Artist Lecture Series

Watkins’ Community Education Program is committed to the institution’s mission of creating a learning-centered environment. Through the Artist Lecture Series, Watkins engages the minds of our students and community members by inviting world-renowned visual artists, filmmakers, graphic designers, interior designers, and photographers to campus to offer talks, panel discussion, student critiques and to exhibit in the Brownlee O. Currey, Jr. Gallery. Previous artists have included David Berman, Barry Cook, Sam Dunson, Ming Fay, Gregg Horowitz, Teri Jones, Hans Schmitt-Matzen, Jeff Silva, Jered Sprecher, Faith Wilding, and Wayne White. Watkins thanks Regions Bank and Millenium Maxwell House Hotel for the generosity of their sponsorship of this series.

keith carter

Thursday, November 4

Lecture @ 7:00 p.m.

Keith Carter is an internationally recognized photographer and educator. Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1948, he holds the endowed Walles Chair of Art at Lamar University Beaumont, Texas. He is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Regional Survey Grants and the Lange- Taylor Prize from The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. In 1997 keith Carter was the subject of an arts profile on the national network television show, CBS Sunday morning. In 1998, he received Lamar University's highest teaching honor, the University Professor Award, and he was named the Lamar University Distinguished Lecturer. Eight monographs of his black and white photographs have been published: From Uncertain To Blue, 1988; The Blue Man, 1990; Mojo, 1992; Heaven of Animals, 1995; and Bones, 1996. A mid- career survey, Keith Carter Photographs- Twenty Five Years was published in 1997; Holding Venus and his eighth book , Ezekiel's Horse, were published in 2000. Called "a poet of the ordinary" by Los Angeles Times,Mr. Carter's haunting, enigmatic photographs have been widely exhibited in Europe, The U.S., and Latin America. They are included in numerous permanent collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago ; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the George Eastman House; the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston, and the Wittliff Collection of Southwestern and Mexican Photography at Southwest Texas State University. 

This lecture is free and open to the public.

Miwon Kwon

Thursday, December 2

Lecture @ 7:00 P.M.

Miwon Kwon is trained in architecture, holds a MA in photography, and has extensive curatorial experience from her tenure at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the early 1990s. She received her PhD in Architectural History and Theory at Princeton University in 1998, the same year in which she joined the faculty at UCLA to teach contemporary art history (post- 1945). Her research and writings have engaged several disciplines including contemporary art, architecture, public art, and urban studies. She was a co- editor and publisher of Documents, a journal of art, culture, and criticism (1992- 2004), and serves on the advisory board of October magazine. She is the author of One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity (MIT Press, 2002), as well as lengthy essays on the work of many contemporary artists, such as Francis Alys, Michael Asher, Cai Guo- Qiang, Jimmie Durham, Felix Gonzalez- Torres, Christian Marclay, Ana Mendieta, Josiah McElheny, Christian Philipp Muller, Gabriel Orozco, Jorge Pardo, Richard Serra, and Do Ho Suh, among others. She is currently preparing an essay on the public projects of Barbara Kruger for Rizzoli Publications and is co- organizing a major historical exhibition entitled "Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1977" with co- curator Philipp Kaiser to be presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2012. She is on sabbatical leave for academic year 2009- 10.

This lecture is free and open to the public.