Tag: visual art (Page 1 of 5)

5/20, Week 8: Ralph Pugay

March 28, 2026 / oshas / 0 Comments

Ralph Pugay works across painting, drawing, and other media to build nonlinear worlds shaped by humor, contradiction, and the layered noise of contemporary culture. The works unfold through loose fables and open situations, where everyday absurdities, digital traces, and emotional undercurrents circulate and take form in different ways. Figures, animals, and gestures appear in shifting arrangements, informed by modes of being together that are adaptive, relational, and slightly off-balance, sometimes engaging narrative, other times existing without it. Humor plays a recurring role in the work, functioning as one of several ways the work navigates tenderness, friction, and surprise.

Pugay (b. 1983, Cavite, Philippines; lives and works in Portland, OR) holds a BA and MFA in Contemporary Art Practice from Portland State University. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at venues including Adams & Ollman , Cristin Tierney , AA|LA, Vox Populi, Seattle Art Museum, Hallie Ford Museum of Art , Marinaro, Chez Max Y Dorothea, Hunter College Art Galleries , and Ditch Projects.

1/14, Week 2: Shaw Osha

January 14, 2026 / oshas / 0 Comments

Shaw Osha is an artist and educator and has just finished an assemblage that reimagines her work over the last ten years as an artist’s book. The book mixes painting projects with writing to contemplate the relentlessness of racialization in American culture since slavery. Using fragile and unstable materials like pigments, flowers, paper, emotions, and language, her book compares, intersects, and maybe fleetingly locates a haunting of a personal, collective, and social ghost that resists comprehension or meaning but returns and repeats.

She has exhibited work in venues including New York’s Pocket Utopia; The Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University; Satellite UNC in Chapel Hill, NC, and the Ali Center in Louisville, KY. She is a member of the faculty at Evergreen and teaches an interdisciplinary arts curriculum that allows students to study at the intersections of intellectual, research, and creative activity.

11/20, Week 8: Ellen Levy

September 27, 2024 / Josselyn Haldeman

Ellen Levy is the author of A Book About Ray (MIT Press, 2024), the first full-length survey of the career of the collagist and correspondence artist Ray Johnson (American, 1927-1995). Her other writings include Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle Between the Arts (Oxford UP, 2011), and essays and reviews on poetry, visual art, theater, and television in such publications as Dissent, Genre, Modernism/Modernity, The Nation, Parkett, and Twentieth-Century Literature. She has taught at Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, and Vanderbilt University.

https://www.abookaboutray.com/the-author-1

When: 11:30 a.m.- 1 p.m. Wednesday, November 20th

Where: In-person in the Comm Building Recital Hall and live streamed via Zoom webinar

Zoom Webinar Link: https://evergreen.zoom.us/j/86447124526

4/10, Week 2: Jessica Jackson Hutchins

March 21, 2024 / Jade Baker

Jessica Jackson Hutchins (b. 1971) lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Hutchins’ expressive and intuitive studio practice produces dynamic sculptural installations, collages, paintings, and large-scale ceramics, all hybrid juxtapositions of the handmade. As evidence of the artist’s dialogue with items in her studio, these works are a means by which the artist explores the intimacy of the mutual existence between art and life. Her transformations of everyday household objects, from furniture to clothing, are infused with human emotion and rawness, and also show a playfulness of material and language that is both subtle and ambitious. Based upon a willingly unmediated discourse between artist, artwork and viewer, Hutchins’ works ultimately serve to refigure an intimate engagement with materiality and form.

5/9, Week 6: Rafael Soldi

March 21, 2024 / Jade Baker

Rafael Soldi is a Peruvian-born artist and independent curator based in Seattle (unceded Indigenous land of the Coast Salish peoples). His practice centers on how queerness and masculinity intersect with larger topics of our time such as immigration, memory, and loss. Rafael has exhibited internationally at the Frye Art Museum, Frost Art Museum, Griffin Museum of Photography, CLAMP, The Print Center, Museo MATE, Filter Space, and Burrard Arts Foundation, among others. He has received support from the The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, The Northwest Film Forum, Puffin Foundation, smART Ventures, Artist Trust, 4Culture, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and Center Santa Fe. He has been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, Bogliasco Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and PICTURE BERLIN. He was a 2022 finalist for the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Award.

His first monograph, Imagined Futures / Futuros Imaginarios (Candor Arts), and CARGAMONTÓN (self-published), were both published in 2020.

His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Finer Arts, Houston, Tacoma Art Museum, Frye Art Museum, King County Public Art Collection, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Rafael’s work has been reviewed on ARTFORUM, The Seattle Times, The Boston Globe, Photograph Magazine, The Seen, Art Nexus, and PDN. He is the co-founder of the Strange Fire Collective, a project dedicated to highlighting work made by women, people of color, and queer and trans artists; and co-curator of the High Wall, a yearly outdoor video projection program that invites immigrant artists and artists working on themes of diaspora and borderlands to intervene the facade of a former immigration center building in the heart of Seattle.

Rafael holds a BFA in Photography & Curatorial Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

https://rafaelsoldi.com/

2/28, Week 8: Pamela Lins

January 17, 2024 / Jade Baker

CANCELLED

Pamela Lins refers to her work primarily as sculpture, although she uses the term expansively. She teaches sculpture at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and painting at Princeton University. Through her work, Lins contemplates the social, the political, and the historical by constructing situations inquisitive and equivocal to sculpture and the making of it. Lins’ work explores the space and connections between painting and sculpture, sometimes with a focus on ceramics, leading her to found Ceramics Club with Trisha Baga. Previously, Lins’ work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, in a collaboration with Amy Sillman, and has been exhibited at the Tang Museum of Art, The Suburban, the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. She is represented by Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York. A New York Times review of her 2015 show ‘model, model, model’ describes her exploration of the links between painting and photography. In 2008 Lins received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and in 2007 she was awarded a fellowship in the visual arts from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation. In 2013-14, she held the David and Roberta Logie Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

1/31, Week 4: Leah Modigliani

January 4, 2024 / Jade Baker

Leah Modigliani is Associate Professor of Visual Studies at Tyler School of Art and Architecture. She is an artist and scholar with transdisciplinary engagements informed by fine arts, art history, critical geography, urban studies, and politics. Modigliani’s work represents the liberatory potential (right to the city) and neoliberal revanchism (displacement, punitive laws) of urban experience. In artwork she has dwelled upon eviction (“How long can we tolerate this? An incomplete record from 1933-1999,” 2016-17); cities destroyed by war (“The City in Her Desolation,” 2017) and natural disasters (“Cities of God” series 2021-22), and protests against injustices enacted in cities (“Washington D.C., 1939; Basel, 1957; Berkeley, 1969; Chicago, 1969; London, 1969; Windsor, 1982…,” 2015-2018). While often sculptural, her work increasingly cites the form and history of photography, especially photography’s role in constituting and deconstructing historical narratives online and in physical archives. Modigliani visual artworks are complemented and informed by her academic writing about photography and landscape (Engendering an avant garde: the unsettled landscapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism, 2018), and public sculpture (Counter Revanchist Art in the Global City: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action (in press with Routledge, 2023).

Modigliani’s visual work has been exhibited at many galleries and museums including Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum (Philadelphia), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Colby College Museum of Art (Waterville, ME), the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax), the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto). Her critical writing can be found in academic journals and contemporary art magazines such as Mapping Meaning the Journal, Anarchist Studies, Prefix Photo, Art Criticism and C Magazine.Her book, Engendering an avant-garde: the unsettled landscapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism, was published by Manchester University Press’s Rethinking Art’s Histories series in 2018. Her second book, Counter-Revanchist Art in the Global City will be published by Routledge in 2023.

https://www.leahmodigliani.net/

11/1 Wednesday, Week 6: Jennifer West

October 10, 2023 / Jade Baker

Jennifer West (b.1966, Topanga, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist who has explored materialism in film for over fifteen years. She is known for her digitized films that are made by hand manipulating film celluloid. Joanna Kleinberg wrote on her work in Frieze “the intermingling of materiality, feeling and identity creates a wild blend of synaesthetic experience wherein the substances of life literally and figuratively colour the film. West’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Frieze and Mousse Magazine. West has produced sixteen zine artist books which were recently acquired by the Getty Museum.

Significant commissions include works for LIAF Biennial (2022); Seattle Art Museum (2016-2017); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2016); The High Line, New York, NY (2012); MIT List Visual Arts Center (2011); Aspen Art Museum (2010); and Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London (2009). West has had solo exhibitions and presentations at the Pompidou Center, Paris (2022); Times Square Arts, New York (2021); JOAN Los Angeles (2020); Contemporary Art Museum St Louis (2018); Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2017); Seattle Art Museum (2016-2017); Museo d’Arte Nuoro, Sardinia (2017); Tramway, Glasgow (2016); S1 Artspace, Sheffield, UK (2012); Kunstverein Nürnberg, Germany (2010); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, (2010); Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2008); White Columns, New York, NY (2007). She received an MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and a BA from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.She has lectured widely on her ideas of the “Analogital” and is the Program Director of MFA Art and an Associate Professor of the Practice of Fine Arts at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design. In 2022, a monograph on her work, Media Archaeology was published by Radius Books, funded by a grant from the Thoma Foundation.

https://www.jweststudio.com/

5/24 Wednesday, Week 8: Dr. Vuslat D. Katsanis

April 2, 2023 / Jade Baker

Vuslat D. Katsanis is a scholar of comparative literature, film, and visual culture with a focus on Turkish and global migrant cultural productions and critical theory since 1989. Currently a professor in the Literary Arts and Studies path of study at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, Katsanis is also the cofounder of MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture (MPAC), an independently-run curatorial project and research space in Zurich, Switzerland. She has published essays on the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Fatih Akin, translated a number of short fiction and poetry between Turkish and English, coedited a volume on teaching writing, and together with MPAC, curated several contemporary multimedia art exhibitions in the Pacific Northwest and Southern California with upcoming programming in Switzerland and Türkiye. Katsanis holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine, with a certificate of emphasis in Critical Theory and a M.A. in Visual Studies.

In this panel, Katsanis will join artist and MPAC cofounder Ilknur Demirkoparan in conversation with Suriname-based filmmaker, Keoni K. Wright, and the American painter, Charles Edward Williams, with whom she is co-curating Play, a multimedia contemporary art exhibition opening on June 9, 2023, in Zurich. The panelists will discuss their individual art practices as well as their collective outlook toward the future through a shared interest in worldmaking and joy. The “play” theme is inspired by the historical role of artist-run initiatives for refugee artists during the first two world wars, and specifically, the playhouse that the Dadaists established in Zurich to sustain hope amidst a fury of political and social upheavals.

https://postcollapse.art/

5/10 Wednesday, Week 6: MusicXHabitatXArt

April 2, 2023 / Jade Baker

Music X Habitat X Art is an interdisciplinary group comprised of three artists whose medium is digital artwork. Yaoyue Huang, Amelie Jiang, and Scott Sherman work together to present classical and contemporary music in new ways to audiences, engaging them visually and aurally. They merge contemporary piano music with digital art and performance installation. Their process is intensely collaborative, working with music, photographs, and re-imagining them into a final film which is a commentary on both the music and images themselves.

https://musichabitatart.com/

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