Artist

Jonathan Pellitteri is an award-winning, North Carolina-based artist working with three dimensional objects and industrial materials. His sculptural and installation practice involves life-size objects and miniature models to engage viewers in curious and explorative ways that stimulate personal narratives and evoke private memories. His exhibition at McMaster Gallery will explore current debates over humanity’s impact on the environment, sustainability, and the exploitation of natural resources.

Learn more at jonathanpellitteri.com

Exhibition: Canary in the Coalmine, April 22 - May 27, 2021

Coordinator: Olga Yukhno, McMaster Gallery

Artist

Noah Scalin is an internationally-exhibiting multidisciplinary fine artist. Noah Scalin’s work explores the theme of transience and temporality of human existence. His works are rooted in the medieval concept of memento mori, a reflection on mortality meant to spur a greater reverence for life and reevaluation of priorities, often asking us to take notice of quotidian moments.

By using everyday and mass produced consumer items like stickers in his photographs, installations, and sculptures, Scalin asks the viewer to recontextualize the things in their lives that are normally taken for granted, overlooked, or discarded. His work narrates the potential long-term impact of humans and their physical creations. Much of Scalin’s work is intentionally temporary or ephemeral. Like human existence, these works revert back to their component parts or are destroyed after a short lifespan, only to exist in documentation and memories after they’re gone.

Learn more at noahscalin.com

Free and Public Lecture: March 30, 6:00 PM, virtual

Coordinator: Meena Khalili

Artist and Art Educator 

Britt Morgan Kirkwood is a 2009 UofSC alumna. She has taught studio art internationally for the past 12 years, infusing STEAM & technology into core curriculum and creating her own art work based on biological illustration in large scale. She is an Apple Distinguished Educator and presented in Singapore and Berlin on media and science in the art classroom. Britt has shared her practice in over 10 different countries with her primary message focusing on how the power of audience, science and passion can radicalize the art classroom. 

Workshop: "Why the A in STEAM?" February 22, 12:00 PM 

Public Lecture: "Unsolicited Advice from a Disobedient Art Teacher," February 22, 6:00 PM

Coordinator: Andrew Graciano

Artist

Amanda Smith is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist based in Missouri, where she is Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at Missouri State University. Amanda Smith’s exhibition at McMaster Gallery will feature hybrid quilt paintings and cushion-stuffed works which challenge our common associations of quilts as sources of comfort and conduits to rest. Her works tap into our collective unease about transitioning environmental, political, and social landscapes.

Learn more at amandasmithart.com

Exhibition: Restless Sleepers, January 14 - February 18, 2021

Lecture: February 17, 6:00 PM, Facebook Live (McMaster Gallery)

Workshop: February 18, 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM.

Coordinator: Olga Yukhno, McMaster Gallery

Elizabeth M. Marion Visiting Artist

The Guerrilla Girls are a feminist, activist artist collective committed to fighting injustice in the arts. They wear signature gorilla masks in public and take on the names of dead women artists to remain anonymous. Founded in New York City in 1985, they began by flyposting text and photo-based messages on the streets of SoHo to call attention to discriminatory practices by galleries and museums towards women. Today, they use stickers, flyers, and advertising campaigns full of facts, humor, and outrageous visuals to expose bias and corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture. They create works of art that reveal the understory, the subtext, the overlooked, and the downright unfair. The Guerrilla Girls believe in an intersectional feminism that fights discrimination and supports human rights for all people and all genders.

An exhibition of their works in McMaster Gallery, Guerrilla Girls: Art, Power, and Justice for All!, will explore text and photo-based activist works that use statistics and humor to shock and reveal  underlying issues of power and representation in the arts, and chronicle the Guerrilla Girls’ history of institutional critique in the field of contemporary art.

This program is part of the Justice Theme Semester in the College of Arts and Sciences. Support comes from a grant from the Knight Foundation fund at the Central Carolina Community Foundation, the College of Arts and Sciences at UofSC, and the Elizabeth M. Marion Visiting Artist Fund at the School of Visual Art and Design, and the Columbia Museum of Art.

Exhibition: Guerrilla Girls: Art, Power, and Justice for All!,  October 1 - October 22, 2020, McMaster Gallery.

Visit in person Mon. - Fri., 9 am - 5 pm. 

A Virtual Evening with the Guerrilla Girls: October 9, 7:00 pm

Virtual Activist Art Workshop with the Guerrilla Girls: October 10, 12:00 pm, Zoom. 

Coordinators: Anna Toptchi and Laura Kissel

Art Historian

LaNitra M. Berger, Ph.D., is an art historian whose research focuses on the intersections of art and social activism in the black and Jewish diasporas. Dr. Berger is the senior director of fellowships in the Honors College at George Mason University, where she is an affiliate faculty in the History and Art History Department. She has written and taught on subjects ranging from lynching photography to racial representations in German Expressionism.

Virtual lecture: "Audacities of Color: Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of Global German Expressionism" 
September 24, 6:00 pm

Art and Social Activism: A Black Lives Matter Discussion
September 25, 12:00 pm

Coordinator: Peter Chametzky  

Artist and Art Educator 

Sharif Bey, Ph.D., is a ceramic artist, art educator, and scholar. He is Associate Professor of Art Education at Syracuse University in New York. Dr. Bey’s work reflects his interest in the visual heritage of Africa and Oceania, the cultural and political significance of ornamentation and adornment, as well as contemporary African American culture.

Virtual talk: September 18, 1:00 pm, Facebook Live. Free and open to the public.

Virtual workshop: September 18, 2:30 pm, Facebook  Live. Free and open to the public. Details forthcoming.

Coordinators: Hyunji Kwon, Olga Ivashkevich, and Minuette Floyd

Art Historian, Professor

Alison J. Miller, Assistant Professor of Art History, is a scholar of Asian art who specializes in modern and contemporary Japanese art, prints and photography, and the intersections of gender studies and visual culture. 

Dr. Miller earned a Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Kansas, M.A. degrees in Art History and Museum Studies from the University of Kansas, and B.A. degrees in Art History and Anthropology from Northern Illinois University.  Her research has been funded by a Fulbright Fellowship, Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship.  She has published in TransAsia Photography Review, Impressions, and various museum catalogues.  

Dr. Miller’s book manuscript, tentatively titled, "The Feminine Imperial Image in Japan, 1868-1952" addresses how prints, photographs, and paintings of the modern Japanese empresses were used to construct norms of modern femininity and class.

Lecture: “Images of the Imperial: The Modern Japanese Empresses in Visual Culture” 
March 2, McMaster 214, 4:00 pm
Free and open to the public.

Curator, Writer, Activist

Elizabeth M. Marion Visiting Artist

Kimberly Drew is a curator, activist, and author of soon-to-be released Black Futures, an anthology of contemporary Black experiences, and This Is What I Know About Art, part of a young adult series featuring big ideas from today’s leading activists and artists. She has been featured in Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Glamour for her work. She is the creator of the blog “Contemporary Black Art” and has worked at Creative Time and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Learn about her experiences in creative careers and how she champions Black art and culture and advocates for radical art access.

Workshop: Curating in the Digital Age
February 27, 2:00 - 3:00 pm
School of Visual Art and Design
McMaster Room 323
Free and open to the public.

Lecture: February 27
6:00 - 8:00 PM
Columbia Museum of Art
Free and open to the public. 

Co-sponsors: African American Studies Program at UofSC and the Friends of African American Art and Culture at the Columbia Museum of Art

Artist,  Researcher, Professor

Andrea Kantrowitz is an artist, educator and researcher who uses cognitive psychology theories and methods to study the hidden dynamics of artists’ thinking processes. Her work includes a randomized control trial that demonstrated the impact of an interdisciplinary art curriculum for students growing up in poverty. She has lectured and led workshops on art and cognition internationally. Kantrowitz believes drawing represents a solid example of human imagination at work.
 
She is the graduate program coordinator and assistant professor in Art Education at the State University of New York @ New Paltz.  As director of the Thinking through Drawing Project at Teachers College, Columbia University, she organized a series of international drawing and cognition research symposia, in collaboration with colleagues from the U.K. She holds a B.A in Art and Cognition from Harvard University and a MFA in Painting from Yale. She has taught foundation drawing at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and graduate courses in contemporary art at the College of New Rochelle. She was a teaching artist in the New York City for many years, involved in multiple local and national research projects. She recently completed an interdisciplinary doctorate at Teachers College which examined the cognitive interactions underlying contemporary artists’ drawing practices.  

Lecture: Wednesday, February 19, 4:00 - 5:00 PM, McMaster 214