threewallsSALON, The Doctoral Artist: Research and Art Practice January 26, 2010

Be our guest for our first discussion The Doctoral Artist: Research and Art Practice on Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 7:00 PM.

Research-based artistic practice seems to have greater currency today than perhaps ever before. Art projects begin to feel like dissertations; loaded with multivalent cultural, political, and historical references, this type of practice often doesn’t result in a traditional art object, but instead exists in performance, in conversations, in recreations of office spaces or archives within a gallery. Contemporary strains of this type of practice have had high visibility in Chicago recently, with exhibitions by Liam Gillick and Jeremy Diller at the MCA in the fall, and the knowledge-questioning investigation by Aspen Mays about to open at the Hyde Park Art Center; these examples will be touchstones for the conversation.

Guest Respondents:

Patrick Bobilin is a filmmaker, sculptor, musician and writer from Bronx NY. He has lectured and taught workshops around the USA, screened work in galleries internationally and in 2009 founded the gallery Noble & Superior Projects in Chicago, IL. Many of his projects involve both academic and ethnographic research, the latter of which intends to raise ethical, legal and moral questions. patrickbobilin.com

Aspen Mays lives and works in Chicago, Illinois, and received her Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. Originally from Charleston, South Carolina, Mays holds a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and Spanish from the University of North Carolina. Mays was recently awarded a Fulbright Grant, and she will spend 2010 in Santiago, Chile working with astronomers using telescopes in Chile’s northern deserts.

Allison Peters Quinn is the Director of Exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center, where she has organized over a hundred exhibitions at the Art Center during the past 6 years. Recently, she co-organized Artists Run Chicago, an exhibition highlighting the unique energy of artists-run spaces in Chicago over the past decade. A native of the Chicago area, she studied an MA at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, NY and a BA at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She is the recipient of the Ramapo Curatorial Prize, a juror for the Artadia Awards, and has written essays for several exhibition brochures and catalogues.

Frances Whitehead is an artist working from a multifaceted aesthetic position on publicly engaged projects that aim to contribute to a sustainable cultural future. Understanding the imperative for artists to operate in a larger society she has focused on strategies to deploy the knowledge of artists towards these ends, asking What do Artists Know? Whitehead is currently developing a series of linked civic initiatives including The Embedded Artist Project www.embeddedartistproject.com with the City of Chicago Innovation Program and The Great Lakes Basin Phenologic Garden Project, a climate change/culture change initiative for the Chicago Park District. Whitehead is Professor of Sculpture at SAIC since 1985.

Official Website: http://www.three-walls.org