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Participating artists' bios | Schedule of Events

Connecting you to the Contemporary Art that makes
a difference in the world

This program will examine the movement of peoples, ideas, and art as a result of three primary contemporary forces: tourism, migration, and exile. In each of these situations the person moving is essentially an outsider who engages with the culture of habitation in a way that is distinctly different than that of the members of the dominant culture.

The tourist comes as an observer to see a different place for a short period of time and the accommodations for tourism focus on the traveler as a source of income.

Migration today can be between countries or within countries, it is a force that pre-dates the existence of borders and is a major cause for the diversification of populations and the enrichment of culture and communities. Migrating peoples bring cultural and social practices, foods and culinary styles, art and ideas that can add immeasurably to the resulting population. Although much of the history of nations involves migrations, the individual or groups migrating today are more often than not seen as a threat or a problem.

Exile is another force that implies both political and social impetus. Whether between nations or within nations, the history of human societies is marked by trails of human movement in response to oppressive conditions. The artist can take the viewer to places and present situations that would otherwise be nearly inaccessible, opening doors and minds to the realities of human movement in contemporary society in all its many forms.

For more information call 505 424-5050.

Artist Bios and event descriptions

Zelie Pollon
Raw: Images of War
Five Years of US Occupation in Iraq
Photographs by Zelie Pollon. projected on SFAI outside walls.
3/19– 3/31, SFAI

Zelie Pollon is a freelance journalist based in Santa Fe. Her first trip to Iraq was in 2003 for The Baghdad Project: One hundred voices, One hundred faces – A story about war. She returned in 2005 to cover the elections and found a changed – and exponentially more violent country. Things have only worsened since then. Many of the images in Raw: Images of War are not the ones most people see on American TV, in newspapers or in magazines, as they are gruesome and violent. But this is the real Iraq, the real war, the war that people in Iraq see and live with every day. Now entering the fifth year of US occupation, Pollon wants to dedicate this year’s memorial to the children of Iraq, hundreds of thousands of whom are suffering from severe post traumatic stress disorder. Says Zelie, “I pray that my son will never experience the kind of terror, or witness the kind of images, that children in Iraq witness day in and day out.”

Jose Obando
4/5 Workshop, SFAI
4/7 Lecture / Performance - TBD

KSFR Radio Café PODCAST

Jose Obando has dedicated his life to the study of Salsa and its 350+ years of evolution in the United States – specifically Spanish Harlem. His consultancy, Lubona Corporation/Salsa Sight, offers a series of educational programs around this rich and fascinating history. Obando is also the Salsa Consultant for the Musical Instruments Department of the Metropolital Museum of Art, and is currently expanding its collection.

Todd Lester / freeDimensional
4/21 freeDimensional Lecture, 6pm Tipton Hall
4/22–25 freeDimensional Workshop, SFAI

KSFR Radio Café PODCAST

Todd Lester is the Executive Director of freeDimensional, an organization dedicated to the support and protection of individuals who create dialogue on global issues and inequalities through their art and media. For issues to reach society at large, free and open expression is critical. At times imposed limitations or censorship require movement of voices and ideas in order for expression to be possible, safe, and unrestricted. By connecting critical people, places, and issues freeDimensional serves as a platform of collaboration for linking artistic communities to creative individuals and social justice movements worldwide.

Laurie Hawkinson
5/1 Lecture, 6pm Tipton Hall
5/2 Workshop, SFAI

In conjunction with the Santa Fe Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, architects Laurie Hawkinson and Neil Denari will speak about Architectural Tectonics in Contemporary Culture. Hawkinson is a partner in the New York City based architectural firm Smith-Miller+Hawkinson. She will be speaking specifically on the topic of “Transparency and Representation.” Neil Denari is the founder of Neil M. Denari Architects of Los Angeles.

Shanna Ketchum
5/5 Lecture, 6pm Tipton Hall
4/6–9 Workshop, SFAI

Shanna Ketchum is a noted critic and art historian of contemporary Native American art. Her articles have appeared in major publications across the globe including Third Text (London), Estrago (Latin America), Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the Plains Art Museum (USA). Ketchum lectures, both nationally and internationally, about contemporary issues in Native art. More(pdf)>

Andrea Robbins and Max Becher
6/2 Lecture, 6pm Tipton Hall
6/3–6 Workshop, SFAI

The primary focus of Robbins and Becher’s work is, what they call, the transportation of place – situations in which one limited or isolated place strongly resembles another distant one. Everywhere, not only in the new world, such situations are accumulating and accepted as genuine locales. Traditional notions of place, in which culture and geographic location neatly coincide, are being challenged by legacies of slavery, colonialism, holocaust, immigration, tourism, and mass-communication. More(pdf)>

Armando Espinosa and Craig Johnson
7/21 Lecture, 6pm Tipton Hall
7/22–25 Workshop, SFAI

The film is part of the “Metamorfosis Documentation Project,” a collaborative project with the community of Teotitlán del Valle, a village in southern Oaxaca. The presentation will focus on what Espinosa and Johnson refer to as “fair trade art and anthropology.”
The Metamorfosis Documentation Project – is a cinematic and photographic project of cross-cultural dances and rituals of indigenous and mestizo communities throughout the Americas. They hope, through the Metamorfosis Project to help strengthen these communities and promote understanding of their cultures by not only documenting the dances rituals, but by presenting the documentaries to the communities for their study and use, and including them in exhibitions on a wider scale to the outside world. More(pdf)>

Nancy Reyner
7/21-25 Workshop, SFAI

Nancy Reyner is a painter with more than 30 years experience who exhibits, lectures and teaches locally and nationally. Her varied experiences add technical expertise and originality to her work and her teaching. In her SFAI workshop, “Taming the Acrylic Beast,” Reyner will teach all the tips and tricks needed for effortless acrylic painting in any style.

Laurie Anderson
TBD August

Laurie Anderson is arguably this country’s premier performance artist. Known primarily for her multimedia presentations, she has cast herself in roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, experimental electronics musician, vocalist, and instrumentalist. In 2003, she became NASA's first, and so far only, artist-in-residence. Anderson is fascinated and inspired by the effects of technology on human interrelationships and communication.

Deborah Madison
8/11 Lecture, 6pm Tipton Hall

Deborah Madison is a world-renowned chef, founder of Greens restaurant in San Francisco, author of numerous cookbooks, and leader in the Slow Food movement. Madison will talk about the migration of culture and ideas through food, and how food is an essential part of overall cultural identity and the merging of peoples across the globe. About exactly this, Madison says, “Today, of course, we take all this for granted. The distance that food—vegetarian and otherwise—has traveled in the past two and a half decades is truly amazing.”

Guy Tillim
9/8 Lecture, 6pm Tipton Hall
9/9–12 Workshop, SFAI

Guy Tillim is one of South Africa’s foremost contemporary photographers. Learning his trade as photojournalist nearly two decades ago, Tillim’s work has proven to be far more than that of orthodox reportage. His images emerge from the complexities of aftermath and the nuanced details of everyday life in what is reductively termed ‘conflict zones’. They freeze gestures and textures that might otherwise be overlooked and a tension is created between the banality of place and the drama of historical context.

Fazal Sheikh
10/13 Lecture, 6pm Tipton Hall
TBD Workshop, SFAI

To travel, and to observe carefully and with sympathy the people whose lands he visits has been Fazal Sheikh’s practice from the beginning. Most often his work has been with displaced people driven out of their homelands by civil wars, drought and famine, struggling to survive for years in refugee camps where the traditional balance of their lives has been entirely destroyed. Sheikh’s award-winning images are beautiful and haunting, and do not simply provoke, but demand that the viewer contemplate the humanity of his subjects.

Chrissie Orr
11/17 Lecture, 6pm Tipton Hall
11/12-14 Workshop, SFAI

Chrissie Orr is an artist, animator and activist who focuses on developing “an aesthetic around community and site with issues relevant to both.” Orr has created innovative community based projects in Australia, Iran, Turkey, Europe, Mexico and the U.S. She has lectured internationally on her work, especially regarding the Bridge Project, which addressed issues on the border between El Paso, Texas and Cuidad Juarez, Mexico.

Hamid Naficy
11/17 Lecture, 6pm Tipton Hall
11/18 Workshop, SFAI

Hamid Naficy’s research focuses on comparative media theory, film and television history, Middle Eastern studies and diaspora studies. He is the recipient of numerous awards and grants from federal agencies, foundations, corporations and professional societies. Naficy has produced many educational films and experimental videos and has published extensively about theories of exile and displacement, exilic and diaspora cinema and media, and Iranian and Third World cinemas.He is John Evans Professor of Communication, Department of Radio, TV, Film, Northwestern University.

Alfredo Jaar
12/8 Lecture, 6pm Tipton Hall
12/9–12 Workshop, SFAI

In installations, photographs, film, and community-based projects, Jaar explores the public’s desensitization to images and the limitations of art to represent events such as genocides, epidemics, and famines. Jaar’s work bears witness to military conflicts, political corruption, and imbalances of power between industrialized and developing nations. Subjects addressed in his work include the genocide in Rwanda, gold mining in Brazil, toxic pollution in Nigeria, and issues related to the border between Mexico and the United States.

Lucy Lippard
1/12 '09 Lecture, 6pm Tipton Hall

Lucy Lippard is a world-renown writer, activist and curator. She is the author of eighteen books on contemporary art and has written art criticism for Art in America, The Village Voice, In These Times, and Z Magazine. Lippard has also curated over 50 exhibitions, done performances, comics, guerrilla theater, and edited several independent publications, the latest of which is the decidedly local “La Puente de Galisteo” in her home community of Galisteo, New Mexico.

Michael Eric Dyson
TBD Discussing Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke”

Georgetown University professor Dr. Michael Eric Dyson has been named by Ebony magazine as one of the hundred most influential black Americans. He is the author of fourteen books, including Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, in which Dyson gives the victims of Hurricane Katrina a voice in a time when the government and many Americans have seemingly forgotten that race and class continue to divide the United States.

Marco Williams
TBD “Banished”

Filmmaker and New York University professor Marco Williams's documentaries offer an unflinching look at hard issues like racism, injustice, and the black American experience. In filming personal issues such as the search for his father or the repercussions of a black man’s murder at the hands of white racists, Williams has created a body of work that rises above its subjects. His film “Banished” is a documentary about four U.S. cities, which were part of many communities that violently forced African American families to flee in post-reconstruction America.