news & events : visiting artists

Each semester MECA hosts a variety of visitings artists, curators, curators and innovators to meet with students in classes and in critiques. In addition, visiting artists deliver a lecture which is free and open to the public.

Artist Lecture Series : Fall 2010

Miller & Shellabarger
September 2, 4:30pm, Osher Hall

Husband and husband artist team Dutes Miller & Stan Shellabarger’s performances and artist books document the bittersweet rhythms of human relationships. Their performance work, always enacted in public and always together, focuses on simple materials and actions pushed to almost Sisyphean extremes: shifting between moments of togetherness and separation, protection and pain, visibility and invisibility and spaces private and public. Their work functions in a manner that is both autobiographical and metaphorical, and speaks to the common experience of human interaction as well as the specific experiences of queer relationships. Miller & Shellabarger have performed at the Hyde Park art Center in Chicago, IL, the Lakeview Performance Festival and Western Exhibitions, Chicago. They were the 2008 recipients of an Artadia Chicago Award and the 2007 recipients of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award.

Alix Lambert
September 16, 3:30pm, Osher Hall

The sheer convenience of wedding and divorcing was the starting point for Lambert’s Wedding Project, an art piece in which she married and divorced three men and one woman in the space of six months. Two weddings took place in the New York City courthouse, one at a drive through in Vegas, and another in Hungary. While Lambert insists there are important distinctions between weddings and marriages, ceremonies and commitments, her experiment suggests that for better or for worse, getting hitched and unhitched in America can resemble a trip to a fast food drive-through. Alix Lambert's feature length documentary The Mark of Cain was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and aired on Nightline. She has produced additional segments of Nightline as well as 7 segments for the PBS series, LIFE 360. She wrote Episode 6, season 3 of Deadwood: “A Rich Find.” Lambert has exhibited her work to international critical acclaim, including venues such as the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Kwangju Biennnale.

Ilana Halperin
September 30 at 3:30 pm, Osher Hall

Ilana Halperin lives and works between Glasgow and New York. She received an MFA from The Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, Scotland and a BA with Honours from Brown University, Providence, RI. Previous solo exhibitions include Physical Geology (part one) at the Manchester Museum and Nomadic Landmass at doggerfisher in Edinburgh. Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including Polar Dispatches at the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Estratos, PAC Murcia, Spain and Experimental Geography, iCI (Independent Curators International,) currently touring.

Andrew Raftery
October 7, 3:30pm, Osher Hall

Andrew Raftery’s contemporary narratives—people in conversation, vacuuming the living room, shopping for cosmetics—draw the viewer into the immediacy of the situation, evoking a gentle irony. Familiar objects in everyday scenarios are rendered uncanny; Raftery’s masterful use of the historic medium of engraving both elevates and good-naturedly pokes fun at the comforts and foibles of domestic life. Raftery’s work has been featured in many exhibitions such as Portfolios and Series at the New York Public Library; Sixty Years of North American Prints: Collecting from The Boston Printmakers, Boston and at the University Art Gallery, Boston. He received the 2006 American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, the 2003 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the 2001 Fritz Eichenberg Fellowship in Printmaking, Narrative Engraving Project, Rhode Island State Council for the Arts.

Ahmed Alsoudani '05
November 4, 3:30, Osher Hall

MECA Painting alum Ahmed Alsoudani creates unsettling depictions of abstracted figures in ethereal landscapes. His work draws from memories or specific visual experiences that suggest a strange interaction between brutality and the mundane. A muted, nearly monochromatic palette is disrupted by explosions of bright color.Born in Baghdad in 1975, Ahmed lived for many years in the Middle East before coming to the United States in 1999. He completed his BFA at the Maine College of Art in 2006, and received his MFA in painting from Yale University in 2008.

Recent article about Ahmed in Maine Sunday Telegram

Visiting Artist lectures are free and open to the public. For additional information, see www.meca.edu or call (207)775.3052.