Lecture

Andrea Carlson (b. 1979) is a visual artist currently living in Chicago, Illinois. Through painting and drawing, Carlson cites entangled cultural narratives and institutional authority relating to objects based on the merit of possession and display. Current research activities include Indigenous Futurism and assimilation metaphors in film. Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the British Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. Carlson hold an MFA from MCAD. She was a 2008 McKnight Fellow and a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors grant recipient. In 2020, Carlson helped form the Center for Native Futures, the only Native art center in Chicago.

Hamza Walker, director of LAXART, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles, and an adjunct professor at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, will be in conversation with Jessica Vaughn, a Brooklyn and Philadelphia-based multimedia artist whose practice is a dedication to understanding materials and images and how they function politically, socially and conceptually in the world. Her most recent artworks in sculpture, video, and photography interrogate questions of labor, race, architecture and modularity in space.

Angela Morelli is an award-winning information designer based in Norway. She is the co-founder and CEO of InfoDesignLab. After a degree in Engineering from Politecnico di Milano and an MA in Industrial Design, she gained her MA in Information Design from Central St Martins in London and a Postgraduate Certificate for teaching in Higher Education. She is an acclaimed international speaker, an Associate Lecturer at Central St Martins in London and a visiting lecturer in universities in Europe. She has been collaborating with research organisations for the past 15 years, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Water Footprint Network, the European Environment Agency and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. Angela firmly believes that information design can play an extraordinary role in democratizing knowledge, explaining complexity and facilitating understanding. She has been jury member of the International Institute of Information Design Award, and along with philanthropist Paul Polak, ethologist Jane Goodall, water scientist Tony Allan and other individuals committed to defend planetary ecosystems, she has been awarded Il Monito del Giardino Award in 2013. Angela was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

Thomas Hine writes about the relationships between people and the objects they desire, buy and use. His work on materialism and its meaning has appeared in many magazines, and his six books have been recognized as important contributions to their fields. He has been praised in the New Yorker by John Updike for his “mischievously alert sensibility,” and "Populuxe," a word he coined to describe some of the styles and enthusiasms of post-World War II America, has entered the language and now appears in several dictionaries. Among his books are Populuxe, an examination of what newly prosperous Americans thought and bought during the post-World War II era, The Total Package, an examination of how persuasive containers shape people’s understandings of products and themselves, and The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (On a Shag Rug) in the 1970s. He was as multimedia editor of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and he has helped organize exhibitions on design and culture for museums in Los Angeles and Newport Beach, Miami, Denver, Washington, and Philadelphia. He was architecture and design critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer for 23 years and is currently the newspaper’s chief art critic. He is a graduate of Yale and lives in Philadelphia.

AbiFarès is the Founding Director of the Khatt Foundation and Khatt Books publishers. Based in Amsterdam, her professional, cultural, and educational activities extend from the US and Europe to the Arab World. She is the curator behind the Inner Structures–Outer Rhythms: Contemporary Arab & Persian Graphic Design exhibition in the Main Gallery as well as a book of the same title. She holds degrees in design and design history from Leiden University (PhD, 2017), Yale University (MFA, 1990), and Rhode Island School of Design (BFA, 1987). She was a jury member of the Third Jameel Prize for Islamic Art and Design 2013 (Victoria & Albert Museum, London), and member of the grants selection committee for Mondrian Foundation (2011-2012) & The Netherlands Architecture and Design Fund (2013). She is a member of AGI (Alliance Typographique Internationale). Dr Smitshuijzen AbiFarès specializes in multilingual typographic research and design, with focus on Arabic typography and design history. She has published several books on typography and design from the Arab World, and contributed essays to professional and academic publications. AbiFarès is the author of Arabic Typography: A Comprehensive Sourcebook (2001/2021), Typographic Matchmaking (2007), Typographic Matchmaking in the City (2011), Arabic Type Design for Beginners (2013), Nomadic Traces: Journeys of Arabian Scripts (2019), Kameel Hawa: The Art of Shaping Arabic Letters (2019), Typographic Matchmaking in the Maghrib (forthcoming), and The Catholic Press of Beirut: A Printing and Design Legacy in the Arab East (forthcoming). She taught design and typography courses at design programs in the Middle East and Europe. She works as an independent design curator, researcher, writer, designer, and publisher.

Eva Wylie is a multi-disciplinary artist with a background in printmaking. She is on the faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, and is a founding board member of Second State Press in Philadelphia, PA. Her work intimates how humanity and its detritus merge in both familiar and unexpected ways. Her compositions are compressed within frames and expand across large wall spaces to create conversations between nature and artifice, the organic and the synthetic, and the present and the past.

Las Hermanas Iglesias is the collaborative team of Lisa & Janelle Iglesias, sisters born to Dominican and Norwegian immigrants in Queens, NY. The collective’s moniker anchors their identity within the contexts of feminism, teamwork, and multiplicity. For the past 15 years, the two have maintained an interdisciplinary, category-blurring collaboration alongside their individual practices. Las Hermanas undertakes their collaboration while living in different cities, usually through formal and informal residencies and extended on-site collaborative installations. Their practice has evolved to include a number of team efforts and variations such as our further collaboration with their mother, Bodhild. The team’s collaborative work has been exhibited at the Blanton Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Queens Museum, Abrons Art Center, ASU Art Museum, NMSU Art Museum, The Utah Museum of Fine Arts and others. Las Hermanas has been artists in residence at LMCC’s Paris program (France), Fanoon: Center for Print Research at VCUQ (Qatar), The New Roots Foundation (Guatemala) and the Textile Arts Center (US). Lisa Iglesias is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Art Studio at Mount Holyoke College and Janelle Iglesias is an assistant professor at University of California San Diego.

Opertura is the collaborative unit of self-taught artists, Aya Yamasaki (she/her) and Jason Brown (he/they). They create hand-drawn animations and related media that reference phenomena of the natural world to tell straightforward but layered stories using playful characters. Their work has screened domestically and abroad.

Alex Chitty is a British/American transdisciplinary artist living and working in Chicago, IL. Chitty is represented by PATRON Gallery and has worked with students, educators and institutions locally, throughout the United States and abroad; Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Horticultural Society of New York, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Smith College, University of Chicago, Spudnik Press, ACRE residency, Moraine Valley Community College, Columbia College, Aby Warburg Library, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Palau Coral Reef Research Foundation, Belize Hol Chan Marine Reserve, Oxbow School of Arts, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent exhibitions include Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery, PATRON Gallery, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Elmhurst Art Museum, Virginia Commonwealth University, Luce Gallery, KMAC Museum, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Angela Two Stars (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate) is a public artist and curator. Angela is the director of All My Relations Arts in Minneapolis, MN, a project of the Native American Community Development Institute. She received her BFA from Kendall College of Art and Design, in Grand Rapids, MI. Reconnecting with her Dakota culture and language were the catalysts for her current work that incorporates the Dakota Language as means of bringing awareness to the Dakota language and the importance of language revitalization efforts. Cultural reconnection and healing and community engagement are highlighted in Angela’s work. Angela's public art graces the shores of Bde Maka Ska and shares the Dakota language through visual accessibility. Her most recent public art commission, Okciyapi, is installed at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, an acquisition of the Walker Art Center. Angela’s public artworks also include commissions for the City of Minneapolis, and the Saint Paul Port Authority through a project with Forecast Public Art.