The Art Talks Lecture Series includes two in-person events at University Hall on the Lesley University campus and two Zoom events.
In-person talks
Naoe Suzuki
Monday, June 24, 7 pm
Lesley University, University Hall
Lower level screening room L-030
Naoe Suzuki is a Japanese American visual artist whose work explores the theme of water and the environment. She works primarily with drawing, and practices community-engagement work that investigates our relationships with water.
Suzuki often employs language and considers the interconnectedness of our world, inviting viewers to reflect on our lifestyles, histories, relationships and the legacy of colonialism to our environment.
Jesse Aron Green
Tuesday, June 25, 7 pm
Lesley University, University Hall
Lower level screening room L-030
Jesse Aron Green is an interdisciplinary artist often working in sculpture, video, painting, and music. In his widely celebrated contribution to the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Green created an installation based on the Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik, a 19th-century gymnastic guide by the German physician Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber. Green used Schreber’s text as a score for 16 male performers to execute 45 exercises according to the book’s precise instructions to investigate masculinity, psychology, and aesthetics.
Virtual talks
Rafa Esparza
Thursday, June 27, 7 pm
Join Zoom event
Meeting ID: 928 2633 5828
Passcode: 205460
Rafa Esparza is a multidisciplinary artist who was born, raised, and is currently living in Los Angeles. Woven into Esparza’s bodies of work are his interest in history, personal narratives, and kinship.
He is inspired by his relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that come forth as a result. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, Esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory and (non)documentation as primary tools to interrogate and critique ideologies, power structures and binaries that problematize the “survival” process of historicized narratives and the environments wherein people are left to navigate and socialize.
Esparza was recently part of the 2016 Made in L.A. Biennial at the Hammer Museum and the 2017 Whitney Biennial.
Hannah Levy
Friday, June 28, 7 pm
Join Zoom event
Meeting ID: 989 1943 0202
Passcode: 476190
Sculptor Hannah Levy breaks apart and reconfigures often overlooked items to create subtly anthropomorphic combines that suggest the familiar detritus of the industrialized world.
She uses the term “design purgatory” to describe the banal objects she repurposes, which include such trade materials as medical devices, pool handrails and napkin dispensers.
Most often rendered in polished steel and vinyl, the works seek to balance the elements of abstract sculpture and associative assemblage. In their combination of soft materials, often flesh colored, and hard metal, her untitled sculptures speak in the subtle language of medical and commercial design, finding a metaphor for the human body in the machinery that mediates it.
Through her practice, Levy calls attention to the relationship between our bodies and the built environment, considering how we are impacted by the design choices around us. Levy’s work was exhibited in the Central Pavilion of the 2022 Venice Biennial.