Art historian Roberto Tejada is next Hixson-Lied Visiting Scholar
calendar icon06 Mar 2024
Lincoln, Neb.—Roberto Tejada, the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston, where he teaches creative writing and art history, will present the next Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar lecture on Wednesday, March 20 at 5:30 p.m. in Richards Hall Rm. 15. The lecture is free and open to the public.
His lecture is titled "Latinx & Queer Media: Neighboring Sight & Sound." In this talk, he will weave episodes that locate Latinx and Queer visual forms in the ethnic and sexual affirmation inspired by social movements of the 1960s and 70s. These juxtapose with contemporary photographers Christina Fernandez and Connie Samaras who provide respective views of the mid-2000s real estate crisis in Los Angeles, and a lesbian separatist trailer park in the Southern California desert. These settings give way to strategies in sight and sound that indicate situations of crisis, alternate dwelling and the languages of affect adequate to the visual account.
The School of Art, Art History & Design’s Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series brings notable artists, scholars and designers to Nebraska each semester to enhance the education of students.
A translator, editor, essayist, art historian and cultural critic, Tejada was awarded The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Poetry in 2021.
He is the author of art and media histories National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (2009), as well as catalog essays in Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Hammer Museum, 2011) and Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (The Menil Collection, 2021).
His poetry collections include Why the Assembly Disbanded (2022), Todo en el ahora (2015), Full Foreground (2012), Exposition Park (2010), and Mirrors for Gold (2006), as well as Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (2019), a Latinx poetics on colonial settlement and cultural counter-conquest in art and literature of the Americas.
His writing spans method, discipline, and form to address the political imagination and impurity of time in shared image environments.
The remaining lectures in the series are:
• March 27: Isabel Barbuzza. Barbuzza is professor in the sculpture and intermedia program in the University of Iowa’s School of Art and Art History. As a sculptor, she works in installations, objects and site-specific; she is interested in the power of materiality and the narratives that accompany them.
• April 10: Kim Dorland. Dorland lives and works in Toronto. He pushes the boundaries of painted representation through an exploration of memory, material, nostalgia, identity and place. He has exhibited globally.
• April 24: Tatyana Fazlalizadeh. Fazlalizadeh is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist working primarily in painting, public art and multimedia installation. She is a Forbes Under 30 lister, a Mellon Foundation fellow, and in 2018, she became the inaugural Public Artist in Residence for the New York City Commission on Human Rights.
Each lecture takes place at 5:30 p.m. in Richards Hall Rm. 15.
Underwritten by the Hixson-Lied Endowment with additional support from other sources, the series enriches the culture of the state by providing a way for Nebraskans to interact with luminaries in the fields of art, art history and design. Each visiting artist or scholar spends one to three days on campus to meet with classes, participate in critiques and give demonstrations.
For more information on the series, contact the School of Art, Art History & Design at (402) 472-5522 or e-mail schoolaahd@unl.edu.