Please join us online for our first Visual Art Forum lecture of 2021, with artist Jessica Stockholder in conversation with curator Monika Szewczyk, on Tuesday, February, 2nd from 9:30 - 11:00 am (PST).

Jessica Stockholder was born in 1959 in Seattle, Washington. She was raised in Vancouver, Canada, and currently lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Chicago. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; MoCA LA; SF MoMA; The British Museum, London; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Drawing attention to ordinary everyday materials, Stockholder engages the sensuality and pleasure evoked by color and formal order in an effort to call attention to the edges of understanding. She orchestrates an intersection of pictorial and physical space, probing how meaning derives from physicality.

Monika Szewczyk is director of de Appel in Amsterdam. Previously, she was curator for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2015-2017); Visual Arts Program Curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago (2012-2014); Head of Publications at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam (2008–2011); Assistant Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2004–2007) and Program Coordinator of the Belkin Satellite, a downtown outpost of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia (2001-2003), her alma mater. Having studied International Relations and Art History as well as theatre, film and fine arts at UBC, she went on to lecture, advise and lead seminars that address the specific techniques of art- and history-making found along her own diasporic path. Her work draws on nearly two decades of practice organizing exhibitions and publishing in close dialogue with artists who pose vital and courageous questions – in key instances acting as co-curators, teachers, historians and lyricists themselves. Her own teaching experience began at Emily Carr University in Vancouver (2002-2007) and includes writing mentorship at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2008-2012), political theology seminars at Bergen Academy of Art and Design (2011), exhibition study seminars at the University of Chicago (2012-2014) and the gradual evolution of de Appel’s Curatorial Programme curriculum. Her writings and interviews as well as her editorial work can be found in numerous artists’ publications, readers, catalogues and in journals such as South as a State of Mind, e-flux journal online, Mousse Magazine, Artforum and Afterall.

In 2019, she contributed the essay “Jessica Stockholder’s Assists or Autonomy in Infancy and Old Age” to Jessica Stockholder: Stuff Matters, a monograph published by Mousse on the occasion of the artist’s eponymous exhibition at Centraal Museum, Utrecht. She first worked with Stockholder while at the Vancouver Art Gallery, in the context of PAINT, a group exhibition guest curated by artist Neil Campbell, and of Paint: A Psychedelic Primer, the accompanying publication she edited and introduced. The occasion brought Stockholder’s large-scale work Of Standing Float Roots in Thin Air (2006) to Vancouver, where it remained upon entering the VAG’s permanent collection.

Presented by the Audain Faculty of Art at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Zoom link: https://ca01web.zoom.us/j/68202461072

Meeting ID: 682 0246 1072

Password: 580891