Visual Voices is a Professional Lecture Series offered by Mason Exhibitions and the School of Art at Mason. Speakers are chosen with faculty guidance to represent leading and emerging talented practitioners, as well as artists whose work lies beyond the subject areas of the program offerings.
The purpose of the lectures are to broaden students’ exposure and vocabulary to professional work being created today. It also provides an opportunity for Art & Design students and members of the public to interact with speakers via a Q&A following their lecture, giving them the chance to exchange ideas and pose questions to the guest speakers.
If you miss the live presentations, recordings of the lectures will be available one week after the live event. Recordings of the lectures will be available at https://masonartsamplified.gmu.edu/soa
Visual Voices events are free to attend and open to the public. Registration is required!
For more information, please contact: Jeffrey Kenney - jkenney5@gmu.edu
Thursday, September 12, 2024 @ 4:45pm - 6:30pm
KEI ITO
Hybrid Event (In-Person / live-streamed)
Kei Ito is an interdisciplinary installation artist and immigrant, navigating themes entrenched in trauma and inheritance within the context of his identity and heritage. His artistic practice is deeply rooted in the profound legacy passed down from his late grandfather, a resilient survivor of the harrowing atomic bombing of Hiroshima. This familial narrative, coupled with the loss of numerous family members to the explosion's aftermath and radiation poisoning, serves as the cornerstone of Ito's creative exploration. Through his art, Ito delves into hidden histories, employing his generational past as a lens for contemplating contemporary and future events. Ito's artworks become temporal monuments that transcend traditional views of art by placing them in both art and non-art spaces alike, inviting audiences to explore nuanced social issues and honor the memories of those lost to historical and contemporary tragedies.
Ito's artistic contributions have been widely recognized and exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions. His works have garnered attention in esteemed publications such as the Washington Post Magazine, Hyperallergic, BBC Culture & Art, BmoreArt, ArtMaze Magazine, ESSE Magazine, and various newspapers worldwide. Notably, his pieces are held in esteemed institutional collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL), the Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach, FL), the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art (Fort Collins, CO), Georgia Museum of Art (Athens, GA), and the Eskenazi Museum of Art (Bloomington, IN).
This event will be held at the Center for the Arts Concert Hall on the GMU Fairfax campus and online via Zoom. RSVP is required to receive the Zoom link via email the day-of!
Thursday, September 26, 2024 @ 4:45 pm - 6:30 pm
NORA KRUG
Hybrid Event (In-Person / live-streamed)
Nora Krug is the author and illustrator of Diaries of War, an illustrated account of Russia's war on Ukraine through different viewpoints. Her other work includes the graphic memoir Belonging, the illustrator of adaptation of On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, and an associate professor at Parsons School of Design in New York. Her drawings and visual narratives have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, and Le Monde Diplomatique. Her short-form graphic biography, Kamikaze, about a surviving Japanese World War II pilot, was included in editions of Best American Comics and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Maurice Sendak Foundation, Fulbright, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and has received gold medals from the Society of Illustrators and the New York Art Directors Club. She was named Illustrator of the Year by the Victoria and Albert Museum and was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography in 2019.
Thursday, October 24, 2024 @ 4:45pm - 6:30 pm
ANDRIY DUBCHAK
Virtual Event
Andriy Dubchak is a Ukrainian photographer, videographer, photojournalist, and war correspondent. Dubchak is the founder and director of the independent reporting media outlet Donbas Frontliner. Dubchak was one of the first streamers of Euromaidan, having filmed the main events of the Revolution of Dignity, including the clashes on 17-20 February 2014.
Dubchak took up photography in 2015. Since then, he has regularly reported from the front line and covered the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He was one of the first journalists to document Russian war crimes against civilians in Ukraine, including the murder of a family on a bridge in Irpin on 6 March 2022. He has been covering the Russian-Ukrainian war since 2015.
Dubchak was a co-producer of Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom, a film nominated for 2016 Oscar’s Best Documentary Feature, and Freedom on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom directed by Evgeny Afineevsky. He is also the co-producer of Ukraine Under Attack: 72 Hours in the Presidential Office. He is currently working on several documentaries that will be available for both Ukrainian and international audiences. The reports by Andriy Dubchak have been published and streamed by numerous media worldwide, including CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. He is an honorable member of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers.
Andriy’s work is featured in A Closer Look: Conflicted Art from Ukraine at Buchanan Hall Atrium Gallery.
Thursday, November 7, 2024 @ 4:45 pm - 6:30 pm
COLETTE FU
Hybrid Event (In-Person / live-streamed)
Colette Fu is a Philadelphia-based visual artist who received her MFA in Fine Art Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2003, and soon after began devising complex compositions that incorporate photography and pop-up paper engineering. Her pop-up books are included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, and many private and rare archive collections. Fu’s numerous awards and grants include a Forman Arts Initiative Art Works grant, Philadelphia Cultural Treasures grant, Joan Mitchell Painter’s & Sculptors Fellowship, the Meggendorfer Prize, Leeway Transformation Award, and a Fulbright Research Fellowship to China. She exhibits widely and teaches pop-up courses and community workshops internationally.
Visual Voices lectures are now available to watch online! Mason Arts Amplified has a new look and platform to make watching and browsing arts content even easier. This online platform is a digital stage and learning space featuring curated arts experiences including livestreamed concerts, releases of previously recorded content, behind-the-scenes talks with artists, and more. It requires a free registration.
Past speakers have included:
Maria Gaspar / Taekyeom Lee / Mendi+Keith Obadike / Ellen Lesperance / Bahia Shehab / Jon Henry / Silas Munro / Sadie Barnette / Sharif Bey / Rodrigo Carazas Portal / William Christenberry / Sonya Clark / James Elkins / Ann Fessler / Sam Gilliam / Steve Heller / Leslie Hewitt / Steve Kurtz / Lucy Lippard / Ellen Lupton / J.J. McCracken / Dorothy Moss / Alyce Myatt / Laurel Nakadate / Lori Nix / Eddie Opara / Adriana Ospina / PARABOLA Architecture / Michael Rakowitz / Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz / E. Carmen Ramos / Wendy Red Star / Dario Robleto / Mia Eve Rollow / Phyllis Rosenzweig / Mario Rossero / Amanda Ross-Ho / Rozeal (formerly Iona Rozeal Brown) / Paul Rucker / Carrie Schneider / Simon Schwartz / Kuiyi Shen / Renee Stout / Siebren Versteeg / Angela Washko / Robert Whitman / Daniel Wickerham and Malcolm Lomax / Bruce Willen / Deborah Willis / Krzysztof Wodiczko / Agustina Woodgate / The Yes Men