March 5: Allison Smith
Allison Smith, Professor and Chair of the Sculpture department at California College of the Arts, is another artist whose work embraces craft culture. She creates performative sculptures and public events, exploring history and national identity through reenactment. Her exhibitions often function as a living history museum. She creates sites in which the public can reimagine a collective American history. Through working in such a way, Smith is queering history and its artifacts. Like the other artists in the lecture series, craft not only functions in a decorative sense, but it's also charged with social and political content.
February 26: Pepón Osorio
Community engagement is also a critical theme throughout this lecture series. Pepón Osorio is an artist that creates large scale installations that incorporate sculpture and video, but his goal is to give back to the community. His work as a social worker informs his desire to give back. His installations tell universal stories, but many of them come from his personal experiences in the community. For Badge of Honor pictured above, Osorio had met a lot of young people in the Newark area whose fathers were incarcerated and wanted to bring that into the work. Through using narratives that he encounters, Osorio creates work that is politically engaged and emotionally compelling.
March 19: Emily Jacir
Emily Jacir is an interdisciplinary artist that investigates issues surrounding translation and resistance, questioning the notion of the archive. One of her recent works that she presented at dOCUMENTA (13), ex libris (which translates to "from books"), is a collection of 178 photographs taken of books. These books are regarded as abandoned property at the Jewish National Library in West Jerusalem, but restitution of these books has yet to take place. Jacir's work is an attempt to keep these things from slipping away into history. In a way, she is creating a counter-archive, one that exists in place of what should already be in place. Unlike the other lectures in this series, Jacir's will be held at ASU Art Museum and begin at 5:30 p.m.
