McKnight Discussion Series: David Bowen, Mara Duvra, Rotem Tamir
The Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) is pleased to present the McKnight Discussion Series featuring Jasmine Wahi, founder and co-director of Project for Empty Space, in conversation with McKnight 2021 fellows David Bowen, Mara Duvra, and Rotem Tamir. This program pairs a visiting critic with three McKnight Visual Artist Fellows and offers attendees an opportunity to learn more about the fellowship recipients as well as how their work intersects with broader contemporary art ideas and concerns. This event is generously supported by the McKnight Foundation.
The discussion series is co-presented with the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Fellowships are generously funded by the McKnight Foundation and administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Jasmine Wahi is the Founder and Co-Director of Project for Empty Space, a nonprofit organization rooted in Newark, NJ, and soon to be in New York City. Her multi-faceted curatorial practice predominantly focuses on issues of femme empowerment, complicating binary structures within social discourses, and exploring multi-positional cultural identities through the lens of intersectional feminism.
David Bowen is a studio artist and educator whose work is concerned with aesthetics that result from interactive, reactive and generative processes as they relate to intersections between natural and mechanical systems. His work has been featured in exhibitions at ZKM Karlsruhe, Fundación Telefónica Madrid, Eyebeam New York, Mattress Factory Pittsburgh, BOZAR Brussels, Itau Cultural São Paulo, The Israel Museum Jerusalem and Intercommunication Center Tokyo. His past awards include a Grand Prize from the Japan Media Arts Festival and Honorary Mention Prix Ars Electronica as well as residencies with AutoDesk Pier 9 San Francisco, Schmidt Ocean Institute and The Arctic Circle. Bowen is currently an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Physical Computing at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.
Mara Duvra is a visual artist and writer. Her research-based practice combines photography, poetry, and moving image to create installations that explore stillness and interiority as critical modes of self study. Duvra is originally from Silver Spring, Maryland, and received a BA in Studio Art and Psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her writing has been featured on MNArtist and InReview and her artwork has been shown in various galleries, including Soo Visual Arts Center, Public Functionary, Juxtaposition Arts, and Common Wealth Gallery. Duvra has held artist residencies at The Soap Factory and The White Page and received a 2019-2020 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant and Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship. She is a visiting assistant professor at Macalester College.
Rotem Tamir’s art focuses on traditions of object making and how they morph as they migrate with their bearers through time and space, echoing the complex stories of relocation and shuffled identities. Her objects, installations, and community-based work are a result of playful, material driven processes that explore cultural fragmentation and displacement. Tamir studies and borrows from global heritages of pre-industrial domestic applied crafts, paying homage to the traditions from which they emerged, while revitalizing those traditions as subjects of contemporary enquiries about places, belonging, and postfeminist politics. Tamir immigrated to the United States from Israel in 2011. She serves as an Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota. She received her Masters Degree in Fine Art from the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media at VCUarts in Richmond, VA, and her Bachelor Degree in Fine Art from the Bezalel Academy for Art and Design in Jerusalem. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in venues including the Minnesota Museum of American Art, St Paul; the Harn Museum Gainesville, FL; Artists’ House, Tel Aviv; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; Ha’Kibbutz Gallery, Tel Aviv; among others. Tamir has been awarded residencies at Sculpture Space, Utica, NY; Franconia Sculpture Park, MN, Art OMI International Arts Center, among others. She received the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship award; the Artis Exhibition Grant from artiscontemporary.org, New York, NY.