Clark Art Talks
Clark College’s Artist & Scholar Lecture Series
Upcoming Art Talks:
Kanani Miyamoto
Thursday, May 2nd, 11am
Location: Clark College, PUB161
Originally from Honolulu, Hawai`i, Kanani Miyamoto is currently living in Portland, Oregon where she practices art, teaches, and curates. She is an individual of mixed heritage and identifies most with her Hawaiian and Japanese roots, which is celebrated in her artwork. Miyamoto holds a Master of Fine Arts in Print Media from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and a Bachelor of Arts in Art Practices from Portland State University. Kanani is now the Arts Coordinator at p:ear.
Important to Miyamoto’s work as an artist is sharing and honoring her mixed cultural background to represent her community and the beauty of intersectional identities. She also explores topics such as institutional critique and hopes to create critical conversations around cultural authenticity in the arts. Miyamoto is a printmaker and uses traditional printmaking techniques to create large scale print installations and murals. In addition to being a practicing artist, she is an advocate for art education and a passionate community worker.
I’d like to tell the story of survivance and resilience through reclaiming this tradition. I want to recognize our ancestors and feel their hands through my hands.”
– Kanani Miyamoto (Hawaiian)
Nicole Seisler
Tuesday, May 7th, 9am - 11:20am
Location: Frost Art Center,
room 011 Ceramics Studio.
Nicole Seisler is a Portland-based ceramic artist whose tripod practice comprises making, educating, and curating. Her sculpture, installations, and public art investigate time, materiality, process, psychology, and the overlapping roles of artist/viewer/participant/collaborator.
Nicole received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has exhibited widely at museums ranging from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Museum of Fine Arts Tallahassee to the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles. She recently had a solo exhibition at the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, CA and her work is featured in the two-person exhibition In Hand at the Kennedy Museum at Ohio University. She recently published the book Recipes for Conceptual Clay (in the time of covid-19). Nicole has taught ceramics for over ten years at as many universities—from SAIC and the University of Washington, to Scripps College and UCLA—and she is currently Assistant Professor and Head of Ceramics at Lewis & Clark College. As Founder and Director of the contemporary ceramics platform A-B Projects, she has curated over thirty exhibitions and offers alternative educational programming that reevaluates and redefines the trajectory of contemporary ceramics.
Across her practice Nicole creates dialogue and perspectives around ceramics that exist in the same conditions as the material: malleable, shifting, adaptable, and enduring; existing within, between, and beyond conventional definitions.
David Eckard, Artist in Residence
Artist Talk: May 9th, 10am - 11am, in Archer Gallery
Workshop: May 16th, 10am, in Archer Gallery
Reception: May 18th, 11 - 1pm, in Archer Gallery
David Eckard utilizes diverse materials, techniques and presentational strategies in his studio practice. Futility, function, authority, queer masculinity and persona are the primary notions investigated, critiqued, and exploited in his work. Eckard fabricates fictive artifacts and enigmatic objects with a variety of materials and techniques. These sculptures exist as singular objects, installation components and performance props.
His rendered works on panel and paper are biomorphic, sexualized schematics that address the body as carrier of histories, fantasies, potential and trauma. Through performance, Eckard orchestrates transient theatrics and deploys temporary monuments in civic spaces for incidental audiences.
Eckard has exhibited internationally and his work has been reviewed in Art in America, Sculpture, Flash Art, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and Artnews. He is the recipient of multiple fellowships and awards including the Individual Artist Fellowship (2015, Regional Arts and Culture Council, Portland, OR), the Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts (2010, Ford Family Foundation, Portland, OR) and the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship (2010, Portland, OR).