Watkins Announces 2011-12 Visiting Artists Series
Five Acclaimed Artists Set for Lectures and Exhibition
(October 24, 2011)
Watkins College of Art, Design & Film will bring five renowned artists to campus during the 2011-12 academic year for the expanded Watkins Visiting Artists Series. Artemio Rodriguez, Natalia Almada, David Hilliard, Harrell Fletcher and Alec Soth are scheduled for this series of Thursday night lectures, which are free and open to the public.
The guest artists, whose work crosses many disciplinary boundaries, will give public presentations, sharing their expertise and perspectives on their careers and providing insight into current issues facing contemporary artists and designers, as well as meet with relevant classes in which they will conduct a workshop and/or critique student work.
The Watkins Visiting Artists Series is an annual year-long program which welcomes nationally and internationally recognized fine artists, designers, filmmakers, educators and critics to the campus and the community. Through the generous support of the Memorial Foundation, this year’s series builds upon last year's 125th anniversary series of three lectures by presenting four lectures in the Watkins Theater plus an exhibition in the Brownlee O. Currey, Jr. Gallery.
Specific dates, times and programming for each artist’s visit will be posted to the Watkins website (Watkins.edu/VisitingArtistsSeries). Below is the year’s full line-up, followed by details on each visiting artist:
- November 17, 2011 – Artemio Rodriguez, printmaker
- January 26, 2012 – Natalia Almada, filmmaker
- February 9, 2012 – David Hilliard, photographer, in conjunction with Visiting Artist’s Exhibition
- March 29, 2012 – Harrell Fletcher, multidisciplinary artist
- April 26, 2012 – Alec Soth, photographer
Artemio Rodriguez on Thursday, November 17
Reception at 6:00 p.m.; Lecture begins at 6:30 p.m. in the Watkins Theater
Artemio Rodriguez was born in Tacámbaro, Michoacán, Mexico, and studied agronomy at the Universidad Autonomo Chapingo. 
He was introduced to art when he apprenticed and learned letterpress printing from Juan Pasco, a master print maker working out of the Taller Martín Pescador near Rodriguez’s hometown. As a printmaker who works primarily in black and white, Rodriguez’s signature style emphasizes simplicity and clarity. European medieval woodcuts and the great Mexican print artists such as Jose Guadalupe Posada have been influential in Rodriguez’s printmaking career. 
Natalia Almada on Thursday, January 26, 2012
Screening of “El Velador” begins at 6:30 p.m. in the Watkins Theater; Q&A discussion to follow
Recipient of the 2009 Sundance Documentary Directing Award for her film “El General,” Natalia Almada’s most recent film “El Velador” (2011) premiered at New Directors/New Films and the Cannes' Directors' Fortnight. Her previous credits include “All Water Has a Perfect Memory,” an experimental short film that received international recognition, and “Al Otro Lado,” her award-winning debut feature documentary about immigration, drug trafficking and corrido music. Almada’s films have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Biennial, with all three feature documentaries broadcast on the award-winning series POV. Almada is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow and 2010 USA Artist Fellow, and a recipient of the Alpert Award. She graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and shares her time between Mexico City and Brooklyn, New York.
David Hilliard on Thursday, February 9, 2012
Remarks begin at 5:15 p.m. in the Watkins Theater; Opening Reception for David Hilliard exhibition begins at 6:00 p.m. in the Brownlee O. Currey, Jr, Gallery
The Visiting Artist Exhibition runs through March 2
David Hilliard creates large-scale, multi-paneled color photographs, often based on his life or the lives of people around him. His panoramas direct the viewer’s gaze across the image surface allowing narrative, time and space to unfold. Hilliard received his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1992 and MFA from Yale University in 1994. He worked for many years as an assistant professor at Yale University where he also directed the undergraduate photo department. He has also taught at Harvard University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and spent the spring of 2010 at Dartmouth College as their artist in residence. He is currently an assistant professor in Boston at the Massachusetts College of Art and visiting faculty at Harvard. Hilliard exhibits his photographs both nationally and internationally and has won numerous awards, such as the Fulbright and Guggenheim. His photographs can be found in many important collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His work is represented by the Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York, Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston, Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta, the Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica and in Paris at La Galerie Particuliere. In 2005 a collection of his photographs was published in a monograph by Aperture Press.
.
Harrell Fletcher on March 29, 2012
Reception at 6:00 p.m.; Lecture begins at 6:30 p.m. in the Watkins Theater
Harrell Fletcher has worked collaboratively and individually on a variety of socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects for over a decade. His work has been shown at SF MoMA, the de Young Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in the San Francisco area; the Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Sculpture Center, the Wrong Gallery and Smackmellon in New York City; DiverseWorks and Aurora Picture Show in Houston; PICA in Portland, Oregon; CoCA and the Seattle Art Museum in Seattle; Signal in Malmo, Sweden; Domain de Kerguehennec in France; and the Royal College of Art in London. Fletcher exhibits in San Francisco and Los Angeles with Jack Hanley Gallery, in New York City with Christine Burgin Gallery, in London with Laura Bartlett Gallery, and in Paris with Gallery In Situ. He was a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. In 2002 Fletcher started Learning To Love You More, an ongoing participatory website with Miranda July. His current traveling exhibition, The American War, originated in 2005 at ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas, and traveled in 2006 to Virginia, New York City, Boston and Portland. A 2005 recipient of the Alpert Award in Visual Arts, Fletcher is a professor in the School of Fine & Performing Arts at Portland State University.
Alec Soth on Thursday, April 26, 2012
Reception at 6:00 p.m.; Lecture begins at 6:30 p.m. in the Watkins Theater
Born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Alec Soth is a photographer whose work is rooted in the distinctly American tradition of ‘on-the-road photography’ developed by Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Stephen Shore. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, he is the recipient of several major fellowships from the Bush, McKnight and Jerome Foundations and was awarded the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. Soth’s work is represented in major public and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. His photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo Biennials. In 2008, a large survey exhibition of his work was exhibited at Jeu de Paume in Paris and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. In 2010, the Walker Art produced a large survey exhibition of Soth’s work entitled From Here To There. Alec Soth’s first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published by Steidl in 2004 to critical acclaim. Since then he has published NIAGARA (2006), Fashion Magazine (2007) Dog Days, Bogotá (2007) The Last Days of W (2008), Broken Manual (2010). In 2008, he started his own publishing company, Little Brown Mushroom. Soth is represented by Sean Kelly in New York, Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis, and is a member of Magnum Photos.
Key series participants from Watkins are Gallery Committee members Dan Brawner, professor and department chair of graphic design; Derek Coté (committee chair), assistant professor of fine art; Stefanie Gerber Darr, director of community education; Caroline Davis, director of external relations and assistant director of development; Brady Haston, assistant professor of fine art and studio facilities manager; Charles Kanganis, associate professor of film; Robin Paris, assistant professor and interim department chair of photography; and Tom Williams, assistant professor of art history.
The Watkins Visiting Artists Series is made possible through a grant from the Memorial Foundation and is sponsored in part by Marché Artisan Foods.
Watkins College of Art, Design & Film is supported in part by the Metro Nashville Arts Commission and the Tennessee Arts Commission