McKnight Visual Artist Discussion Series: Hrag Vartanian in conversation with Erik Benson and Julie Buffalohead
The McKnight Visual Artist Fellowships are awarded annually to eight established Minnesota-based artists. This discussion series, pairing a nationally recognized art critic or curator with two McKnight Visual Artist Fellows, offers attendees an opportunity to learn more about the fellows as well as about how their work intersects with broader contemporary art ideas and concerns.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Erik Benson is an artist whose process-based paintings are informed by architecture and everyday objects found in urban landscape. He received a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, MFA from the Rhode Island School of Art and Design, and studied at the Skowhegan School Painting and Sculpture. He has had solo and group shows throughout the United States and Europe and is the recipient of a NYFA painting fellowship as well as a participant in the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program.
Julie Buffalohead is an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma whose work focuses thematically on describing a cultural experience, an Indian experience, through a personal language. Her iconography draws upon a cast of characters from Native stories, such as raven, coyote, and deer. Buffalohead has been awarded numerous grants and participated in many group and solo exhibitions regionally and nationally. She received her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and her MFA from Cornell University. Buffalohead lives and works in St. Paul.
Hrag Vartanian is a critic, curator, editor-in-chief, and co-founder of Hyperallergic, a publication he created in 2009 in response to the changes in the art world, publishing, and the distribution of information. He has curated projects, exhibitions, and has organized public events since 1997. Highlights of his curatorial efforts include exhibitions at Storefront Gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y., and #theSocialGraph at Outpost, the world’s first multi-disciplinary exhibition of social media-related art in 2010. Vartanian writes and lectures about contemporary art, performance, multiculturalism, politics, the internet, literature, and visual culture. His curatorial interests are focused on theories and practices of decolonization, and he prefers to work in unorthodox spaces.
Co-presented with Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Fellowships are funded by the McKnight Foundation and administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Free, but ticketed. Reserve tickets in advance at ticket.artsmia.org.