Lincoln, Neb.—Six artists will be presenting Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar lectures this fall in the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s School of Art, Art History & Design. The series begins with studio artist and muralist Hannah Webb on Thursday, Sept. 3.
Each lecture will take place at 5:30 p.m. in Sheldon Museum of Art’s Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium. The lectures are free and open to the public.
Webb, also known as “The Obanoth” on social media, is a Los Angeles-based artist with a focus on dynamic abstracted realism. Although her signature art style is graphic, the work is rooted in a fine arts background, and she begins all pieces with a brush regardless of the size of the project.
With public art, she likes to reflect the industrial nature of human-made spaces with her hard-edged painting style, creating motifs of animals and nature to create visual balance between organic and mechanical. She’s created many large-scale murals across the world and loves to learn about new communities as she travels to create.
The remaining lectures in the series are:
• Sept. 10: Elizabeth Burden. Burden is the Elizabeth Rubendall Artist-in-Residence at the Great Plains Art Museum this fall. She is an artist who engages in artistic archivy, blending multidisciplinary studio work with social practice to reflect on the past, present and future. As the great-granddaughter of the first Black homesteaders in Nebraska (Henry and Mary Burden), she is a third-generation Nebraskan, now living in the Southwest.
• Sept. 17: Zanna Gilbert. Gilbert, senior research specialist at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, presents on her exhibition “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl” and explores how archival and curatorial research illuminates the histories of feminist, conceptual and activist art practices.
• Oct. 22: Wesaam Al-Badry. Al-Badry is a visual social documentary photographer, long-form investigative journalist and interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers on environmental justice, immigration, labor and the lived conditions of marginalized communities. Working across photography, film, video installation and sculpture, Al-Badry blends long-term documentary engagement with conceptual inquiry, creating work that examines the human and political consequences of American power, both domestically and abroad.
• Oct. 29: Laura Crehuet Berman. Crehuet Berman is a native of Barcelona, Spain, where her love for pattern, design and bold colors originated. Her art is widely collected and exhibited, and her work has been featured in multiple books. As a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute, she has taught printmaking, book arts and color studies since 2002.
• Nov. 12: Rochelle Feinstein. Feinstein, an acclaimed artist and educator and professor emerita at Yale School of Art, will discuss her multi-decade practice and the works featured in “Gender, Genre, Generation,” currently on view at Sheldon, exploring how abstract painting can respond to the cultural, political and media realities of contemporary life.
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. The series is presented in collaboration with Sheldon Museum of Art.
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.
