We are happy to announce the Art Lecture Series for Spring 2026!
Speaker presentations will be held in-person in the Com Building Recital Hall weeks 2, 4, 6, and 8 from 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m., as well as live streamed on Zoom at https://evergreen.zoom.us/j/81559331559. In-person lectures are a delightful opportunity to engage with our guests and the campus community in a direct and meaningful way. Don’t miss out!
What is the Art Lecture Series?
The Art Lecture Series presents a broad range of interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art issues by artists, writers, activists, and scholars. The ongoing aim is to feature an array of practices from a variety of fields, areas of inquiry, and creative production, by people active outside the world of our campus (and sometimes within). This quarter we are lucky enough to be joined by two Evergreen professors: Arun Chandra in week 2, and Miranda Mellis in week 6. The series provides a lively forum for the exchange of ideas between the speakers, students, faculty, staff, and the public.
Please consider supporting an all-campus shared curriculum as part of your interdisciplinary education! Let me know if your program is joining or if you’d like to suggest a speaker. Contact Shaw Osha, oshas@evergreen.edus
Art Lecture Series Spring 2026 Schedule
Zoom Webinar Link: https://evergreen.zoom.us/j/81559331559.
Week 2, April 8: Arun Chandra (In Person)
Arun Chandra is a composition professor and director of the Evergreen Experimental Ensemble. Chandra’s works challenge the social and political contexts of music creation and performance. He was most recently commissioned by Seattle Modern Orchestra for his new piece, Ways of Resisting, which explores contradictions of individual identity versus collaboration. In his own words “Every phrase in this composition is an attempt to be a verbal utterance, in the guise of a musical gesture, made by an individual, within a context of others also asserting themselves. Each person (each instrument) is attempting to articulate what they think is going on, and should be done.”
Week 4, April 22: Julia Rooney (Virtual)
Julia Rooney is a New York-based visual artist who makes paintings and site-specific installations grounded in real space, analog material, and the human body. Sensitive to the increasing dominance of a screen-based world, she creates work rooted in physicality and bodily perception of one’s environment, often responding to conditions such as light, scale, texture, and architecture. In addition to paint, she uses postal correspondence, cyanotype and other explicitly analog technologies to capture a sense of time and place. Rooney has exhibited her work widely throughout the United States and been awarded residencies and fellowships through The Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Yale University Art Gallery, among others. She was born and raised in New York City, where she currently lives and works as a Teaching Artist.
Week 6, May 6: Miranda Mellis (In Person)
Miranda Mellis is the author of the novel Crocosmia (Nightboat Books); three novellas, The Revisionist, The Spokes, and The Quarry; and a short-story collection, None of This Is Real. Her poetry and nonfiction books and chapbooks include The Revolutionary, Demystifications, Unconsciousness Raising, and Materialisms. She is the co-author of two book-length dialogues: The Instead with Emily Abendroth and Passing Through with Rick Moody (forthcoming, Solid Objects 2026). She has been an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Millay Colony and was the ESRR Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Utah in 2026. With Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz, she was a founding co-editor at The Encyclopedia Project. She trained at the Upaya Zen Center as an interfaith, all faith, and no faith chaplain. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in the woods of the Pacific Northwest where she teaches at The Evergreen State College.
Week 8, May 20: Ralph Pugay (In Person)