Cassandra Pfeifer, an English instructor at Mid-Plains Community College in McCook, will present the next Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 25 in Richards Hall, Room 15. The lecture is free and open to the public.
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.
Pfeifer’s lecture, “Folklore in Life and Art: The Power of Informal Creativity," will examine folklore's power, from its use in daily life to its role in the arts. Folklore is a form of creative expression that everyone engages with, which can provide us with a sense of group identity and belonging, give us an outlet to vent our anxieties and frustrations, and provide us with an opportunity to learn why people are the way they are. Folklore has been used by artists for generations and studying folklore in its various forms can provide artists practicing today with an endless source of inspiration.
Pfeifer earned her doctorate in folklore and American literature at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and a Master of Arts in literature at the University of Essex. She received a Bachelor of Arts in English and philosophy at Northern Illinois University. She has presented work on folklore at the Fox River Valley and Aurora Public Libraries, the Folklore Podcast Lecture Series, the Digital Folklore Podcast, and the American Folklore Society Annual Conference.
She has works published in Cordella magazine, Noctivagant Press and Sundial magazine. Her research and creative writing specialties are folklore studies, narrative and genre theory and American literature.
The remaining lectures in the series are:
• 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. — A Husker 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.
