DEPARTMENT OF ART LECTURE SERIES

BETSY STIRRATT – (McDonough Museum of Art, lecture hall)  Monday, October 4, 5:30pm

Exploring natural and social histories through photographs, books, paintings, objects and film, Betsy Stirratt creates multiple layered narratives about the interactions of humans and nature. She is Director Emeritus of the Grunwald Gallery of Art at Indiana University Bloomington where, since 1987, she curated exhibitions and published catalogs. Exhibiting her own work widely since 1983, solo exhibitions include La Maladie at The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia and the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago and Veiled Taxonomies at the Center for Book Arts in New York among others. Her work has been included in group exhibits at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and White Columns and Art in General in New York. She is the recipient of several grants, including a Visual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and awards from the Indiana Arts Commission and the American Craft Council. 

This lecture is in conjunction with her solo exhibition Embedded Histories at the McDonough Museum of Art, September 5 – October 20.

HYLA WILLIS – (McDonough Museum of Art, lecture hall) – Wednesday, October 23, 3pm

Artist Hyla Willis will present the work of the subRosa art collective, known for its site-specific and audience-engaged installations and performance art. Learn how the group became interested in cyberfeminism and what they were able to accomplish with an interdisciplinary, intergenerational, collaborative practice. subRosa has performed, exhibited, lectured, and published in the USA, Spain, Britain, Holland, Germany, Croatia, Macedonia, Mexico, Canada, Slovenia, and Singapore. subRosa uses art to explore and critique the intersections of information and bio technologies on women’s bodies, lives and work

Hyla Willis is an interdisciplinary artist, graphic designer, and co-founder of the cyberfeminist art collective subRosa, which has focused on the ways women are impacted by rapidly-evolving biological and communications technologies. Willis has performed, exhibited, and given workshops in Europe, Asia, Australia, and throughout North America. She holds a MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and has been the recipient of two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in New Genres, a Creative Capital grant in Emerging Fields, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Arts, and an Artist Opportunity Grant from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council. She was selected as Pittsburgh Center for the Arts’ Artist of the Year in 2014 and mounted a solo exhibition—America’s Least Livable City—in homage to her hometown in the Sacramento Valley. She is a Professor of Media Arts at Robert Morris University in Moon Township, Pennsylvania.

BEECHER ART + TECHNOLOGY LECTURE SERIES

CRYSTAL BEIERSDORFER – (virtual) – Monday, November 15, 1pm

Crystal Beiersdorfer is a digital artist whose work exams digital culture and how the digitized world promotes alterations to identity, body, and the psyche. Through a femme perspective, her art showcases how digital culture influences and controls concepts of the ideal femme figure and how pervasive technology has become in our daily lives. Crystal’s work also scrutinizes media itself through glitching, pixelization, and other digital manipulation methods, making viewers question the influence that technology has over their personal beliefs and daily routines.

She earned her MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Chicago (2020) and her BFA in Studio Arts: Photography & BA in Mathematics from Youngstown State University (2015).

event link:  https://ysu.webex.com/ysu/j.php?MTID=m9ac0e9d4207677c5dad8c26966a66f92
password: Yart2023 (92782023 from phones)

 BECAUSE WE FOCUS ON YOU

Education in the arts is paradoxical. Art making and the study of art require skills training as well as perceptual awareness. Participation in the process is the primary means of education. Students and faculty alike are immersed in the quest for knowledge and creative self-realization, whether it is in the form of computer graphics, printmaking or the study of art from the past.

The Higher Learning Commission accredits Youngstown State University in an accreditation that includes all undergraduate and graduate programs. In addition, the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), an organization whose membership includes 250 schools out of approximately 2,000 art departments nationally, accredits the Department of Art.

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