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The Alfred R. Shands III and Mary N. Shands Masters Series
Vian Sora
Topic: Local Artist Vian Sora in conversation with Contemporary Curator Tyler Blackwell.
About the Speaker:
Vian Sora (b. Baghdad, Iraq, 1976) received a BS from Al Mansour University in Baghdad, Iraq in 2000, and an MBA from Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky in 2012. She also studied printmaking at the Istanbul Museum of Graphic Art in Istanbul, Turkey. She lives and works in Louisville, KY, USA.
Utilizing a synthesis of styles and iconography taken from both her native, modern and ancient Iraq and adopted cultures, along with a variety of techniques, Vian Sora’s mixed media paintings embody imagery that suggests the struggle of the individual in the face of personal and social upheaval, often employing androgynous figures that transmute into expressionist abstraction. Her work also takes inspiration from such disparate modern masters as Chaïm Soutine, Willem de Kooning, and Gerhard Richter, whose Birkenau cycle paintings the artist viewed in Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie. Sora’s paintings reflect the zeitgeist of the city while also expanding her vibrantly expressive color palette and distinctive visual language. Having personally experienced several wars while living in Iraq, Sora’s search for beauty is translated in her compositions through a conscious embrace of decay, resulting in bright, metaphorical “landscapes” that simultaneously signify both the turmoil and dynamics of change. Dense with ideas, the distillation of experiences, and the transmission of emotion, her atmospheric surfaces, layered with optical ambiguities that create illusions of light and movement, of time and space, allow her to express untold emotional landscapes.
Vian Sora’s work has been included in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally including the Speed Museum, Louisville, KY; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; Sharjah Biennale, Sharjah, UAE; Imoga Istanbul Museum of Graphic Art, Istanbul, Turkey; Japanese Foundation Culture Center, Ankara, Turkey; and the Baghdad Art International Art Festival in Iraq; as well as the KMAC Triennial, Louisville, KY; The Shands Collection, Louisville, KY; Grinnell Museum of Art, Grinnell, Iowa; Louisville Metro Hall, Louisville, KY; and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Washington D.C., among others. Sora’s paintings are included in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Dar El Cid Museum, Kuwait City, Kuwait; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Shands Collection, Louisville, KY; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell, IA; Ministry of Culture Contemporary Collection, Baghdad, Iraq; the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; Fidelity Art Collection, Boston, MA, as well as numerous private collections.
2022
Alyson Shotz: The Substance of Space
Alyson Shotz, b.1964, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. For the past 28 years she has been engaging, through her sculptural practice, in an artistic investigation into the physical qualities of space, light and matter—the building blocks of our physical world. Through exhaustive empirical experimentation in various materials including metal, porcelain, string, and glass beads, she explores the structure and substance of space itself from a humanistic perspective: what is it, what is it made of, how does it shape everything we see around us?
About the Speaker:
Alyson Shotz lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She currently has a new solo project at Grace Farms Foundation in CT and was included in the recent exhibition Line of Wit at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. She has also been included in exhibitions such as The More Things Change, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art and Space at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Contemplating the Void and The Shapes of Space, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Light and Landscape, Storm King Art Center, and Living Color, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC and Pattern: Follow the Rules at the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. She has had solo exhibitions at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, The Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, and Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, among others. Shotz was an Arts Institute Research Fellow at Stanford University in 2014- 2015, a Sterling Visiting Scholar, Stanford University, 2012, she received a Pollock Krasner Award in 1999 and 2010, the Saint Gaudens Memorial Fellowship in 2007, and was the 2005-2006 Happy and Bob Doran Artist in Residence at Yale University Art Gallery. Her work is included in numerous public collections, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Guggenheim Bilbao, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, among others.
2021
Noel W Anderson: Beyond this Point, Abstraction is Promise
Artist and philosopher Noel W Anderson discusses the function of Black publications, weaving, representation, and abstraction in his arts-based research. Beginning with his erased Ebony magazine works included in Promise, Witness, Remembrance, Anderson will talk about how he seeks to confront limited representations of Black identity, think Black subjectivities as always already abstract (abstraction as a material reality), and, consequently, explore the possibilities of abstraction as a mode of critique.
Anderson also recently featured as one of the contributors to the week-long series highlighting Promise, Witness, Remembrance in Burnaway magazine.
About the Artist:
Born 1981 in Louisville, Noel W Anderson received an MFA from Indiana University in Printmaking, and an MFA from Yale University in Sculpture. He is also Area Head of Printmaking in NYU’s Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions.
Anderson utilizes print-media and arts-based-research to explore philosophical inquiry methodologies. He primarily focuses on the mediation of socially constructed images on identity formation as it relates to black masculinity and celebrity. In 2018, Noel was awarded the NYFA artist fellowship grant and the prestigious Jerome Prize. His solo exhibition Blak Origin Moment debuted at the Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati) in February 2017 and travelled to the Hunter Museum of American Art in October 2019. His first monograph, Blak Origin Moment, was also recently published.
2019
New Seeds. A talk on the relationship between art, science, and nature.
Artist Wolfgang Buttress creates multi-sensory artworks that draw inspiration from our evolving relationship with the ‘natural’ world. He explores and interprets scientific discoveries, collaborating with architects, landscape architects, scientists and musicians to create human-centered experiences.
Wolfgang has produced artworks on four continents including Europe, Australia, Japan and the U.S. He is well known for the UK Pavilion (Milan EXPO 2015) and The Hive, a collaboration with physicist Dr Martin Bencsik, BDP, Hoare Lea and Simmonds Studio which expresses the life of a bee hive in real time through form, sound and light.
The Hive is now permanently installed at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, England, the project has won 27 national and international awards including gold medal for best in show at World EXPO 2015.
Buttress is currently working on a new commission for the Speed Art Museum entitled A New Seed. This commission is generously sponsored by Cary Brown and Steve Epstein.
April 26, 2019
Speed Art Museum
2018
As part of After Hours at the Speed
Ebony G. Patterson (b. 1981 in Kingston, Jamaica; lives and works in Kingston and Lexington, KY) received her BFA from Edna Manley College, Kingston, Jamaica (2004) and MFA from Sam Fox College of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University, St. Louis, MO (2006). Patterson has had solo exhibitions and projects at many US institutions including The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2016); Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, GA (2016); and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2016). Dead Treez, Patterson’s large-scale solo show, originated at the Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI (2015) and traveled to Museum of Art and Design, NY (2015); Boston University Art Galleries, MA (2016); and UB Art Galleries, University at Buffalo, NY (2017). Her work was included in the 32nd São Paulo Bienal: Live Uncertainty (2016); the 12th Havana Biennial: Between the Idea and the Experience, Cuba (2015); Prospect.3: Notes for Now, New Orleans (2014), and the Jamaica Biennial 2014, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston. She is a recipient of numerous awards and grants: United States Artists Award (2018), Tiffany Foundation Grant (2017), Joan Mitchell Foundation Art Grant (2015), The Andy Warhol Foundation Grant (2012); and she was a 2017 Artist-in-Residence at the Rauschenberg Foundation. Patterson’s work is included in a number of public and institutional collections, including Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Museum of Art and Design, NY; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; 21c Museum Hotels; and the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston. Patterson served on the Artistic Director’s Council for Prospect.4, New Orleans (2017), and will present solo exhibitions at Pérez Art Museum, Miami and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago in 2018.
April 20, 2018
Speed Art Museum