SFAI - San Francisco. Art. Institute.

Of decisive importance to SFAI’s educational mission, the Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series provides the students and faculty at SFAI—as well as the wider Bay Area public—with direct access to the major practitioners and theorists of contemporary global art and culture. The series also creates an open forum through which SFAI’s students are challenged to go beyond basic canonical approaches to the study of art and to discover a global perspective made possible by conceptual and comparative approaches. In addition to the public lectures they give, visiting artists and scholars, whether on campus for several days or for an entire semester, engage with students by teaching intensives or by participating in seminars, critiques, or colloquia. The Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series is organized by SFAI faculty member Glen Helfand.

One of the few contemporary artists internationally recognized for work in both film and photography, Sharon Lockhart seeks out the quiet moments of everyday life in order, among other things, to explore the relationship between the two mediums. Whereas her photographic work often involves staging techniques reminiscent of filmmaking, her films tend to make salient the photographic qualities of the moving image. Recent solo-exhibition venues include Gladstone Gallery in New York City, Blum & Poe in Los Angeles, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Secession in Vienna, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA). Film screenings include such major international venues as the New York Film Festival, the Vienna International Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and the Sundance Film Festival. A fully illustrated catalogue for her recent exhibition Lunch Break is forthcoming in February 2010. An alumna of SFAI, Lockhart lives and works in Los Angeles.

Elaborate fantasy worlds in which everything seems at once enchanted and eerie, Julie Heffernan’s paintings utilize an array of styles and techniques from the grand tradition of European painting as codes for achieving an almost cinematic effect. She received her MFA in painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art in 1985 and her BFA from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1981. Heffernan has exhibited her paintings throughout the United States since 1988 when she had her first solo exhibition at Littlejohn Contemporary Gallery in New York City. Recent solo-exhibition venues include PPOW in New York City, Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica, and Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. Her work was also featured in the exhibition The New Old Masters at the National Museum in Gdansk, Poland. Heffernan is Associate Professor in the Art and Design department at Montclair Sate University in Montclair (New Jersey, USA).

Altering images of ambiguous places and then exhibiting them as documentation, Walead Beshty explores the way in which photography shapes our understanding of history. The tenuous link between what is authentic and what is reproduced encapsulates the medium of photography and the sense of uncertainty inherent within it. He received his BA from Bard College and his MFA from the Yale School of Art, and he is a faculty member in the Department of Art at California Institute of the Arts. Solo-exhibition venues include P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (MoMA) in Long Island City (New York) and, in Los Angeles, the Hammer Museum and LAXART. Group-exhibition venues include the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago; the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln (Massachusetts, USA); and, in New York City, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and White Columns. Beshty lives in Los Angeles.