Visiting Artists and Scholars

Shahzia Sikander is widely celebrated for subverting Central and South-Asian miniature painting traditions into dialogue with contemporary international art practices and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. Engaging ideas of language, trade, empire, and migration through feminist perspectives, Sikander’s paintings, video animations, mosaics and sculpture explore gender, sexuality, racial narratives, and colonial histories. Sikander is a recipient of the MacArthur award and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation's Pollock Prize for Creativity, among others. A survey exhibition, Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and Cincinnati Art Museum as a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, was on view until October 20th, 2024, before complementary iterations will be presented in parallel at both Ohio institutions from February 14, 2025.

View recording from February 5, 2025 lecture.

Sylvie Hayes-Wallace lives and works in New York. Her sculptural practice explores the confinements of the self in its thoughts, feelings, and the body as a barrier between the inner self and external world. Pulling from an ever-evolving personal archive of markers of time and guided by the measurements of her body, she incorporates these archives into sculptures and collages. By taking inventory of the self, Hayes-Wallace attempts to understand, organize, and contain the chaos of the mind by mirroring the precarious constructs of our interior world and exterior surroundings. She has had solo exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York; Chapter NY, New York; In Extenso, Clermont-Ferrand, France; and Bad Water, Knoxville; among others. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Rose Easton, London; Chapter NY, New York; Simone Subal Gallery, New York; and King’s Leap, New York; among others. She is represented by Silke Lindner, New York.

View recording from January 31, 2025 lecture.

Art in a Democracy: A Community Conversation

Lecture recording from Thursday, October 24th.

Goal: This symposium/community forum or conversation highlights projects associated with the School of Art and the university at large that utilize the arts to promote community engagement with the goal of advancing social justice, promoting civic engagement, and sustaining democracy.  

These projects will illuminate ways how the arts can provide experiences with community engagement, foster community belonging, promote civic dialogue, and further skills that are necessary in a democratic society.  

1. How does art promote civic engagement? Insights from Who Is American Today? And other projects. Flavia Bastos and Doug Blandy

2. National Endowment of the Arts: Our Town Project / Jordan Tate, Anissa Lewis, Dani Clark (as well as orgs who have been involved or other NEA Fellows) 

3. Urban Walls, Cincinnati: A legacy of art in the public interest (Kate Bonansinga) 

4. UC / SOA and Blink Jenny Ustick and Colleen Houston  

Migiwa Orimo

Lecture recording from Friday, October 18th.

Migiwa Orimo is a Tokyo-born interdisciplinary artist whose practice straddles the fields of art and activism. Orimo primarily engages in installations comprising disparate elements such as text, drawings, photographs, objects, and textiles. As a social justice activist, Orimo facilitates the People's Banner Workshop and collaborates with social justice activists across various causes.

A five-time recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Creativity Excellence Award for her interdisciplinary art projects, Orimo was awarded residencies at the Headlands Art Center (2012) and SPACES Gallery's World Artist Project (2014). Her work has been shown extensively, including at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC), San Bernardino Art Museum (CA), apexart (NYC), UNC-Chapel Hill's Allcott Gallery (NC), University of Northern Colorado’s Mariani Gallery (CO), and in Ohio at the Springfield Art Museum, OSU's Urban Arts Space, Riffe Gallery (Columbus), Oberlin College's Baron Gallery, Wave Pool and Weston Art Gallery (Cincinnati).

Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series with assistance from the Agnes Croll Blackburne Visiting Artist and Scholars fund and the Elise Zeller Sauer Fund for Fine Arts.

John Knight

Lecture recording from Friday, August 30.

John Knight (b. 1986) is based in London and Montana. Recent exhibitions include Final Hot Desert, London; Monaco, St. Louis; Apparatus Projects, Chicago; BSMNT Gallery, Leipzig; Julius Caesar, Chicago; The American Institute of Thoughts and Feelings, Tucson; and Muscle Beach, Portland. Selected group exhibitions include Final Hot Desert; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Utah; and As It Stands, Los Angeles. Knight co-directed the curatorial projects: Williamson Knight Gallery, Portland; Cherry and Lucic, Portland; H. Klum Fine Art, Portland; and THE PINK HOUSE [Jan. 19, 1995] at Bad Reputation, Los Angeles. He received an MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland and a BFA from the University of Cincinnati. Knight is represented by Final Hot Desert.

Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series with assistance from the Agnes Croll Blackburne Visiting Artist and Scholars fund and the Elise Zeller Sauer Fund for Fine Arts.