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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 7pm (campus parking is free after 7pm).

For information, contact the Art Department: 503-768-7390 or art@lclark.edu.

Fall 2021

Tuesday, September 14- Miller 105
Megan Hanley
Megan Hanley is an artist who lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She creates art to continue a dialogue around the theory of posthumanism and the physical processes of biology and geology. By creating drawings utilizing natural materials from sites of investigation she urges us to consider that humans are part of a complex ecosystem, equal to bacteria, minerals, plants, and animals. In 2017 she was awarded the Andries Deinum Prize for Visionaries and Provocateurs and a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council to complete a year of research in collaboration with the Center for Life in Extreme Environments at Portland State University in preparation for the exhibition In/Habitable. Hanley has also taken part in a backpacking residency with Signal Fire in the Siskiyou Mountain region of Northern California, and a three-week dig with the Sanisera Archaeology Institute on the island of Menorca, Spain as part of her research-based practice. Her work has been selected for juried exhibitions at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA, the Nightingale Gallery at Eastern Oregon University, La Grande, OR and the CICA Museum in South Korea. Her drawings have been published in the Pacific Coast edition of New American Paintings. Hanley received a BFA in Art Education from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2008 and an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice from Portland State University in 2017.

Tuesday, October 12- Miller 105
Chiffon Thomas

Chiffon Thomas Chiffon Thomas (b. 1991) was born in Chicago, IL and holds an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas has since developed a multifaceted practice incorporating embroidery, collage, drawing, and sculpture to explore the self as split, fractured, and transforming. Identifying as a non- binary queer person of color, Thomas contends with the crafted body in their work, examining wider issues of gender, race and sexuality.Thomas has completed prominent residencies with the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME and the Fountainhead Residency, Miami, FL. Their work is included in the permanent collections of the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL, ICA Miami, Hammer Museum, LA and the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH. Thomas is anticipating and upcoming solo exhibition at P.P.O.W. Gallery, NY in 2022.

Tuesday, October 26- Miller 105
Lynn Yarne
Lynn Yarne is an artist and educator from Portland, Oregon. She works within animation and collage to address collective memory, generational narratives, histories and space. A fourth generation Chinese and Japanese American, her current work explores themes of displacement and loss, resilience and community, particularly within Old Town Portland. She is curious about participatory works, magic, and rejuvenation.

As a teacher in a public high school she facilitates a teen digital media think tank and skill building program with an emphasis on equipping young people with media skills to create positive change and participate in visual culture. Yarne and her students began building a screen printing studio in a classroom closet in 2015, it is now a printmaking studio that trains over 120 youth printers a year. Lynn holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MAT from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Tuesday, November 2- Miller 102
Sherrill Roland

Sherill Roland Sherrill Roland (born in Asheville, NC), received a BFA in design and an MFA in studio art from the University of North Carolina–Greensboro. As he describes his work, Roland “creates art that challenges ideas around controversial social and political constructs, and generates a safe space to process, question, and share.” He is the founder of the acclaimed Jumpsuit Project, intended to raise awareness around issues related to mass incarceration. The work grew out of the ten months he spent in state prison, wrongfully convicted just as he had started his last year of grad school. Based on new evidence, Roland was eventually exonerated of all charges. The project is meant to provoke conversation around issues related to incarceration, including prejudice toward those incarcerated.

Tuesday, November 9- Miller 102
Sara Siestreem

3 Eagle Machine Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos, 1976-) is a master artist from the Umpqua River Valley on the South Coast of Oregon. She comes from a family of professional artists and educators; her training began in the home. Her lifelong mentor is Lillian Pitt (Wasco, Warm Springs, Yakima) and her weaving teachers are Greg Archuleta (Grand Ronde) and Greg A. Robinson (Chinook Nation). Siestreem graduated Phi Kappa Phi with a BS from PSU in 2005. She earned an MFA with distinction from Pratt Art Institute in 2007. She has been represented by Augen Gallery since 2010.

Her studio work is multi-disciplinary. Her primary language is painting, but she also works in photography, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, video, traditional Indigenous weaving, and large-scale installation. Her art practice branches into education and institutional reform and these concepts directly influence and are reflected in her artwork and public presence. Siestreem created and runs a weaving program for the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw people. She teaches collegiate studio arts and theory at PNCA. Her work in institutional reform relates to curatorial and educational practices regarding Indigenous Fine Art and Critical Race Theory. She is the Director of the Future Present Action Lab at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education.

Tuesday, November 19- Miller 105
maximiliano
maximilliano mononymously named, maximiliano, is a conceptual artist working in BLKwvv, a generative multimedia mythos: a Black reclamation rococo aesthetic and agenda based in exploring and expanding the multiplicity and fluidity of the Black self through pleasure, desirability, innocence, and imagination as performance, video, GIF, sculpture, thought, and publications.
Nat Turner Project

Nat Turner Project NTP allows artists of color to go beyond the usual initial expositions inherent in presenting art borne of marginalized perspectives to a dominant culture; allowing artists of color freedom to create or express their own language within and without the parameters of racial commodification or designation. NTP creates an environment of inclusivity, a communal harbor for artists previously silenced by institutional constraints, and actively provides priority spaces to artists of color; allowing others the privilege of viewership from an outsider role. Nat Turner Project, not just a name…

Tuesday, November 23- Miller 105
Lucia Monge

Unearthing Futures Lucia Monge is a Peruvian artist whose work explores the ways humans position ourselves within the natural world and relate to other living beings, especially plants. For the past ten years she has organized Plantón Móvil, a yearly “walking forest” performance that leads to the creation of public green areas in cities such as Lima, Providence, Minneapolis, London, and New York. Other recent projects include a “fungi broadcast” about deforestation in Peru and sending potato seeds to space as messengers for non-colonial visions of the future.

Monge has received an Eliza Moore Fellowship from Oak Spring Garden Foundation and a Social Innovation Fellowship from Brown University, alongside grants from institutions such as the Peruvian Ministry of Culture, COAL Art and Ecology, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts among other. She has shown her work internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lima, Queens Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, and the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP20).

Fall 2020
Gianine Tabja
Sameer Farooq
Intisar Abioto
Francesca Capone
Elisa Giardina-Papa
Anina Major
Ellie Irons
Nandita Kumar