Lorna Simpson, Rock/Haiku, 1999. Set of twelve framed sheets of silk-screened Japanese newsprint, 73 x 84 in. Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94 in New York City.
Established in the spring of 2008, the
Pilara Foundation Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellowships are envisioned to provide SFAI’s students with direct and extended access to artists whose work has profoundly impacted the contemporary global artworld and whose contributions to art practice and theory represent the highest level of achievement and the promise of continued excellence.
Each semester, two to three artists are invited to SFAI for a three- to five-day residency, during which time they participate in graduate seminars in the Photography department, conduct one-on-one critiques with graduate students, lead colloquia with SFAI students and faculty, and present public lectures. With a view to deepening each artist’s impact, the fellowships are structured as sustained on-campus residencies so as to provide SFAI’s students extensive interaction with the fellows, facilitating discussions of process, aesthetics, cultural influences, and career paths.
A further benefit of the fellowships—part of SFAI’s continued commitment as one of San Francisco’s foremost cultural centers—is that they provide the wider Bay Area public free and open access to an international array of eminent and influential figures on the current global art scene.
Fall 2009 Pilara Foundation Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellows
Lorna Simpson
Public lecture: Friday, September 11, 2009 — 7:30pm
Receiving her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and her MFA from UC San Diego, Lorna Simpson first gained critical notice in the mid-80s for large-scale photograph-and-text works that challenge conventional views of gender, identity, culture, history, and memory. In subsequent work, she expanded upon similar themes through a variety of mediums: large multipanel photographs printed on felt; film and video works; and drawings. Venues at which her work has been exhibited include MoMA in New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA). She participated in the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City and Documenta XI in Kassel (Germany) and is the subject of a number of articles, catalogue essays, and a monograph. A mid-career survey of Simpson’s work was exhibited at such venues as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
lsimpsonstudio.com
Allan Sekula
Public lecture: Monday, October 19, 2009 — 7:30pm
A photographer, writer, and critic, Allan Sekula devises many-leveled critiques of what he calls the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world. An exponent of a critical realism that examines the economic, political, social, and cultural changes of globalization, he constructs work out of concrete life situations. Books by or on him include
Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Work, 1973–1983;
Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes; and
Dismal Science: Photoworks, 1972–1996. He has had solo exhibitions at such venues as Museum Folkwang in Essen (Germany), the Berkeley Art Museum, Witte de With in Rotterdam (The Netherlands), Moderna Museet in Stockholm (Sweden), Kunstverein München in Munich (Germany), the Centre for Fine Arts (“Bozar”) in Brussels (Belgium), and the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Getty Research Institute, DAAD, and Atelier Calder. Sekula is on the faculty of the Photography and Media program at the California Institute of the Arts.
Spring 2009 Pilara Foundation Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellows
Shirin Neshat
Public lecture: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 — 7:30pm
An Iranian-born artist who has lived in the US since 1974, Shirin Neshat portrays, in her photographs and films, the emotional space of exile, in particular, as such emotions touch on the role of women in Islamic society. She has had solo exhibitions at such venues as the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (Texas, USA), the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA), the Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Espoo (Finland), Castello di Rivoli in Turin (Italy), the Art Institute of Chicago, Serpentine Gallery in London, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in León (Spain), the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin, and Gladstone Gallery in New York City. Her awards include the 2004 Hiroshima Freedom Prize and the 2006 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. Neshat is currently completing a film based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s book
Women Without Men (2004).
James Welling
Public lecture: Wednesday, April 1, 2009 — 7:30pm
Born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut (USA), James Welling earned both a BFA and an MFA at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia (California, USA), where he studied with, among others, Dan Graham (see above). He emerged in the 70s as an artist for whom photographic norms and the representational field itself were (and remain) not so much the given as a locus for contestation and for what he named the ventriloquism—the many different formal languages—of photography. Recent venues at which he has exhibited include David Zwirner and the 2008 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; Regan Projects and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; and Galerie Nelson-Freeman in Paris. Retrospectives of his work have been held at David Zwirner in 2008 and at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus (Ohio, USA), among other venues, in 2000. The cover photographer for Sonic Youth’s seminal 1985 album,
Bad Moon Rising, Welling currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Isaac Julien
Public lecture: Wednesday, April 15, 2009 — 7:30pm
Born in 1960 in London, where he currently lives and works, Isaac Julien graduated from Saint Martin’s School of Art in 1984, having studied painting and fine art film. Early work includes the poetic documentary
Looking for Langston,
Young Soul Rebels, and
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001 for
The Long Road to Mazatlán and for
Vagabondia. Formerly a visiting lecturer at Harvard University’s Schools of Afro-American and Visual Environmental Studies, he is currently a visiting professor at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. He received MIT’s Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts and the Frameline Lifetime Achievement Award. Recent solo shows include such venues as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami (Florida, USA). Julien is represented in the collections at the Tate Modern in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim in New York City, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC.
www.isaacjulien.com
Fall 2008 Pilara Foundation Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellows
Guy Tillim
Public lecture: Monday, September 15, 2008 — 7:30pm
South Africa–based photographer Guy Tillim makes black-and-white and digital images, mainly of economically underdeveloped and war-torn parts of the world. He worked as a freelance photographer for the local South African press as well as for foreign media, including positions at Reuters and Agence France Presse. Tillim has received numerous awards, including the 2002 Prix SCAM (Societé Civile des Auteurs Multimedia) Roger Pic, the 2003 Higashikawa Overseas Photographer Prize, the 2004 DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Photography, the 2005 Leica Oskar Barnack Award, and, in 2006, the first Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. He recently exhibited at Documenta 12, the 27th São Paulo Bienal, Neue Galerie in Graz (Austria), Tate Modern in London, and in the traveling Africa Remix (2004–2007). His work is included in
Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography (2006).
Martha Rosler
Public lecture: Saturday, October 25, 2008 — 7:30pm
Known for her work in video, phototext, installation, and performance, Martha Rosler also writes and lectures widely on art and culture. Her work in the public sphere treats of the link between social life and media, architecture and the built environment, housing and homelessness, and systems of transport. Her work has been exhibited in the 50th Venice Biennial (2003), the Liverpool Biennial (2004), the Taipei Biennial (2004), Documenta 7 (1982), and a number of Whitney Biennials. A retrospective of her work—Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World—was shown in five European cities and at the International Center of Photography in NYC. She has published numerous essays and ten books of photography, art, and writing, including
Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001 (2004). Rosler was awarded the Spectrum International Prize in Photography in 2005, which was accompanied by a photo and video retrospective at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover (Germany) and at NGBK in Berlin.
Stanley Greene
Public lecture: Saturday, December 6, 2008 — 7:30pm
Born in New York City in 1949, Stanley Greene joined the Black Panthers and was an anti–Vietnam War activist as a teenager. He studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and at SFAI, where he took his BFA in 1978 and his MFA in 1980. He worked as a photographer for a number of magazines in New York and, in 1986, moved to Paris. Living in Europe, he was on hand to record the fall of the Berlin Wall, his documentation of which soon made his photojournalism internationally known. Having documented wars and poverty in Africa, the former Soviet Union, Central America, Asia, and the Middle East, he is perhaps best known for the work he has done in Chechnya, collected in
Open Wound: Chechnya 1994 to 2003 (2003). Greene was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for 2004—a fitting tribute to the fact that it was Smith himself who encouraged Green to study photography in the first place.
Spring 2008 Pilara Foundation Distinguished Visiting Photography Fellows
Stan Douglas
Public lecture: Wednesday, February 6, 2008 — 7:30pm
Stan Douglas’s films and videos reflect on questions of culture and technology and on the relationship between subjectivity and popular representations of history. The complexities of his audiovisual installations are often based on substantial research (e.g., the work of Samuel Beckett and his themes of alienation, displacement, and the collapse of subjectivity). Together with that of Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham, Douglas’s work examines the socially and environmentally detrimental effects of industry and technology. Douglas has had solo exhibitions at David Zwirner in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Kunsthalle Basel (Germany); the Serpentine Gallery in London; and Secession in Vienna. He was the subject of an international retrospective in 1999. He was included in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art at the International Center of Photography in New York, curated by Okwui Enwezor and on view from January 18 to May 4, 2008.
Catherine Opie
Public lecture: Tuesday, March 18, 2008 — 7:30pm
Since the early 1990s, Catherine Opie has produced a complex body of photographic work in diverse genres, exploring notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. From her early portraits of transgender people and performance artists to her expansive urban landscapes of cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and New York, Opie has offered profound insights into the conditions under which communities form and define themselves. Influenced by social documentary photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and August Sander, Opie maintains a strict formal rigor, working in stark and provocative color as well as richly toned black and white. Opie’s photographs have been shown extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. She will have a major solo exhibition, Catherine Opie: American Photographer, in the fall of 2008 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Thomas Demand
Public lecture: Monday, April 21, 2008 — 7:30pm
Thomas Demand begins his photographic process with a preexisting image, usually taken from media accounts of German history or of current politically charged events. He then translates the images into life-sized models, using colored paper and cardboard to re-create entire rooms, parking lots, facades, and hallways. He then photographs and destroys the paper sculpture. He has applied a similar strategy to 35mm films, setting his cinematic still images in motion. He had a mid-career retrospective at MoMA in New York. Solo exhibitions include those at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice. He participated in the 6th Shanghai Biennial and the 51st Venice Biennial. He represented Germany in the 26th São Paulo Biennial.
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