LECTURES

Visiting artists, critics, curators and art historians from throughout the art world will be welcomed to The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University during the twice-annual intensive residency for students in the Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts program.
The Art Talks series of guest lectures will feature visiting artists Joan Jonas, Lynne Tillman, Helen Mirra and Peter Rostovsky, whose innovative artworks range from video and performance art that transforms time and space, to atmospheric paintings that explore the transcendental and the sublime in the everyday.
The Art Talks are free and open to the public, sponsored by The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Joan Jonas – Monday, June 25
Looking Forward, Looking Back
Joan Jonas is a pioneer of video and performance art. She began working with mirrors and distance in landscape space in 1968. Starting in 1972, she began experimenting with the combination of these various mediums, incorporating cameras and monitors as a means of transforming space and time on stage, continually probing how the reception of an image changes due to its set-up. Since 2000, Jonas has taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lynne Tillman – Tuesday, June 26
Between Writing and Art
Lynne Tillman is a writer and critic. Her most recent novel is American Genius, A Comedy, and her most recent book is Someday This Will Be Funny, a collection of short stories. Tillman’s previous collection, This Is Not It, was comprised of 23 stories, which responded to the artwork of 22 contemporary artists. Currently, she writes a column for Frieze magazine and teaches at School of Visual Arts in New York in their MFA Art Criticism department.
“My writing often responds to visual art. Learning from looking, paying attention to other forms, has helped me find different approaches in writing. I choose to write on art as a fiction writer. Writing is not just a conduit, it is an art, and, after all, words are images, too,” says Tillman.

Helen Mirra – Wednesday, June 27
So-called Pedestrian
Helen Mirra has recently abandoned certain familiar conventions of the making and circulation of art with which she had become increasingly uncomfortable, while taking up a new protocol with which to continue as an artist. After a number of years making discrete works in various materials, especially in sculpture and with language, and considering various subjects—labor and travel, pragmatist philosophy and geology—the literal field has displaced the studio. Mirra’s present rhythm of working takes the form of a kind of paced printmaking, made through walking. The activities are interdependent; the walking structures the printing, and the printing impels the walking. This rhythm is nestled into a cycle of exhibitions that perpetuates the project. The most recent walkings were made in the Arizona Sonoran desert, and the next are scheduled in northwest France and Brazil, under the auspices of the Rennes Biennale and Sao Paulo Bienal, respectively. Her most recent solo institutional exhibitions were at Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

Peter Rostovsky – Thursday, June 28
Peter Rostovsky is a Russian-born artist who works in a variety of disciplines that include painting, sculpture, and installation. Known for his atmospheric paintings that explore the transcendental and the sublime in the everyday, he is equally committed to conceptual and collaborative work that he has pursued most recently as a founding member of the collective PROW with artist Olav Westphalen. Rostovsky’s many diverse projects attempt to bridge the gap between painting and conceptual art while remaining attentive to painting’s material and discursive history and to its encounter with new technologies.
His work has been shown widely both in the United States and abroad and has been exhibited at such venues as The Walker Art Center, PS1/MOMA, Artpace, The Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, the ICA in Philadelphia, the Blanton Museum of Art, SMAK Museum in Ghent and a host of private galleries including Sara Meltzer, Elizabeth Dee, The Project, Danese, Salon94, and Gio Marconi. He currently teaches painting at New York University.