. His work references art history and literature, recalling the works of modernists such as Constantin Brancusi and Marcel Duchamp. His sculptures and installations often combine modernists references with figurative fragments of ancient, mainly Greco-Roman statues. Monahan has been a prominent member of a new generation of artists in Los Angeles. In 2007, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles mounted a solo exhibit of the artist's work and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas acquired six of the artist's sculptures in 2022, which were shown in a solo exhibition titled, Matthew Monahan: Recent Acquisitions, in May, 2023.Monahan has also participated in Whitney Biennial, Venice Biennale, Carnegie Internatonal and has works in the collectons of MoMa, Art insttute in Chicago, the Tate, SFMoma, and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In his artst talk, Monahan will present more than two decades of work as having originated in his graduate school experience. Weird figural experiments from a handful of works made between 1994- 1996 at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, become the relics in an artistic origin story.”

 

 

DEVILLE COHEN

Tuesday November 14, 2023, 4:00 pm, Lazarus Auditorium

 

Deville Cohen, (b.Tel Aviv, 1977) is a NYC-based visual artist and director. He studied sculpture at the KHB Berlin from 2002-2007 and received his MFA in film/video from Bard College, NY in 2010. His video installations have been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries such as MoMA PS1; SFMoMA; The CCA Tel-Aviv; PS122 Gallery, NYC; The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik; Aspect Ratio Gallery, Chicago; Marlborough Chelsea Gallery, NYC; and Foxy Production Gallery, NYC, among others. He began creating for the stage during a residency at the Wooster Group Performance Garage in the summer of 2014. His creation underline, made in collaboration with the composer Hugo Morales, was commissioned and co produced by the Deutsche Oper Berlin and The Munich Biennale for New Music Theater in 2016. In 2018 he co-created MENAGERIE with choreographer Shamel Piis for Gibney Dance Company in NYC and McGuffin was commissioned and produced by The Center of The Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2019. In 2020 Deville Founded Hand To Mouth, a new collaborative project, which had its first project DE-SUICIDE presented as an installation at PS122 Gallery in 2021 and as a live performance at Kinosaito in 2022. Hand to Mouth received a MAP Fund grant for a new performance for 2024. Deville was an artist in residence at Recess Art; EMPAC Troy, NY; Wooster Group Performance Garage, Lower Manhaian Cultural Council (LMCC) workspace, NYC; Fountainhead in Miami; Kimnosaito Art Center, and LMCC Process-Space NYC.

 

 

STELLA ZHONG

Tuesday November 28, 2023, 4:00 pm, Lazarus Auditorium

 

Stella Zhong’s work suspends existential uncertainty and humor. She builds vastly empty spaces punctured by barely visible, nonconforming objects in the periphery—highly idiosyncratic worlds that disorient authority. Immersed in physics and bypassing the human, her large-scale installation, video, and painting use obscurity and lack of reference as the condition to observe strength in smallness, latent life, and moments where alienation and intimacy converge. Stella Zhong (b. 1993, Shenzhen, China) lives and works in New York, NY. She holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. Zhong has exhibited internationally at SculptureCenter, Queens, NY; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Guan Shan Yue Museum, Shenzhen, CN; and more. Her work has been reviewed on ArtAsiaPacific, Mousse Magazine, Texte zur Kunst, The New York Times, Art in America, among others.