McKnight Discussion Series at Mia / Catherine Morris, Hend Al-Mansour, Jovan C. Speller

MCAD, Auditorium 150

Catherine Morris is the Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum where, since 2009, she has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions including We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985; Judith Scott-Bound and Unbound; and Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art. She has worked on projects examining contemporary practices through historical precedents, including the museum wide Sackler Center ten-year anniversary project, The Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum and two collection based exhibitions Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection and Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection. Morris currently serves on the CAPE National Advisory Council, Archives of American Art Journal Advisory Board, and the Art Beyond Sight Board of Advisors.

Hend Al-Mansour left a cardiology career and earned an MFA from MCAD in 2002 and an MA in Art History at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul in 2013. Al-Mansour’s work draws on the clandestine community of women that thrives in domestic spaces under Saudi Arabia’s gender discrimination. Arabic and Islamic aesthetics featured in her prints and installations act as a sustained critique of gender politics. She was awarded Minnesota State Art Board’s Artist Initiative grant in 2019, a Jerome Fellowship of Printmaking in 2013/14, and the Juror’s Award of the Contemporary Islamic Art exhibition in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 2012. She was listed among the 100 most powerful Arab women for three years in the online magazine Arabian Business. She has shown her work in national and international exhibitions, lectured, and curated exhibitions on Arab art.

Jovan C. Speller is a Minnesota based artist, curator, and arts administrator originally from Los Angeles, CA. For over 15 years Speller has had a dedicated career in the arts.  Her work – visual, textual, and performative – interprets historic narratives through contemporary discourse. Her research based practice is centered around elevating, complicating, and inventing stories that explore ancestry, identity, and spatial memory – making the intangible tangible and the invisible visible.  She is a recipient of a 2018 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, a 2018 Next Step Fund Grant, and a 2016 Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship. Speller is currently an artist resident at Second Shift Studio Space in St. Paul. Her photographic works have been published and exhibited in various exhibitions throughout the nation.  She holds a BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago, and studied art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. 

Fellowships are funded by the McKnight Foundation and administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

All exhibitions and events are free and open to the public. For more information or to request any disability services, please contact Kerry Morgan, director of gallery and exhibition programs, at 612.874.3667 or gallery@mcad.edu.