Muralists Linda Fernandez and Keir Johnston, founding members of Amber Artwork and Design, will current the subsequent Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 9 at Sheldon Museum of Artwork’s Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the general public.
Fernandez is a multicultural artist, muralist and educator specializing in public artwork and neighborhood engagement. She is a founding member of Amber Artwork and Design, an artist collective based mostly in Philadelphia that creates public artwork by way of engagement with neighborhood members.
Her work options vivid colours, designs and symbols that mirror her Caribbean heritage. She’s impressed by the methods through which nature, structure and historical past weave collectively to inform tales of individuals and the locations they name house. Her work merges themes of id and residential throughout bodily, social and cultural divides by exploring Caribbean heritage by way of a diasporic lens.
Fernandez earned a Bachelor’s diploma in artwork training from Tyler Faculty of Artwork, a certificates in up to date artwork from Metafora Escola de Arte Contemporaneo in Barcelona, Spain, and a Grasp’s in public administration from Austin W. Marxe Faculty of Public and Worldwide Affairs. She is an alumna of Neighborhood Arts Training Management Institute, Nationwide City Fellows and the Caribbean Cultural Heart African Diaspora Institute’s Intercultural Advocacy Fellowship.
Johnston painted his first mural as an adolescent whereas finding out high-quality artwork at California State College at Northridge. That early expertise sparked a deep appreciation for the collaborative nature of mural-making and the ability of public artwork to have interaction numerous communities.
Over time, Johnston has labored with a variety of populations—together with incarcerated youth, prisoners serving life sentences, elders, college students, and people with disabilities—main them in mural manufacturing and community-based artwork initiatives.
As a founding member of Amber Artwork & Design in 2013, he has been instrumental in initiatives that sort out themes of race, class, poverty and inequality. His notable works embrace Colourful Legacy: Constructing Brotherhood, a mural developed by way of neighborhood dialogue round violence and trauma skilled by males of coloration in Philadelphia, and Philly’s Firsts, which celebrates the town’s wealthy legacy of innovation and history-making occasions.
The remaining lectures within the sequence are:
- Oct. 16: Margaretta Lovell. Lovell is a cultural historian working on the intersection of historical past, artwork/architectural historical past and anthropology. She holds the Jay D. McEvoy, Jr., Chair within the Historical past of American Artwork on the College of California Berkeley and research materials tradition, portray, structure and design in England, France and North America from the seventeenth century to the current.
- Oct. 30: Adrian Arleo and Jane Shellenbarger. The UNL Clay Membership welcomes two visiting artists who will current successive lectures on Oct. 30. For the final 32 years, Arleo has lived and labored in Missoula, Montana. Her ceramic work is exhibited nationally and internationally and is in quite a few private and non-private collections. In 1995, she was awarded a Montana Arts Council Particular person Fellowship. Shellenbarger is a professor and graduate program director at Rochester Institute of Know-how within the Faculty for American Crafts. She established her studio pottery, Mill Station Pottery, in rural Hale, Michigan, in 1997.
- Nov. 6: Julia Blaut. Blaut is the senior director of curatorial affairs on the Robert Rauschenberg Basis. Celebrating the artist’s centennial, Blaut will ship a lecture about Rauschenberg’s enduring legacy with particular consideration to his prints.
- Nov. 20: Pablo Helguera. Helguera is a visible artist residing in New York and sometimes thought of a pioneering determine within the area of socially engaged artwork. His apply includes efficiency, drawing, pedagogy, set up, theater and different literary methods. Coming from a household of classical musicians, his work additionally often consists of musical components.
- Dec. 4: Kristina Paabus. Paabus is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores techniques of energy, significantly in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. Working primarily in printmaking, she displays internationally and teaches at Oberlin Faculty, the place she is affiliate professor of studio artwork in reproducible media.
The Faculty of Artwork, Artwork Historical past & Design’s Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Sequence brings notable artists, students and designers to Nebraska every semester to reinforce the training of scholars. The sequence is introduced in collaboration with Sheldon Museum of Artwork.
Underwritten by the Hixson-Lied Endowment with extra assist from different sources, the sequence enriches the tradition of the state by offering a method for Nebraskans to work together with luminaries within the fields of artwork, artwork historical past and design. Every visiting artist or scholar spends one to a few days on campus to fulfill with courses, take part in critiques and provides demonstrations.
For extra data on the sequence, contact the Faculty of Artwork, Artwork Historical past & Design at (402) 472-5522 or e-mail schoolaahd@unl.edu.
