Visiting Artists and Scholars
2023 visiting artist Arantxa Araujo, shown in a neon-colored costume, performing “Dar A Luz” at the Brooklyn Museum
Each year the School of Art invites contemporary artists and scholars to present their research to the public, and conduct studio visits with our Fine Art students. These presentations are co-organized by faculty, staff and students in the Fine Arts Program, with the goal of sharing inspiring work by interdisciplinary practitioners at all stages of their careers, providing exposure to members of our community, and opportunities for kinship and connection. We welcome all members of the public to engage. All our lectures are free and open to the public.
Fall 2025 Lectures
Marisa Williamson
- Friday, September 26, 12:30 - 1:50pm
- Aronoff 5401
- Marisa Williamson is a project-based artist who works in video, image-making, installation and performance around themes of history, race, feminism, and technology.
Kevin Quiles Bonilla
- Wednesday, October 8, 12:30 - 1:50pm
- Aronoff 5401
- Kevin Quiles Bonilla is an interdisciplinary artist born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Through photography, performance and installation, his works explore ideas around power, colonialism, and history with his identity as context.
Chakaia Booker
- Friday, November 7, 12:30 - 1:50pm
- Aronoff 5401
- Chakaia Booker is an internationally renowned and widely collected American sculptor known for creating monumental, abstract works from recycled tires and stainless steel for both the gallery and outdoor public spaces.
Collective Futures Book Presentations
This year, expanding upon our traditional program, we asked our faculty and students to share a selection of their favorite books, in a collective meditation on futurity. We welcome you to visit the DAAP library to read our selections and share in our collective efforts to envision shared futures. The booklist for 2024-25 will be available soon.
- Glitch Feminism – Legacy Russel
- Ecofeminism - Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva
- Queer Phenomenology - Sarah Ahmed
- Ornamentalism – Anne Anlin Cheng
Have a book you swear by? Share it with us!
Faculty Lunch Talks
Join our faculty lunch talks twice each semester to learn about the active and inspiring research and creative work undertaken by our own faculty. Bring your lunch with you – these talks are free and open to the public.
Fall 2025 Caroline Anderson and Theresa Leininger-Miller
- Thursday, September 25, 12:30 - 1:30pm
- Reed Gallery reception area
- Join us to learn more about School of Art faculty creative research.
Mrin Aggarwal and Mark Harris
Supermrin is an Indian artist working at the intersections of architecture, sculpture, and landscape. Using withered trees, grasses, earth, and bones, she creates artworks imbued with a sense of temporality, transience, and subjectivity. She is interested in conceptions of reality, pleasure, and nature within eastern practices. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Untitled Art Fair, Headlands Center for the Arts, Governors Island, Tactile Bosch Wales, and the Chateau Vaudijon, Switzerland. Supermrin is an Assistant Professor at the School of Art, University of Cincinnati and holds an MFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute, California.
Mark Harris works in Cincinnati and London researching Caribbean plant histories and poetics, and avant-garde sound and literature. Exhibitions include Wave Pool, Cincinnati, 2023; M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, 2023; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, 2022; Ruschwoman, Chicago, 2022. Publications include Sonic Wilderness: Mad Vinyl Records, AADR, 2022;‘Caribbean paradigms of noise and silence’, Small Axe, 2021; ‘A great chaos of sound: alternative practices of working through madness, alienation, and the aesthetics of catastrophe in 60s Britain’, Counterculture Studies, 2020; ‘Rebellious Type: Kamau Brathwaite’s typographic derangements,’ Manifold: Experimental Criticism, 2020; 'Turntable Materialities,’ Seismograf, Denmark, 2017; ‘The Materiality of Water,’ Aesthetic Investigations, 2015.
Artists and Assistant Professors Xia Zhang and Neil Orians presented their latest work in an informal discussion on October 19th.
Artists at Work, Workshop Series
Each semester, we invite artists to engage with our students through small and mid-sized workshops on themes ranging from collective drawing and metalworking to new materials and bioplastics. Sometimes these are organized months in advance, and sometimes just a few days in advance, so stay posted!
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Past Lecture Recordings
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
Harris Rosenblum
Lecture recording from Friday, November 1st.
Harris Rosenblum is a sculptor based in New York, NY. He received his MFA from Kent State University in 2022. Recent solo presentations include NADA Miami, Sara’s, Miami, FL; Inorganic Demons, Sara’s NY, NY; and Relics of the Corrupted Blood, Blade Study, NY, NY.
In addition to his own practice, Harris is a founding member of Transcendence Creative, the first creative agency and 360 corporation with a historical materialist approach to brand identity, marketing, and logistics. He is also a contributor and moderator of Do Not Research, a digitally native platform for creative work and research centering contemporary political trends
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.
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.
Caroline Tompkins
Lecture recording from Friday, September 30th.
Caroline Tompkins received a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with her work featured on the BBC, Vogue, and The New York Times among others. Caroline has worked as a photo editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, Vice Magazine, and New York Magazine. She has worked as a professor at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. In 2022, she published her first monograph, Bedfellow with Palm* Studios. Caroline works as a photographer with editorial and commercial clients in New York City.
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.
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View the recorded lecture in its entirety by clicking on an artists image below.
View the recorded lecture in its entirety by clicking on an artists image below.
View the recorded lecture in its entirety by clicking on an artists image below.
