The School of Art and Design will present lectures by renowned individuals through its Digital Arts, Fashion, Film/Video, Fine Arts, and Photography Departments. All lectures are free and open to the public; however, seating priority will be given to current students with Pratt identification. Please click here for directions to Pratt's Brooklyn campus and here for a map of the Brooklyn campus.
INTERDISCIPLINARY
Life of Pi
Tuesday, October 29
7 PM
Life of Pi artist Alexis Rockman, associate producer Jean-Christophe Castelli, and Brett Littman, executive director at The Drawing Center, will participate in a panel discussion moderated by Leighton Pierce, Acting Dean, School of Art & Design, on the artwork created for the film Life of Pi, which The New York Times called “one of the greatest achievements in digital cinema.” This fall Rockman has two concurrent exhibitions at The Drawing Center and Sperone Westwater gallery that showcase the work adapted for Life of Pi. The lecture is co-sponsored by the Digital Arts, Fine Arts, and Film/Video Departments.
Where/When: 7 PM at Memorial Hall Auditorium, 200 Willoughy Avenue, Brooklyn.
DIGITAL ARTS
The Department of Digital Arts Lecture Series features talks by critics, artists, and curators of digital art. The guests include both emerging talent and pioneers in the fields of digital animation, motion arts, interactive artwork, and digital imaging.
Hrag Vartanian
Wednesday, October 2
Hrag Vartanian is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Hyperallergic, a newsletter dedicated to playful, serious, and radical perspectives on art and culture. He writes extensively about street art, performance art, the Internet, and issues of multiculturalism.
Jeremy Gardiner
“Unfolding Landscape”
Wednesday, October 16
Jeremy Gardiner is an award-winning digital media artist whose work interprets landscapes through geology, human activity, and forces of nature. He has collaborated with scientists and artists to create artworks that combine a variety of media including painting, drawing, computer animation, ambient sound, satellite data, and 3-D printing technologies. Earlier this year, Lund Humphries published a comprehensive assessment of his work to date, titled The Art of Jeremy Gardiner, Unfolding Landscape. Gardiner—a founding member of Pratt’s Department of Digital Arts—will exhibit work in Pratt’s Digital Arts Gallery from October 7–18 in conjunction with this lecture.
Claudia Hart
Wednesday, October 30
Claudia Hart is an artist, curator, and critic who uses post-photographic simulations technology to create installations, objects, and images that question gender and identity through hyper-feminine and erotic imagery. Her multimedia installations have been shown in the United States and Europe and are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Berlin. She is represented by bitforms gallery in New York.
R. Luke DuBois
“Sex, Lies, and Data Mining”
Wednesday, November 13
R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores verbal and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He will discuss his ongoing project, “A More Perfect Union,” which culls data from online dating profiles and maps it according to geographic location. His time-lapse phonography work reveals the average sonority, visual language, and vocabulary in music, film, and text. He is the director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU and is represented by bitforms gallery in New York.
Where/When: Wednesdays, from 12:45–1:45 PM, in Myrtle Hall, Lecture Room 4E-3, unless otherwise noted. Myrtle Hall is located at 536 Myrtle Avenue between Grand Avenue and Steuben Street in Brooklyn. The entrance to the building is located off 215 Willoughby Avenue.
FASHION
The Department of Fashion Lecture Series features talks by esteemed fashion academicians, curators, critics, and practitioners.
Designer Conversation
Monday, September 9
Neil Gilks, designer and Director of Educational Initiatives at Council of Fashion Designers of America, will be in conversation with Dean Sidaway, fashion designer and new assistant professor at Pratt Institute.
Designer Conversation
Tuesday, October 8
Patricia Mears, deputy director of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, will be in conversation with Susan Cianciolo, multimedia artist, designer, and new assistant professor at Pratt Institute.
Lee Quinones
Wednesday, October 23
Lee Quinones, one of the most influential artists to emerge from New York City’s subway art movement of the 1970s, will lecture on New York City street art and fashion. His work has translated from the street to international art museums and galleries including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of the City of New York, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art.
Dr. Desiree Koslin
Thursday, November 7
Dr. Desiree Koslin, fashion historian and author, will discuss her work visualizing medieval fashion through reproduction. She has taught at Fashion Institute of Technology, New York University, Bard Graduate Center, and has lectured extensively at The Cloisters.
Fashion Film Night
Friday, December 6
The closing night of the lecture series will examine the interface between popular culture, textile, and dress. Jonathan Faiers, a reader in fashion theory at Winchester School of Art at University of South Hampton, UK, will talk about his new book Dressing Dangerously: Dysfunctional Fashion in Film (Yale University Press, 2013). Also, Fashion Photographers Bon Duke and Christopher Labzda will discuss their work as co-founders and curators of the New York Fashion Film Festival. The lecture is co-sponsored by Pratt’s Film/Video Department.
Where/When: 6–8 PM in The Juliana Curran Terian Design Center Gallery at 200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, unless otherwise noted. All events are free and open to the public, however seating is limited. Doors open at 5:30 PM.
FILM/VIDEO
The Department of Film/Video’s fall lecture series features talks by acclaimed and varied practitioners of time-based media. The series is sponsored by BOMB Magazine.
Debra McGuire
Thursday, October 10
Debra McGuire will discuss the conceptual aspects of her work as a major costume designer in film and television. McGuire, who is also a fine artist and fashion designer, is perhaps best known for her 10 year run on the hit television show Friends. She has designed for Judd Apatow’s film and television projects and for many of David Mamet's film and theatre projects including HBO’s Phil Spector, which aired last spring. She currently designs for three television shows for FOX including New Girl. The lecture is co-sponsored by Pratt’s Fashion Department.
Sebastian Silva
Thursday, November 21, 6:30 PM
Chilean film director Sebastian Silva will discuss his work, which includes two feature films released this year: Magic Magic and Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus. His 2009 film The Maid won Special Jury Prize and the “Best Actress” award at the Sundance Film Festival. Silva will also likely share production tales from a film he will be shooting in the Pratt neighborhood of Clinton Hill in the coming weeks.
Where/When: 6:30 PM, ARC Building, Hall E-2, at 200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, unless otherwise noted. Doors will open to Pratt students, faculty, and staff at 6 PM and to the public at 6:15 PM.
FINE ARTS
The Fine Arts Department will present lectures by four renowned artists as part of its Visiting Artists Lecture Series. The renowned international participating artists will speak to the Pratt community about their influences, artwork, and careers. The 2013–2014 Fine Arts Visiting Artist Lecture Series is made possible in part by a generous grant from The Robert Lehman Foundation.
Tom Sachs
Monday, September 30
Tom Sachs is a sculptor who is well-known for his elaborate recreations and transformations of modern icons of capitalist culture. Examples of his work include a McDonald’s built out of plywood, glue, and assorted kitchen appliances and Hello Kitty and her friends depicted in materials ranging from foam core to bronze. Sachs has exhibited internationally, and has work in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.
Aura Satz
Monday, October 7
Aura Satz is a London-based artist and writer who investigates the fusion of human and machine through film, sound, performance, and sculpture. Her narrative work explores the understanding of obsolete technologies, how the body experiences technology and sound, and the materiality of memory among other phenomena. She has performed, exhibited, and screened her work internationally at venues including the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea di Trento in Italy; the Zentrum Paul Klee in Switzerland; and Whitechapel Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum, and Tate Modern in England.
Leigh Ledare
Monday, November 18
Photographer Leigh Ledare documents his eroticized relationship with his mother, investigating how identity is formed and how desires, motivations, and aspirations contribute to the creation of an individual as a subject. His has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including venues in New York, London, Berlin, and Prague.
Judith Bernstein
Monday, December 9
Judith Bernstein is a feminist artist and activist with a career that has spanned over four decades. Bernstein was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, the first venue dedicated to showing woman artists and was an early member of art and activist organizations including Guerilla Girls, Art Workers’ Coalition, and Fight Censorship. The aggressive, sexual drawings for which she is best known reveal layers of political, personal, and artistic struggle, and were on display in a solo show at New Museum in early 2013.
Where/When: Mondays at 7 PM in Memorial Hall Auditorium at 200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, unless otherwise noted.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Pratt Institute's Photography Department will present its second annual series of Pratt Photography Lectures. The series will feature talks by renowned photographers, critics, and curators who will illuminate photography’s diverse history, contemporary practice, and meaning.
Eileen Quinlan
Wednesday, September 25
Eileen Quinlan uses analog methods of photography to capture intricate, abstract constructions of mirrored colored light, fabric, reflective materials, and smoke. Her work tinkers with the mechanics of traditional photography to create stunningly innovative results. She is one of eight international artists to be included in the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography 2013 exhibition (opens 9/2013) and will exhibit work in a solo show at Miguel Abreu Gallery (opens 10/2013).
Susan Meiselas
Wednesday, October 9
Renowned photographer Susan Meiselas has earned an international reputation for her work documenting human rights issues in Latin America, the Middle East, and the United States. She has authored books of her most influential projects, including Carnival Strippers (Steidl, 2008), Nicaragua (Aperture/ICP, 2008), and Pandora’s Box (Trebruk Publishing, 2002), and has been honored with some of photography’s most prestigious awards, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal, Hasselblad Award, MacArthur Fellowship, and The International Center of Photography’s Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement Award. Meiselas is a member of the international photographic cooperative Magnum Photos.
Jason Fulford
Wednesday, October 16
Sponsored by the Pratt Photo League
Jason Fulford is photographer, publisher, and designer who graduated from Pratt’s bachelor of fine arts program in Graphic Design in 1996. His commercial photography and graphic design work has been published in major magazines and newspapers across the country. Fulford is author of several books including the soon-to-be-published Hotel Oracle (The Soon Institute Publishing House, 2013), The Mushroom Collector (The Soon Institute, 2010), and Raising Frogs for $ $ $ (The Ice Plant, 2006). Fulford is also the co-founder of an independent publishing company, J&L Books Inc. and is a contributing editor of Blind Spot magazine.
Jeff L. Rosenheim
Wednesday, October 30
Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator in charge in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Photographs, will speak about recent book and exhibition, Photography and the American Civil War. The exhibition—which was 10 years in the making—focused on the burgeoning medium of photography and its use during one of the most turbulent times in American history and coincided with the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. Rosenheim is also an authority on Walker Evans and Diane Arbus and has published numerous books and curated many exhibitions on these seminal figures in photography.
Lisa Oppenheim
Wednesday, November 6
Sponsored by the Pratt Photo League
Lisa Oppenheim is a conceptual artist whose work emphasizes the photographic process and the duration of time. Her art, which has prominently featured subjects such as the sun, moon, and fire, typically draws from historical negatives that are exposed to natural light (moon, sun, fire) over passages of time, with hauntingly beautiful results. She is one of eight international artists to be included in the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography 2013 exhibition (opens 9/2013) and one of 28 artists included in A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial at The International Center of Photography (through 9/2013).
Where/When: Wednesdays at 6:30 PM, Higgins Hall Auditorium, at 61 St. James Place, Brooklyn. The lectures will begin promptly at 6:30 PM and are free and open to the public. Doors will open to members of the Pratt community at 6 PM, with public admission beginning at 6:15 PM.
MEDIA CONTACT: Amy Aronoff, Pratt Institute, at press@pratt.edu or 718.636.3554