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Visiting Artist, Scholar & Designer Program
The Visiting Artist, Scholar & Designer Program fosters participation and collaboration with both the institution and the MSU Denver community. An integral part of MSU Denver Art’s mission, the Visiting Artist, Designer & Scholar Program is an invaluable resource for students, faculty, and the community. The program is an interdisciplinary and culturally inclusive initiative, bringing nationally and internationally renowned artists, designers, and scholars to engage with the Department of Art. All lectures are free and open to the public and take place at the Center for Visual Art or occasionally online as Microsoft Teams streaming events.
Gordon Yellowman
A lifetime of experience exploring the facets of art and design
This visual presentation will explore Chief Gordon Yellowman’s wide-reaching experiences as an Indigenous artist and designer. He will share his early creative beginnings, discuss his goal of becoming a graphic artist, and share perspective on recent art and design curatorial projects. This talk will offer perspective on the full scope of creative practice including concept creation, critical thinking, creation of small- and large-scale art and design products, commercial arts sales, business, branding, media arts, technology, and the future impacts of AI. Join us for what promises to be an inspirational event!
Chief Gordon Yellowman, Sr., is an enrolled citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes who has devoted more than 32 years of service to tribal government and cultural heritage work. He currently serves as the Tribal Historian for the newly established Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, Department of Language and Culture. Gordon is an award-winning artist who specializes in contemporary Cheyenne ledger art paintings that depict historical accounts of Cheyenne and Arapaho lifeways. In addition to his art practice, Gordon is an educator, researcher, curator, and lecturer. In these roles he promotes public awareness of traditional, contemporary, and healing arts by sharing his extensive knowledge of Cheyenne and Arapaho history, traditions, beliefs, and languages. He has exhibited nationally and internationally.
Tuesday, October 8, 2024, 4:00pm at Center for Visual Art, 965 Santa Fe Drive, Denver, CO
Darya Warner
Darya works at the intersection of art and science by bridging the creative process and growth/connections with human and non-human actors through the prism of Climate Change. By addressing site-specific history, ecology, and local systems of communication Darya aims to mine a new form of hybrid space for “intermatter” interaction with an emphasis on the interconnectivity of intelligence across species.
Wednesday, February 28, 2024 at 5:00pm at Center for Visual Art, 965 Santa Fe Drive, Denver
Daina Warren
Daina Warren is a member of the Akamihk Montana First Nation in Maskwacis, Alberta. She holds a Master’s in Critical and Curatorial Studies and was selected to participate in the International First Nations Curators exchange in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. She won the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellency in 2018 and was Director of Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art Gallery for over ten years. She was most recently the Artist in Residency Program Manager at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Warren also curated the exhibition Transformative Power: Indigenous Feminisms at the Vicki Myhren Gallery in Denver in 2022 and will share ideas behind this exhibition at her public lecture at the CVA.
Wednesday, October 18, 2023 at 5:00pm at Center for Visual Art, 965 Santa Fe Drive, Denver
Virgil Ortiz
Virgil Ortiz is a Pueblo artist known for his pottery and fashion design from Cochiti Pueblo, New Mexico. Ortiz makes a variety of pottery including traditional Cochiti figurative pottery, experimental figurative pottery, and traditional vessels. For nearly two decades Ortiz has told the story of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt through his artwork, simultaneously joining traditional pottery forms with sci-fi fantasy. His material choices and techniques draw from the past, while his imagery is both ultramodern and futuristic.
April 19th at 5:00pm at Center for Visual Art, 965 Santa Fe Drive, Denver
Rex Koontz
Curating a Portable Universe: Ancient and Contemporary Indigenous Splendor in Colombia
This talk will focus on the little-known but spectacular tradition of Indigenous goldwork beginning about 2,000 years ago and continuing until the European invasion and its contemporary importance to the community of art historians, to our museum colleagues in Colombia, to various audiences in Houston, and to indigenous stakeholders. How does art history articulate with native perspectives and desires? How can art history grow its audience– and become more global– while at the same time examining its own past?
Wednesday, October 5, 2022 @ 5:30pm at Center for Visual Art, 965 Santa Fe Drive, Denver
Visiting Artist Announcements & Reminders
Announcements and reminders about the Visiting Artist, Scholar & Designer program are posted on the Art Department’s Facebook page.
For additional information please contact Dr. Jessica Weiss at [email protected].
Past Visiting Artists, Scholars and Designers
Spring 2022
Anna Jo Beck
Wednesday, Feb 23, 2022 @ 5:30pm Anna Jo Beck is a designer, illustrator, and zinester based in Chicago. Her passion for layout is reflected in her professional work as a magazine and book layout designer, as well as her personal work as a self-publisher of her own writing and design through zines.
Watch Event Recording:
Fall 2021
Jennifer Ling Datchuk
Thursday, October 14, 2021 at 1PM Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s work is an exploration of her layered identity – as a woman, a Chinese woman, as an “American,” as a third culture kid. Trained in ceramics, Datchuk works with porcelain and other materials often associated with traditional women’s work, such as textiles and hair, to discuss fragility, beauty, femininity, intersectionality, identity, and personal history. Datchuk holds an MFA in Artisanry from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a BFA in Crafts from Kent State University. She is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Texas State University and lives and maintains a studio practice in San Antonio, Texas.
Pamela Patton
Wednesday March 17, 2021 at 5PM Pamela Patton is director of the Index of Medieval Art in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University and co-editor of the journal Studies in Iconology.
Thomas Evans
Wednesday November 18, 2020 at 1PM Thomas Evans, a.k.a. DETOUR, is a Denver based artist whose large-scale, public artworks reflect his experimentations in visual art, music, and interactive technologies.
Mike Calway-Fagen
Wednesday October 21, 2020 at 5PM Mike Calway-Fagen is a multi-media artist, writer, and the curator/director of Stove Works, a contemporary gallery and artist residency in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Calway-Fagen aims to traverse the traditional barrier between artwork and viewer in order to explore nebulous networks of subjectivity. Through collage, installation, and video, he invites the viewer to experience with him the act of questioning the relationship between the known and the unknown, the imagined and the remembered. Calway-Fagen received an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and in addition to exhibiting work across North America has curated exhibitions that explore the nuances of perception and experience including Land and Sea, a joint project between Stove Works and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and Blue in the Face at Gallery Protocol in Gainesville, Florida.
Erin Peters
Wednesday September 23, 2020 at 5:30PM Erin Peters is an egyptologist and curator who researches ancient polychromy and uses modern technology to simulate lost color with projected light.
Cannupa Hanska Luger
Wednesday, August 26, 2020 at 5PM Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multidisciplinary artist whose works interweave performance and political action to communicate stories of twenty-first-century Indigeneity. Raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, and European descent. Luger’s monumental installations, which combine ceramics, video, sound, fiber, steel, and repurposed materials, provoke diverse audiences to engage with Indigenous peoples apart from the lens of colonial social structuring. They often include a call to action to protect land from capitalist exploitation. Luger received a BFA in studio arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts and has received numerous fellowships including a Creative Capital Fellowship, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a A Blade of Grass Artist Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art, and the inaugural Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship from the Center For Crafts. His works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Gardiner Museum and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.
subRosa
Faith Wilding and Hyla Willis are the founders of subRosa, a (cyber)feminist art collective that combines art, social activism, and politics to explore and critique the intersections of information and bio technologies on women’s bodies, lives, and work. Since its founding in 1998, subRosa has developed trans-disciplinary, performative, and discursive practices that create open-ended environments where participants engage with objects, texts, digital technologies, and critical learning experiences while interacting with each other and the artists.
David Lefkowitz
David Lefkowitz ‘s paintings, installation, and mixed-media assemblages address paradoxes of perception both monumental and mundane. His work explores the blurry boundaries between mediated and direct experience, often centered on perceived tensions between the human-built environment and the natural world and combining Western traditions of representational oil painting with the flotsam and jetsam of consumer culture to draw attention to the complex relations between image and object, past and present, and nature and culture. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Carleton College, the Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis, the Northfield Arts Guild, and the Rochester Art Center. Lefkowitz is represented by the Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago and is a Professor of Art at Carleton College in Northfield, MN where he teaches painting, drawing, and Critical Issues in Contemporary Art.
Adé Hogue
Adé Hogue is an art director, designer, and lettering artist specializing in hand-created type. He has worked with various agencies in Chicago for brands such as Nike, ALDI, Mercedes-Benz, Moen, Teavana, and The Atlantic. Doing more than pushing pixels, he takes ideas and turn them into something physical using his hands to blend the beautiful with the practical. Adé has presented his personal work in exhibitions such as Typeforce, an annual juried showcase of typographic artists in Chicago. He has also been an invited speaker at design and creativity conferences such as Top Con, Creative South, and Adobe MAX. In the fall of 2017 he was selected as one of PRINT Magazine’s New Visual Artists—an annual roundup of 15 of the best creatives today under 30. Currently, Adé runs his own design studio and freelances for a range of clients while teaching lettering and typography courses at DePaul University.