UK SA/VS presents spring visiting artist, scholar series

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Jan. 15, 2025) — The University of Kentucky School of Art and Visual Studies (SA/VS) Spring 2025 Visiting Artist and Scholar Series kicks off this month featuring a diverse lineup of artists from around the globe.

Each semester, the UK SA/VS hosts a series of free, public talks with scholars and artists concerned with contemporary visual culture. The Visiting Artist and Scholar Series features lectures, exhibitions and workshops in cooperation with the Art History and Visual Studies program. 

Highlights for the spring semester include demonstrations of animation software with Belgium-based group MaxLab; a film screening and Q&A with Ukrainian filmmaker Anna Kipervaser; and a discussion with immersive electroacoustic musician, Raub Roy.

This semester's artists and presentations for the Visiting Artist and Scholar Series include:

MaxLab Workshop - Demonstrating animation software

Jan. 16 | 3:30 p.m. | Art and Visual Studies Building, room 204

Janna Beck: Professor of Intermedia, Director of MaxLab
Annelise Cerchedean: Researcher, MaxLab
Gina Poortman: Researcher, MaxLab

Janna Beck can be described as a multidisciplinary artist. She is a lecturer at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and artistic coordinator of MaxLab, a facilitator of various master projects and master classes and organizer of international collaborative projects (Aalto University Helsinki, Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota Florida, PJWSTK Warsaw, ESAD Porto and ISA Havana).

Beck has contributed to national and international exhibitions and new media concepts, including exhibitions for Europalia, the world expo in Aichi, the book ‘Stadsgedichten’ by Tom Lanoye, some mapping projections for the Belgian Embassy in Cuba, the Museo de Bellas Artes in Havana and recently live performance in Fabrica de Arte Cubano. Beck has extensive experience in conceptualizing and realizing larger projects that require collaboration between different parties. Her master's degree in product development melds her abilities to create new work and leverage the work’s (artistic) media applications.

Artist Talk with Peter Bosteels

Jan. 17 | noon | Bolivar Art Gallery

Peter Bosteels is a wood engraver and professor in printmaking for more than thirty years. After obtaining an M.F.A and a Ph.D. in arts, he was appointed assistant lecturer, lecturer and then senior lecturer in printmaking at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. From 1998 on he has led the Printmaking Department.

Bosteels was elected to several terms as a member of the Departmental Council, as well as of the institutional body of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and is a member of various internal and external committees and councils: Committee of International Relations, IAPA and IPI (founding member); KoMASK (Royal Society for the Promotion of the Arts) (board member); ARTos (president). For several decades he has been invited, both nationally and internationally, as a guest lecturer, member of jury or as participant and curator of exhibitions.

Artists Talk with Marisa Futernick and Cintia Segovia Figueroa

Jan. 24 | noon | Bolivar Art Gallery

Cintia Segovia Figueroa was born and raised in Mexico City, where she worked in the entertainment industry. Learning English in the United States as an adult gave her a unique perspective on the nuances of the language. Her photography and socially engaged approach explore themes of immigration, displacement, and bilingualism.

With an M.A. She earned a B.A. from California State University, Northridge, and an M.F.A. from California State University, Long Beach. The Museum of Latin American Art and the National Immigration Law Center have collected her work, and private galleries and museums worldwide have exhibited it, including Shanghai University, Spartanburg Art Museum, Torrance Art Museum and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. It has also been shown at the Mexican Consulate and the Autonomous University of Mexico, among many other venues.

Segovia Figueroa teaches photography and new media at Murray State University in Kentucky.

Marisa J. Futernick was born in Detroit, Michigan, and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. Futernick received her B.A. from Yale University and her M.F.A. from the Royal Academy Schools, London, with additional studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Futernick has exhibited widely, at venues including the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Brandeis University, Boston; the Barrick Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Oxy Arts at Occidental College, Los Angeles; Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles; Orange Coast College, Costa Mesa, California; Glendale Community College, Glendale, California; Jerwood Space, London; Kingsgate Project Space, London; Arnolfini, Bristol, England; Outpost, Norwich, England; and Yale University.

She has published several books, including “13 Presidents” (Slimvolume, 2016), “How I Taught Umberto Eco to Love the Bomb” (RA Editions and California Fever Press, 2015) and “The Watergate Complex” (Rice + Toye, 2015).

Futernick is a core member of the activist group Artists 4 Democracy. After more than 15 years in London, she now lives and works in Los Angeles.

Artist talk with Daniel Esquivia Zapata

March 11 | 1 p.m. | Art and Visual Studies Building, room 225

Daniel Esquivia Zapata was born in San Jacinto, in the department of Bolivar, Colombia, in 1987. At age 2, in 1989, he and his family were displaced by a paramilitary group that dominated the region. After passing through several cities, he and his family arrived in Bogotá.

Esquivia Zapata studied and grew up in Bogotá. In 2004, he won a full scholarship to study Fine Arts at Benedict College, a historically Black college in Columbia, South Carolina. In 2008, Esquivia Zapata graduated with honors and won a merit scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in drawing at the New York Academy of Art (NYAA). Additionally, he won a scholarship from Colfuturo and opened a scholarship fund to pay for his studies, which allowed him to pay for all of his studies at the NYAA. In 2011, Esquivia Zapata graduated cum laude from the NYAA and was offered an artistic residency at Saint Barth’s and was awarded the prize for best work on paper from the NYAA.

He has exhibited in different galleries in the U.S., Saint Barth’s and Colombia, including Richard Demato Gallery, Mediallia Gallery and Eden Rock Gallery. Esquivia Zapata works, exhibits and lives in Bogotá, Colombia.

Film Screening and Q&A with Anna Kipervaser

March 26 | 7:30 p.m. | Art and Visual Studies building, room 207

Anna Kipervaser is a Ukrainian-born artist whose practice engages with a range of topics including human and animal bodies, ethnicity, religion, colonialism and the environment. Her engagement with these topics is informed by a commitment to formal experimentation, do-it-yourself and alternative processes, spanning disciplines including experimental and documentary moving image works in 16mm film and digital video.

Her work has been shown internationally at Slamdance Film Festival, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Crossroads Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Light Field, Antimatter, Fracto, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Indie Grits Film Festival and Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogota, among others.

Kipervaser’s work also screens in classrooms, galleries, microcinemas, basements and schools. Her films are distributed by CFMDC, Alchemiya and Canyon Cinema. She is also a painter, printmaker, educator, curator of exhibitions and programmer of screenings.

Artist Talk with Raub Roy

April 11 | noon | Art and Visual Studies Building, room 250

Raub Roy has performed and recorded electroacoustic music as horaflora since 2005, and, beginning in 2017, as Scy1e.

Performances are often based around low-tech immersive sound, using novel arrays of semi-autonomous devices and techniques to keep the audience, as well as himself, surprised. Balloons, electric toothbrush, modified speaker cones, transducers, and a bevy of cassette walkmen, are some of the idiosyncratic tools in his stage performances.

Roy, with partner Dianne Lynn, founded Weird Ear Records, a record label reveling in disparate forms of experimental music. Their slogan, “The Weird Ear, The Better,” serves as a guideline to the curatorial themes across all of these projects. They hosted more than 100 acts at their church-turned-underground-venue, Life Changing Ministries, between 2012 and ’15.