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, January 30, 2025 @ 4:45pm - 6:30pm
CHEMI ROSADO-SEIJO
Hybrid Event (In-Person / live-streamed)
Born in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico, Chemi Rosado-Seijo graduated from the painting department of the Puerto Rico School of Visual Arts in 1997. In 1998, he worked with Michy Marxuach to open a gallery that transformed into a not-for-profit organization presenting resources and exhibitions for contemporary artists in Puerto Rico.
In 2000, Rosado had his first solo show at the Joan Miro Foundation in Barcelona, including interventions on billboards around the city. Since 2002, he has worked with residents of the El Cerro community, a poor neighborhood south of San Juan, to present public art projects, workshops and other community initiatives. In 2006, he inaugurated La Perla’s Bowl, a sculpture built with residents of San Juan’s La Perla community that functions as both a skateboarding ramp and a pool. Since 2009, Rosado-Seijo has been organizing exhibitions in his apartment in Santurce, creating a center for meeting and exchange in the Puerto Rican contemporary art scene. Rosado-Seijo’s work was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2017.
In 2020, current School of Art faculty, Ben Ashworth, collaborated with Chemi Rosado-Seijo on The Ceremonial Bowl
https://creative-capital.org/artists/chemi-rosado-seijo/
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, February 20, 2025 @ 4:45pm - 6:30pm
MORGAN ASHCOM
Hybrid Event (In-Person / live-streamed)
His multidisciplinary artworks and books explore the tension between fiction, myth and lived experience in the context of imperialism. Ashcom's work has been exhibited and published across the globe. He has received numerous awards including German Photobook and the Center for Photography at Woodstock Purchase Prize. His work has been featured in Le Monde, The Brooklyn Rail, Jewish Currents, and The British Journal of Photography.
Ashcom is former faculty of Western Connecticut State University, Ithaca College, University of Hartford, Cornell University and the University of Virginia. He is also the Founding Director of Visible Records.
He currently lives and works in Charlottesville, VA.
https://morganashcom.format.com/
This event will be held at the Harris Theatre on the GMU Fairfax campus and online via Zoom. RSVP is required to receive the Zoom link via email the day-of!
Thursday, March 20, 2025 @ 4:45pm - 6:30pm
ADRIANA MONSALVE
Hybrid Event (In-Person / live-streamed)
Adriana Monsalve (she /they) is an artist, educator, cultural worker and collaborative publisher working (mostly) in the photobook medium. Along with Caterina Ragg, Monsalve is co-founder of Homie House Press, a radical cooperative platform that challenges the ever-changing forms of storytelling with image and text.
Within her photographic practice, Monsalve is an archivist and visual communicator who produces in-depth stories on identity through the nuances in between race, gender, and immigrant adjacent experiences.
Within her cultural work as a collaborative publisher, she holds space for and with underrepresented communities through the multidisciplinary platform of Homie House Press (HHP); a cooperative playground where fotos become books, a safe space for secret stories and an open house for honest content that meets at the intersection of personal, political, and poetic. She is rigorously pushing towards finding ways for photographers and publishers to cultivate the capacity for care and tenderness within structures that actively work against their manifestations. She defines intimacy as the experience of being genuinely seen, heard, and held by another person or group of people.
As an educator, she enacts radical imagination in the classroom daily. Monsalve believes it is the first step in building worlds we can safely live in. She says, “..art maps our journey toward liberation. To realize our freedom fantasies for our larger community, we also engage with education between the practices of imagination and creation. I am certain liberation comes in communal form, because the culture of white-supremacy that we were all born into, thrives on individualism.. In contrast, imagination taps into our desires, so that we can share (education) and realize them collectively (creation).”
https://www.adrianastories.com/
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, April 3, 2025 @ 4:45pm - 6:30pm
JORDAN NASSAR
Virtual Event (ZOOM)
Jordan Nassar is a Palestinian-American artist who was born and raised in New York City. Extending from this, his work evokes a very particular kind of imagined space: the sort of utopian vision of Palestine held by the displaced constituents that comprise the region’s diaspora.
His favored subject is landscape. He embroiders his compositions, which are framed by, and built up through, repeating patterns adapted from traditional Palestinian motifs. At first glance his scenes seem innocuous enough. They comprise rolling hills, rendered sometimes in vibrant shades of red, while other times in more muted grays and browns. These hills are framed by a dramatically hued sky: oftentimes blue, as we might expect, while in other works it is pink or orange. In these the effect is of distant peaks dappled by the rays of a setting late summer sun. This idyll, which initially seems like an abstract anywhere, turns out to be imaginary, yet specific.
It is fitting that a hero of Nassar’s is fellow Middle Eastern diaspora artist, the Lebanese painter and poet Etel Adnan, who also favors landscape as the subject of her work. Since much of the conflict in the region centers on land rights, especially as they relate to histories of colonialism, it makes sense that topography would feature prominently in the work of artists with a connection to this region. However, the work of Adnan and Nassar is not nostalgic, or even confrontational. Precisely by selecting imaginary landscapes, they evoke the impossibility of ever reclaiming this ideal space while retaining the importance of having some sort of imaginary image in order to direct and concentrate affective energy. Hopefully towards more realistic, incremental political ends.
https://www.jordannassar.com/
This event will be held online only via Zoom. RSVP is required to receive the Zoom link via email the day-of!
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:
Kei Ito / Nora Krug / Andriy Dubchak / Colette Fu / 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