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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.

Fall 2023
Tuesday, September 19th
Kanani Miyamoto

Kanani Miyamoto

Kanani Miyamoto holds an MFA in Print Media from the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA), and a bachelor’s degree in Art Practices from Portland State University. Kanani Miyamoto is an artist, curator and educator. Her art work has shown nationally. She is originally from Honolulu, Hawai`i and is currently living in Portland, Oregon.

Kanani Miyamoto, is an individual of mixed heritage and identifies most with her Hawaiian and Japanese roots. Important to her work as an artist is sharing and celebrating her mixed background to represent her community and the beauty of intersectional identities. She also explores topics such as institutional critique and hopes to create critical conversations around cultural authenticity in the arts. Miyamoto is a printmaker and uses traditional printmaking techniques to create large scale print installations and murals.

In addition to being a practicing artist Miyamoto is an advocate for art education and a passionate community worker.

Tuesday, October 17th

David Eckard

David Eckard David Eckard utilizes diverse materials, techniques and presentational strategies in his studio practice. Futility, function, authority, queer masculinity and persona are the primary notions investigated, critiqued, and exploited in his work. Eckard fabricates fictive artifacts and enigmatic objects with a variety of materials and techniques. These sculptures exist as singular objects, installation components and performance props.
His rendered works on panel and paper are biomorphic, sexualized schematics that address the body as carrier of histories, fantasies, potential and trauma. Through performance, Eckard orchestrates transient theatrics and deploys temporary monuments in civic spaces for incidental audiences.
Eckard has exhibited internationally and his work has been reviewed in Art in America, Sculpture, Flash Art, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and Artnews. He is the recipient of multiple fellowships and awards including the Individual Artist Fellowship (2015, Regional Arts and Culture Council, Portland, OR), the Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts (2010, Ford Family Foundation, Portland, OR) and the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship (2010, Portland, OR).

Tuesday October 24th
Bean Gilsdorf

Bean Gilsford Bean Gilsdorf is a fourth-generation seamstress currently working at the nexus of sculptural textiles and photography. Her practice reanimates cultural and political figures found in mass-market history books, turning flat images into collaged three-dimensional forms that are further détourned through strategies of draping, stuffing, and compressing. Her projects have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and the American Textile History Museum, as well as exhibition spaces in England, Italy, China, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and South Africa. Gilsdorf’s work is in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Kala Art Institute, and the International Quilt Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

In her writing, Gilsdorf frequently addresses issues connected to feminism, gender, and the effects of socioeconomic conditions on artistic practices. Her reviews and essays have been included in publications such as Artforum, Art in America, and Frieze, and in 2021 her research and writing was supported by an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Gilsdorf was also the 2018 Art Writer in Residence at SPACES in Cleveland, Ohio, and a 2021 guest editor of SFMOMA’s Open Space magazine.

Gilsdorf is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Ford Family Foundation Fellowship Residency at Ucross Foundation (2023), Fulbright Fellowships to Poland (2015–2016 and 2016–2017), a Graduate Fellowship at Headlands Center for the Arts (2011–2012), and a Graduate Full Merit Scholarship to the MFA Fine Arts program at California College of the Arts (2009–2011). She has also been an artist in residence at 18th Street Arts Center and Banff Centre, among others. Gilsdorf holds a BA from Simon’s Rock at Bard College and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

Tuesday, November 7th
Elizabeth Malaska

Elizabeth Malaska (b. 1978, Portland, OR) is known for paintings that explore the place of a present-day femme subject in relation to art history, raising issues about femininity, power, domination, and vulnerability, with social and political implications for our current times.
Elizabeth Malaska earned her BFA from California College of the Arts and her MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of a Painter’s and Sculptor’s Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Hallie Ford Fellowship from The Ford Family Foundation. Malaska’s work is in the permanent collection at the Portland Art Museum, the Schneider Musuem of Art, and the Hallie Ford Museum. She has exhibited at The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (OR), Archer Gallery (WA), Oregon Contemporary (OR) and Wilding Can (CA), among others. Her work has been featured in Ms.Magazine, Art in America, ArtForum, ArtMaze and Artillery Magazine. She is represented by Russo Lee (Portland) and Wilding Cran (Los Angeles), and lives and works in Portland, OR.

Tuesday, November 21st

Jodie Cavalier

Jodie Cavalier is a conceptual artist living in Portland, Oregon. She earned a BA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. Her works have been exhibited with Converge 45’s Portland’s Monuments & Memorials Project in Portland, OR; the Schneider Museum in Ashland, OR; the deYoung Museum in San Francisco, CA; the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, CA; CoCA in Seattle, WA; Practice in New York, NY; and Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany; among others. She has participated in residencies at ONCA in Brighton, England; the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, UT; Wassaic in Wassaic, NY; AZ West in Joshua Tree, CA; among others.

Tuesday, November 28th
Brenda Mallory

Brenda Mallory’s mixed media sculptural works are comprised of a variety of materials including cloth, fibers, beeswax, and found objects. By creating multiple forms that are joined with crude hardware that imply tenuous connections or repairs, her work addresses ideas of interference and disruption in long-established systems of nature and human cultures.

Mallory lives in Portland, Oregon but grew up in Oklahoma and is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She holds a BA in Linguistics & English from UCLA and a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art. She has received grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, Ford Family Foundation, and the Regional Arts & Culture Council. She is a recipient the The Hallie Ford Fellowship, the Eiteljorg Contemporary Native Art Fellowship, the Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship in Visual Art and the Ucross Native Fellowship. She has participated in artist residencies including Ucross, Anderson Ranch, Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, Glean, Bullseye Glass, and the Jordan Schnitzer Printmaking Residency at Sitka Center for the Arts.

Tuesday, December 5th
Intisar Abioto

Intisar Abioto (b. Memphis, TN. 1986) is an explorer-artist working across photography, dance, and writing. Moving from the visionary and embodied root of Blackgirl Southern cross-temporal cross-modal storytelling ways, her works refer to the living breath/breadth of people of African descent against the expanse of their storied, geographic, and imaginative landscapes. Working in long-form projects that encompass the visual, folkloric, documentary, and performing arts, she has produced The People Could Fly Project, The Black Portlanders, and The Black. Co-created with her four artist sisters, The People Could Fly Project, was a 200,000-mile flying arts expedition exploring realities of flight and freedom within the African diasporic myth of the flying African and Virginia Hamilton’s award-winning book, The People Could Fly.

Abioto is the recipient of a 2018 Oregon Humanities Emerging Journalists, Community Stories Fellowship for which she began a continuing body of research on the history of artists of African descent in Oregon. She has performed and/or exhibited at Ori Gallery, Portland Art Museum, Duplex Gallery, Photographic Center Northwest, African American Museum in Philadelphia, Poetry Press Week, Design Week Portland, Spelman College, Powell’s City of Books, University of Oregon White Box Gallery, Portland State University, Reed College, and Zilkha Gallery among others. Selected for an Art in the Governor’s Office solo exhibition in 2019 she exhibited and performed with nine Oregon-based Black artists against the inner expanse of the Oregon State Capitol building in Salem OR. Her publication Black Portlands documents interviews with Black Portlanders alongside her photographs. She was a contributing photographer to MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora (2017) and her photographs illustrated the Urban League of Portland’s State of Black Oregon 2015. With the five women artists in her family, she is the co-founder of Studio Abioto, a multivalent creative arts studio. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Tuesday, December 12th
Sam Hamilton

Sam Ham Tam (Sam Hamilton), Pāhehā (white person from Aotearoa New Zealand), is an independent interdisciplinary artist and creative researcher from Aotearoa New Zealand, based in so-called Oregon, USA. Their practice functions more like an ecology than a discipline. A modular complex of interweaving creative, critical, material, methodological, magical, experiential, contextual, social, and political lines of inquiry.

a confluence
a nebula
a garden
a long song

Outputs and engagements have included such things as a months-long sound art research project in the Amazon; producing experimental 16mm feature-length artist films about the influence of astronomy on the evolution of human agency; conducting intergenerational rituals of undoing at the Royal Observatory of Greenwich, London; recording inside an active volcano crater; teaching youth choirs how to sing like the ocean; filming asteroid showers at a remote high-plain desert astrophysics observatory; collaborating with dancer and chief Ioane Papali’i in Sāmoa; making huge monochromatic gold paintings of gardens; running several DIY experimental sound and film festivals; plus some 15-years of making sound in Greek squats, Arizona punk spaces, underground parking lots, nightclubs, forests, deserts, infinite house shows, museums, 1 swimming pool, 2 weddings, and a palace banquet hall. They have presented their work at Whitechapel Gallery in London, Issue Transmediale in Berlin, Project Room in New York, The Portland Art Museum, Dockfest in Germany, ARTSPACE Aotearoa in New Zealand, Locust Works in Miami and more. Hamilton also spent 10-years touring as composer/sound designer for the acclaimed Lemi Ponifasio MAU Dance Company, performing at the Brooklyn Academy of Museum, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, Ruhrtriannale, and much more.

Fall 2022
Lu Yim
Lyndon Barrios Jr.
Laura Heit
Yoshihiro Kitai
Taravat Talepasand
Dann Disciglio
sidony o’neal

Fall 2021
Megan Hanley
Chiffon Thomas
Lynn Yarne
Sherrill Roland
Sara Siestreem
maximiliano
Nat Turner Project
Lucia Monge