Six artists will be presenting Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist and Scholar lectures this fall in the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s School of Art, Art History and Design.
The series begins with interdisciplinary artist Janhavi Khemka on Sept. 18.
The School of Art, Art History and Design’s Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series brings notable artists, scholars and designers to Nebraska each semester to enhance the education of students. Each lecture takes place at 5:30 p.m. in Richards Hall room 15, except the Nov. 13 lecture, which is noted below. The lectures are free and open to the public.
Khemka is an interdisciplinary artist who works between Santiniketan and Varanasi in India and Chicago. With her impaired hearing, Khemka looks at disability not as a disadvantage, but as a lens through which one can see, understand and negotiate with the world differently. Born in Varanasi, India, Khemka graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Banaras Hindu University, and a Master of Fine Arts in graphics from Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. She also studied studio arts at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 2023. Each work is an expression of her unique ways of interacting with the world without acoustic sensation.
Khemka’s art practice is characterized by her thoughtful choice of medium to translate her perception. Most of her work is rooted in personal memories, her physic and physical life. She calls her works small dots in the vast map of mind and memory, constituted by the particular use of the medium. The shifting from one medium to another, from printmaking to stop-motion to vibrational installation, is, therefore, understood as the expanse of the sensory map. However, although autobiographical elements are strongly present, her work speaks of her dreams of overcoming shortcomings, creating a space for spontaneous dialogue between the artist and the audience.
Presently working from Chicago, Khemka has been creating live performances that question the meaning of language and how we understand it.
The remaining lectures in the series are:
• Sept. 25: Cassandra Pfeifer. — Pfeifer is an English instructor at Mid-Plains Community College in McCook, Nebraska. Her research and creative writing specialties are folklore studies, narrative and genre theory, and American literature.
• Oct. 2: Raymond Thompson, Jr. — Thompson is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and visual journalist based in Austin, Texas. He is assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He explores how race, memory, representation and place combine to shape the Black environmental imagination of the North American landscape.
• Oct. 16: Matt Belk. — Alumnus Belk has increasingly become known as a contemporary wildlife painter, bridging the gap between the outdoor country lifestyle and modern contemporary. His work is in constant use of tape and cutting of shapes with an X-Actoblade and airbrushing with inventive new techniques to create a seemingly digital graphic depiction of nature.
• Nov. 12: Holly Willis (co-sponsored by the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts and The Awareness Lab) — Willis is chair of the Media Arts+Practice Division in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, where she studies reconfigurations of cinema and experimental media. She also co-directs the AI for Media & Storytelling initiative of the USC Center for Generative AI and Society.
• 5 p.m., Nov. 13: Steve Anderson (co-sponsored by the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts, The Awareness Lab and the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center) — The lecture will be at the Ross, followed by a sneak preview of Anderson’s new film, “Reality Friction.” Anderson is a scholar-practitioner working at the intersection of media, history, technology and culture. He is professor of digital media at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and associate dean for academic affairs in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture and is the author of “Technologies of History.”
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.
