Visual Arts

Jasmina Metwaly

Artist, Filmmaker, and Member of the Mosireen Collective
Jasmina Metwaly gave a Visiting Artist Lecture at the Arts Research Center on January 31, 2019.

Born to a a Polish mother and an Egyptian father, Jasmina Metwaly is a Cairo-Berlin-based artist and filmmaker, member of Mosireen Collective and of media archive 858.ma. She works in video and film, and has recently started drawing again. She likes to work with people and their histories, within different materials including texts and archival matter such as: scripts,...

Susan Meiselas

Documentary Photographer and President of the Magnum Foundation
Susan Meiselas gave a Visiting Artist Lecture at the Arts Research Center on September 10, 2018.

Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer based in New York. She is the author of Carnival Strippers(1976), Nicaragua(1981), ...

Julie Mehretu

Contemporary Visual Artist
Julie Mehretu gave a Visiting Artist Lecture at the Arts Research Center on October 22, 2019.

Julie Mehretu, (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) lives and works in New York City. She received a B.A. from Kalamazoo College, Michigan, studied at the University Cheik Anta Diop, Dakar Senegal, and received a Master’s of Fine Art with honors from The Rhode Island School of Design in 1997.

In exploring palimpsests of history, from geological time to a modern day phenomenology of the social, Julie Mehretu's works engage us in a dynamic visual articulation...

José Carlos Martinat

José Carlos Martinat gave a Visiting Artist Lecture at the Arts Research Center on April 6, 2015.

José Carlos Martinat lives and works in Lima, Peru. Martinat’s projects are characterized by exploring a relationship with the context in which it is presented, on a social, cultural or political level, in order to achieve a real and direct communication between the viewer, the work and the space. Martinat works within a multidisciplinary practice utilizing sculpture, robotics, programming, audio, sound, appropriation and interaction where relevant. His work has taken...

Ajuan Mance

Visual Artist, Author, Editor, and a Professor of Ethnic Studies and English at Mills College
Ajuan Mance gave a Visiting Artist Lecture at the Arts Research Center on November 24, 2020.

Ajuan Mance is a Professor of African American literature at Mills College in Oakland, California. A lifelong artist and writer, Ajuan has participated in solo and group exhibitions as well as comic and zine fests, from the Bay Area to Brooklyn. In her art, illustration, and comics, Ajuan uses humor and bright colors to explore race, gender, power, and the people and places in which they intersect. Her work has appeared in a number of digital and print media outlets,...

Wendy MacNaughton

Illustrator and Graphic Journalist
Wendy MacNaughton gave a Visiting Artist Presentation at the Arts Research Center on July 17, 2015.

Wendy MacNaughton is an illustrator and graphic journalist based in San Francisco. MacNaughton has published eleven books, including three New York Times best-sellers. MacNaughton's work combines illustration, journalism, and social work to tell the stories of overlooked people and places. Her art has appeared in The New York Times, NPR, Juxtapoz, GOOD, Time Out NY, 7x7, and Gizmodo. She has created magazine cover images for 7x7 and Edible SF. Her illustrated documentary...

Maya Lin

Architect, Designer, and Sculptor
Maya Lin gave a Visiting Artist Lecture at the Arts Research Center on September 29, 2014.

Maya Lin is known for her large-scale environmental artworks, her architectural works and her memorial designs. Her unique multi-disciplinary career has “resisted categories, boundaries and borders” (Michael Brenson). In her book Boundaries, she writes I see myself existing between boundaries, a place where opposites meet; science and art, art and architecture, East and West. My work originates from a simple desire to make people aware of their surroundings.”...

Cannupa Hanska Luger

Multidisciplinary Artist
Cannupa Hanska Luger gave a Visiting Artist Lecture at the Arts Research Center on April 16, 2020.

Cannupa Hanska Luger (b.1979) is a New Mexico based multidisciplinary artist creating monumental installations, sculpture and performance to communicate urgent stories of 21st Century Indigeneity. Incorporating ceramics, steel, fiber, video and repurposed materials, Luger activates speculative fiction, engages in land-based actions of repair and practices empathetic response through social collaboration. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Luger is an...

Simon Leung

Professor of Art at UC Irvine
Simon Leung was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the Making Time at Human Resources Conference at the Arts Research Center on February 22, 2012.

Simon Leung’s foremost concern as an artist is how “the ethical,” broadly defined, can be thought and traced. His projects, in various media, include a rethinking of AIDS and otherness using the figures of the pinprick and the glory hole; meditations on “the residual space of the American/Vietnam War” (comprising works on the squatting body as counter-architecture, military desertion as askesis, and surfing); a video essay...

Việt Lê

Artist, Writer, Chair of Graduate Visual and Critical Studies Program and an Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at California College of the Arts
Việt Lê gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023, part of the Spring 2023 Flash Reading Series.

Việt Lê is an artist, writer, and curator whose work over the past twenty years examines spiritualities, trauma, representation and sexualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas, as well as intersectional coalitions. Dr. Lê is the author of Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in...