This week saw another visiting artist. This was our second of three visiting artists for the semester. I have often spoken of Columbia’s visiting artist lecture series and how great it is. It is always nice to have artists, especially experienced and successful artists, come and talk about both their work and their experiences.On Thursday night, Lorraine held a talk at the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Chicago. She gave the lecture there because of her involvement with the 80s show that is currently on display. Her talk was really quite great. She didn’t really talk that much about her work, but her wealth of experience and the stories she had to tell were fantastic.

She spoke for about 45 minutes and then took questions. On Friday, Lorraine came into our graduate seminar class, just like all of the visiting artists do. Five people had signed up to have Lorraine look at their work. Lorraine kept it short and sweet, and we finished up before noon.

The best part of her visit was the talk she gave to the grad students when she came to crit. She got into a long discussion about reclaiming histories and how histories were being lost due to the internet. It was a really interesting discussion and something that I hadn’t thought too much about until that conversation.

We only have one more lecture to go for the year. Laurel Nakadate will be here in a few weeks, and it is the one I have been looking forward to all semester.