The Interdisciplinary Arts Department and the Center for Book and Paper Arts are pleased to present the 2012 Visiting Artist public lecture series.

In addition to public lectures, visiting artists engage with graduate students by way of studio visits and workshops.

If you have questions about the Visiting Artist series, please contact Jessica Cochran, Curator of Exhibitions and Programs, jcochran@colum.edu.

Aram Saroyan

Public Lecture: My Journey as a Writer

Tuesday, January 24, 6pm

Stage Two, 618 South Michigan Avenue

Aram Saroyan has enjoyed success in a wide variety of literary forms: poetry (where he developed a distinctive minimalist style in the 1960’s, but has more recently written in a less unconventional manner), memoir, long and short fiction, literary biography, and in recent years, drama. His book The Street was made into a feature-length film. Saroyan will discuss how this all came about, and what it means to concurrently practice diverse forms of writing.

Reading: Four Monologues (by Aram Saroyan)

Wednesday, January 25, 7pm

The Poetry Foundation Auditorium

61 West Superior Street

This student-led staged reading of Aram Saroyan’s Four Monologues, directed by professor Brian Shaw, coincides with the release of a letterpress chapbook edition created by Book and Paper MFA students under the supervision of professor Clifton Meador. The edition is the first in an annual literary series edited by Poetry magazine Senior Editor Don Share and published by the Center for Book and Paper Arts, under the Epicenter imprint.

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Bob Stein

Public Lecture: Future of the Book

Thursday, January 26, 7pm

Ferguson Hall, 600 S. Michigan Ave

Bob Stein has been engaged with electronic publishing full-time since 1980, when he spent a year researching and writing a paper for Encyclopedia Britannica — “EB and the Intellectual Tools of the Future.”  In 1984 he founded The Criterion Collection, a critically acclaimed series of definitive films, which included the first supplementary sections and director commentaries and introduced the letterbox format. He also founded the Voyager Company, which in 1989 published one of the first commercial CD-ROMs, The CD Companion to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In 1992 Voyager published the first electronic books, including Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. 

In 2004 The Macarthur Foundation provided a generous grant with which Stein founded the Institute for the Future of the Book, a small think & do tank aimed at exploring and influencing the evolution of new forms of intellectual expression. In 2005 the Institute published the first “networked books,” which were instrumental in the recognition of the important shift to social reading and writing as discourse moves from printed pages to networked screens. In late 2010 Stein founded a new company, SocialBook, Inc. with the ambitious goal of building the first viable post-print publishing platform.

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Triple Canopy

Public Lecture: Publication Work, Art in Circulation

Thursday, March 15, 7pm

Ferguson Hall, 600 South Michigan Avenue

Triple Canopy is an editorial collective based in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin. Triple Canopy functions as a publisher, online magazine, workspace, and platform for editorial and curatorial activities. Working collaboratively with writers, artists, and researchers, Triple Canopy facilitates projects that engage the Internet’s specific characteristics as a public forum and as a medium, one with its own evolving practices of reading and viewing, economies of attention, and modes of interaction. Triple Canopy also produces printed matter and organizes public programs that elaborate on these concerns. In doing so, Triple Canopy is charting an expanded field of publication, drawing on the history of print culture while acting as a hub for the exploration of emerging forms and the public spaces constituted around them.

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Mary Lucier

Public Lecture

Thursday, April 5, 6:30pm

Hokin Lecture Hall, 623 South Wabash Avenue

Mary Lucier has been making video art and installations since the early 1970’s. Her work has been shown in major museums around the world where it now resides in numerous collections, such as the Reina Sofia, Madrid, The Whitney Museum, New York, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and ZKM Karlsrhue, Germany. She has been the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Capital, USA Artist Fellowship, and the Japan-US Friendship Commission. Current work includes a cycle of tapes and installations based in Japanese Buddhist Convents and a project scheduled for the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2011 called “Genealogy: The Dutch Connection.” Her work is represented by Lennon, Weinberg Gallery, New York, with video distribution by Electronic Arts Intermix.

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