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Visiting Artist Program

As part of the Studio Seminar on Contemporary Art Theory and Practice at Lewis & Clark College, the Department of Art Visiting Artist Lecture Series brings practicing artists to campus to discuss their work. All lectures are free and open to the public. Lectures will be held at 7:30pm in Miller 105 (campus parking is free after 7pm). For information, contact the Art Department: 503-768-7390 or art@lclark.edu.

Wednesday, September 18

Roland Dawhen

Movie still from Borrufa

Roland Dahwen (b. Brattleboro, VT)is a filmmaker, writer, performer, and visual artist. He studied literature and translation before starting to work in documentary and narrative film.
Roland Dahwen has exhibited film and video work in Cuba, the Netherlands, Brazil, Italy, India, Germany, Canada, Turkey, and the US. He has given artist talks at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Reed College, Pacific Northwest College of Art, King School Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Universidade Federal Fluminense (Brazil).

His work has been supported by Oregon Arts Commission, Portland Art Museum Center for an Untold Tomorrow, Regional Arts and Culture Council, the Cooley Gallery, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Seattle Art Museum. In 2018, he was awarded the Oregon Media Arts Fellowship. In 2020, he was a finalist for the Betty Bowen Award. He is the Co-Director of Outer Voice, an artist-le.d collective in Portland, Oregon.

As a performer, he has participated in performance pieces at Portland Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), Lumber Room (Portland), and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. He has served on numerous juries and panels for festivals and arts organizations, including the National Endowment for the Arts. Overseas (2019), an installation presented by Converge45 and Cooley Gallery, was acclaimed by the Oregonianas a “tour de force.” An accompanying performance piece, The Overseas Banquet, was presented at the Time Based Art Festival in 2019.

Wednesday, October 2
Val Britton

The Blue Skyline

Val Britton was born in New Jersey and lives in Portland, Oregon. She received her B.F.A. from

Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from California College of the Arts. Britton creates immersive, collaged works on paper, site-specific installations, and public art that explores physical and psychological spaces. Using maps as metaphors, her fragmented, explodedlandscapes investigate memory, history, and the possibilities of abstraction. Much of her work was initially influenced by her father, a cross-country truck driver and mechanic, and his loss when she was young.

A recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, she has participated in over a dozen residencies and fellowships, including Headlands Center for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, Recology AIR Program, Millay Colony for the Arts, Kala Art Institute, and the Golden FoundaJon. She has exhibited in solo and group shows in museums, galleries, art fairs, alternative spaces, and nonprofit nationally and Internationally.

An award-winning public artist, Britton has created permanent commissions for San Francisco International Airport, Charlotte Douglas International Airport, and NYC Percent for Art Public Art for Public Schools among others. Her work is part of numerous collections including the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, the Cleveland Clinic, de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University, Facebook Headquarters, the Achenbach FoundaJon for Graphic Arts at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, Print CollecJon of the Library of Congress, National September 11 Memorial & Museum, New-York Historical Society, New York Public Library, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the U.S. Department of State Art in Embassies Program in Brussels, Belgium.

Wednesday, October 9
John Niekrasz
John Niekrasz

John Niekrasz is an American artist working in sound, language, performance, and movement. He received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a lifelong student of music. John studied improvisation with Milford Graves, percussion and dance in Havana, and classical Hindustani tabla with Pandit Lacchu Maharaj. The English pronunciation of his last name rhymes with Free Jazz.

Niekrasz is committed to improvisation both in performance and as a compositional approach. He bridges the musico-poetic divide through text-based composition and syllabic musical notation. His work grapples with ideas around poverty and ornament, rigor and effortlessness, justice and militancy. Liberatory texts are at the heart of his work.

John composes for and performs in ensembles Methods Body, Orchestra Becomes Radicalized, Ixnay, LTD Time, and others. He also creates sound for film and theater. John’s recordings appear on labels Ecstatic Peace, New Amsterdam, ESP-disk’, Beacon Sound, Tender Loving Empire, and others. He has composed original scores for choreographers including Shannon Stewart, Anya Cloud, Claire Barrera, Allie Hankins, and Ginger Krebs, and he dances for choreographer Emma Lutz-Higgins.

Niekrasz is the Autumn 2024 Artist-in-Residence at Lewis & Clark’s EAR Forest. He has created work as a fellow at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, ACRE Arts Residency, Résidence Point Dom, Lazuli Residency, and the 2024 Oregon Artists’ Biennial. For six months, he performed and curated for Paris’ Cité International des Arts. He founded the CMG’s Outset Music Series, works in ACRE’s recording studio, and has served as artistic director of the Creative Music Guild. He taught drum set at Revival Drum Shop for three years.

John has collaborated and performed with artists including Rhys Chatham, Joanna Newsom, Y La Bamba, Marilyn Crispell, Akron/Family, Mika Singh, Mary Halvorson, Glenn Kotche, Holland Andrews, Marcus Fischer, Luke Wyland, Ed Rodriguez, Tim Kinsella, Tomeka Reid, Nicole Mitchell, Nate Wooley, and many others.

John Niekrasz publishes poetry, fiction, and essays. He is currently finishing his third novel.

Wednesday, October 16

Jeremy Okai Davis

Wink (Jimmy Winkfield),

Davis received a BFA in painting from the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, NC. Davis relocated to Portland, OR in 2007 where he has continued his studio practice in addition to working as a graphic designer and illustrator. His work has been shown nationally at the Studio Museum of Harlem (New York, NY), THIS Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA), Wa Na Wari (Seattle, WA) and The Rotating Art Program at Portland International Airport (Portland, OR). Davis’s work resides in the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at Oregon State University and the University of Oregon’s permanent collection. Elizabeth Leach Gallery began representing Jeremy Okai Davis in 2019.

Wednesday, October 23
Jaleesa Johnston
Jeleesa Johnston Jaleesa Johnston is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and curator currently living and working in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a BA from Vassar College, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MA from the University of Bergen in Norway. Her interdisciplinary art practice explores the ruptured space between the subjectivity and objectivity of the Black female body. She has been the recipient of the AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship, Centrum’s Emerging Artist Residency, Open Signal’s New Media Fellowship, Performance Works NW Alembic Artist Residency and an Artist Trust Fellowship Award. Jaleesa also works as Curatorial Coordinator in the Curatorial Department at the Portland Art Museum, where she initiated and curates an ongoing exhibition series titled Conductions: Black Imaginings . Her curatorial interests and research include the residual imprint of ephemeral works in institutional spaces, with a focus on Black performance work.

Wednesday, October 30
Ketzia Schoneberg
Caw, Caw (Where You Been Don't Bother Me) Ketzia Schoneberg is a contemporary American artist whose mixed media paintings, drawings and sculpture are exhibited nationally in galleries and museums. Her feminist autobiographical works combine elements culled from her active dream life, longstanding meditation practice, personal unconscious, cultural background and affinity with wildlife and environmental concerns to create an esoteric interplay of characters. Using figurative and abstract elements, she investigates movement-based plays of power, the erotic, and sensuality with vivid color and loose mark making. The artist uses acrylic, graphite, pastel, wax crayon, grease pencil, charcoal, and ceramics in her studio practice. Schoneberg is also a classical violinist.

In 2023, Ketzia’s solo exhibit, Hineni, was shown at the Center for Contemporary Art & Culturein Portland, Oregon, and her solo show, Everything You Need, was exhibited in Gallery 511 at PNCA in 2022. Schoneberg has been a visiting assistant professor at Willamette University andSouthern Oregon University and has taught at New Mexico State University. She received herMFA in Visual Studies at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and did her undergraduateeducation at the San Francisco Art Institute and San Francisco State University. A fourth generation artist, Schoneberg was born in Los Angeles, grew up in San Francisco and is currently living and working in the Pacific Northwest.

Wednesday, November 13
Melanie Flood

Untitled arrangement Melanie Flood is an artist living in Portland, OR. She has presented recent solo shows at Ruschwoman, Chicago, IL; Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR; and Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR. In 2024, Flood’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR. An arts professional for over twenty years, Flood previously served as Director of the Paige Powell Archive and oversaw a significant photographic collaboration between Powell and Gucci. Flood’s work and projects have been featured in Art in America, the New York Times, and New York Magazine, among others. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, such as the Regional Arts and Cultural Council Grant, Precipice Fund Award, Oregon Arts Commission Artist Fellowship, and two Ford Family Foundation Visual Arts Exhibition Grants. As of 2024, her work belongs in the permanent collection of the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR. Flood teaches in the Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design at Portland State University and holds a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York and an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice from Portland State University

Wednesday, November 20
Catherine Fairbanks

All the Lakes at Once, 2023, 115 x 75 3/4, flasche on canvas Catherine Fairbanks’s work is held in a broad range of professional and liberating actions: making solo and collaborative painting and sculpture, bonding with the work of other artists, participating in the nature, character, and trajectories of contemporary art, and considering, teaching and caring for others as a nurse. Empathy and its appearance as a foundational structure in living processes, is the bridge between her practice as an artist, and her practice as an ICU nurse. In both roles, she is in dialogue with the early 20th century phenomenologist, Edith Stein. For Stein, empathy was the liberating recognition of infinite difference in the other. This is not empathy as feeling, this is empathy enacted socially as equality and liberation.

Fairbanks received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010 and has since attended national and international residencies including Salmon Creek Farm, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, National Textile Institute in Iceland, and the Wool Factory in Barcelona. Additionally she makes post-studio ceramic work with the international workers and patients in the Medical ICU at UCLA, which she calls Glazing at the End of Life.

Ground-shifting exhibitions of the past 4 years include the premier of Chimney Dances, a four-site collaborative work with Dylan Crossman, formerly of Merce Cunningham Dance Company, at the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, UCLA, and Pieter Space, in February of 2020; and a solo painting exhibition, Love Loves to Love Love, Nurse Loves the New Chemist at ACP in Los Angeles, Spring 2023. She is opening a solo exhibition of paintings at M and B Gallery in Los Angeles in October 2024 and a two-person exhibition with the poet Catherine Barnett at Lewis & Clark College, curated by Nicole Seisler of A-B Projects and Lewis & Clark College. Fairbanks has received critical acclaim in Artforum, der Freitag, Carla, SFMOMA Openspace, Thick Press, and Artillery.

Wednesday, December 4
Anna Gray + Ryan Paulsen
Happiness is Subversive Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen work in collaborative partnership, using art as an extended form of study, a mode to follow their curiosities and a way to grapple with the predicaments they encounter in the world. Over the last 15 years, their project-based work has been grounded in reading, writing, and a fascination with language. Functioning like actualized marginalia and/or translations between text and image, many of their projects look to expand the individual act of reading into visual, collective form. Their work has appeared in many public places as well as at institutions such as The Renaissance Society (Chicago, IL); The San Diego Museum of Art (San Diego, CA); SPACES (Cleveland, OH); Locust Projects (Miami, FL); Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Portland, OR); and on the pages of NOON Literary Annual. In addition to making artistic work, they teach, do carpentry work, and enjoy spending time with their two children. The pair are represented by PDX CONTEMPORARY ART in Portland.