»Bensussen Visiting Artist Lecture Series

DONALD PREZIOSI ART HISTORIAN
Thursday, February 23, 2012

Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, Donald Preziosi has written many notable books concerning intellectual history, critical theory, and museology. In August 2007 he became the MacGeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is a past president of the Semiotic Society of America (1985). His 1998 book The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology is considered ‘the most widely used English-language introduction to art history’. At UCLA, Professor Preziosi developed the art history critical theory program and the UCLA museum studies program. At Oxford, he held the Slade Professorship of Fine Arts in 2001, where he delivered a series of lectures entitled Seeing Through Art History. His talk will deal with issues being discussed in his forthcoming book on art and religion.

VICTORIA VENSA
"Art|Science Collaborations: Being in Between"
Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Victoria Vesna is a media artist, Professor at the Department of Design | Media Arts at the UCLA School of the Arts and director of the UCLA Art Sci center. Currently she is Visiting Professor at Art, Media and Technology, Parsons the New School for Design in New York. Her work can be defined as experimental creative research that resides between disciplines and technologies. She explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. Her most recent experiential installations -- Blue Morph, Mood Swings and Water Bowls, all aim to raise consciousness around the issues of our relationship to natural systems. Other notable works are Bodies INCorporated, Datamining Bodies, n0time and Cellular Trans_Actions. She has long-term collaborations with a nanoscientist, a neuroscientist and Buddhist monks.

CHARLES GAINES
Wednesday May 4, 2011

Charles Gaines received his BA from Jersey City State University and his MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He has had over 60 one-person shows and several hundred group exhibitions in the US and Europe. He was included in the Venice Biennale (2007), the Triennale der Photographie, Hamburg (1999), Esslingen (2004), and the Whitney Biennial (1975). His work is in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art in New York and many other museums. A monograph about his work published by Charta, ed., Horace Brockington, will be released in 2011. He has published “Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism” (Univ of Cal, Irvine, (1993) along with various other works. He will discuss his latest work, Manifestos, and the relationship between Metonymy and political discourse.

JASON FELCH LOS ANGELES TIMES REPORTER
Wednesday, November 2, 2011

As an award winning investigative reporter, who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Felch’s stories have shed light on corruption in the art world, the misuse of DNA evidence in courts, fraud in the wake of disasters and other topics. Felch will give a presentation about his non-fiction book, Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum (chasingaphrodite.com), which details how the J. Paul Getty Museum became the epicenter of an unprecedented scandal over the acquisition of looted Greek and Roman antiquities by American museums.

JUDITH HALBERSTAM
February 25, 2010

The Queer Art of Failure. Judith Halberstam is a well known gender theorist, specializing in cultural studies, queer theory and visual culture. Her work on female masculinity refutes the notion that butch lesbians are just imitations of “real men” and instead locates gender variance within the dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders. Halberstam has also written a book on Gothic monstrosity in literature and film and more recently she published In A Queer Time and Place, a study of queer temporality or queer uses of time and space that are developed in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.

MARGARET WERTHEIM
“Mathematics As Poetic Enchantment”
Wednesday, March 4 2009

Margaret Wertheim is an internationally noted science writer, commentator and curator whose work focuses on the relations between science and the wider cultural landscape. Wertheim is the author of Pythagoras’ Trousers, a history of the relationship between physics and religion; and The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. A native Australian, she has a B.S. majoring in pure and applied physics and a B.A. in mathematics and computer science. She is a contributor to the New York Times Science Section and an Op-Ed contributor for the Los Angeles Times. From 2000-2005 Wertheim wrote the “Quark Soup” science column for the LA Weekly and is a contributing editor on science issues for Cabinet, the internationally renowned arts and culture quarterly. Her articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Sciences, New Scientist, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Salon, and Wired Magazine. Wertheim’s writing has been included in Best American Science Writing (2003), edited by Oliver Sacks. In 2006 she won the excellence in journalism award from the American Institute of Biological Sciences and in 2004 she was the National Science Foundation’s visiting journalist to Antarctica. Her television series Catalyst (about science and technology, aimed at teenage girls), won numerous prizes around the world. In 2006 she was Australia’s official spokeswoman for Science Week and in 2007 was a panelist at the Sundance Film Festival’s science round-table. Wertheim has written and produced a dozen television science programs and interactive video programs, including the PBS documentary special Faith and Reason. In 2003, Wertheim founded the Institute For Figuring, an innovative Los Angeles-based organization devoted to enhancing public engagement with the aesthetic and poetic dimensions of science and mathematics. The IFF hosts lectures, curates exhibitions, publishes books and maintains an extensive website. Lecture topics have included hyperbolic space, the mathematics of knots, logic crystallography, the physics of snowflakes, the science of insect flight, and the history of computer memory devices. In 2007 the IFF’s “Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef” was shown at the Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburg) as a centerpiece of the exhibition Artists Respond to Global Warming.

SHAWN BRIXEY
“From Simulation to Emulation...”
Wednesday, April 15 2009

Shawn Brixey (b. 1961) is Director of the University of Washington’s recently established research center and Ph.D. program in Digital Arts and Experimental Media. Previously, he was founder of the Digital Media Program at the University of California Berkeley, and Director of their Center for Digital Art and New Media Research. A graduate of MIT’s CAVS/Media Lab, Brixey has exhibited art and technology works internationally, including Documenta, the Deutscher Kunstlerbund, Karlsruhe, The Cranbrook Art Museum, The MIT Museum, The Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati, The Chicago Art Institute, The 1998 Winter Olympics, The first American Design and Architecture Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, AME at Arizona State University, The Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, and the Berkeley Art Museum. He has received numerous major grants and awards to support his research including: Apple Computer, AVID Incorporated, The Boxlight Corporation, The Intel Corporation, Silicon Graphics, Newport/Klinger Research Corporation, IBM GmbH, The National Institute of Health, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Leica and Hughes Aircraft. In 2003 he was honored with a prestigious Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for New Media, of which past fellows include Bill Viola and Gary Hill. In 2006 Brixey was inducted as a lifetime fellow of the World Technology Network. He lectures widely in the U.S. and Europe on new and emerging media art forms. Critical writing and reviews of his work have been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The Cincinnati Inquirer, The Stranger, The Guardian, Wired Magazine, Surface Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Art News, WolkenKratzer Magazine (Germany), Smithsonian World Television, and KQED/MSNBC Radio. Significant review of his work is included in From Technological to Virtual Art, by Frank Popper, MIT Press, 2007.