McKnight Visual Artist Discussion Series 2

This event is free, but ticketed. Registration opens March 20.

The Minneapolis College of Art and Design is pleased to present the McKnight Discussion Series featuring Gregory Volk, New York-based art critic, and freelance curator in conversation with McKnight 2021 fellows Ben Moren and Dyani White Hawk. This event is free, but ticketed. All are invited to attend. 

This program pairs a visiting critic with three McKnight Visual Artist Fellows and offers attendees an opportunity to learn more about the fellowship recipients as well as how their work intersects with broader contemporary art ideas and concerns. This event is generously supported by the McKnight Foundation.

The discussion series is co-presented with the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Fellowships are generously funded by the McKnight Foundation and administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

The discussion takes place at Mia in the Pillsbury Auditorium.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Gregory Volk is a New York-based art writer, freelance curator, and a former associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. He writes regularly for Hyperallergic and The Brooklyn Rail, and his articles and reviews have also appeared in many other publications, including Art in America, where he is a contributing editor. His book-length essay on German artist Katharina Grosse appears in the monograph Katharina Grosse, published in 2020 by Lund Humphries as part of their Contemporary Painters Series. Among his contributions to exhibition catalogues and books are essays on Joan Jonas (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2007); Vito Acconci, in Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973 (Charta, 2007); Turkish artist Ayse Erkmen (Venice Biennale, 2011), and Icelandic artist Ragna Róbertsdóttir, in Ragna Róbertsdóttir Works 1984-2017 (Distanz Verlag, Berlin, 2018). Additionally, he has curated numerous exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. Gregory Volk received his B.A. from Colgate University and his M.A. from Columbia University.

Ben Moren is a media artist whose process captures and reframes the environment through imagery, sound, and data to reveal and question anthropocentric viewpoints. His projects create paradoxical scenarios which explore human perception, simulation, time and scale shifts, documentation, preservation, and our enduring relationship with the natural environment. He works with filmmaking, performance, sculpture, and custom software systems. He has created site specific and mixed reality projects for Northern Spark Festival in Minneapolis, Kulturpark in Berlin, and the Weisman Art Museum. He has exhibited at Soap Factory, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, IndieCade Los Angeles, and the Beijing Film Academy. He is an Associate Professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design teaching in the Media Arts department and the Web+Multimedia Environments major.

Dyani White Hawk (b. 1976, Sičáŋǧu Lakota) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Minneapolis. Her practice, strongly rooted in painting and beadwork, extends into sculpture, installation, video, and performance, reflecting upon cross-cultural experiences through the amalgamation of influences from Lakota and Euro/American abstraction. White Hawk was featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and recent solo exhibitions, Speaking to Relatives, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. She has received awards from Anonymous Was a Woman, Academy of Arts and Letters, United States Artists, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Jerome Foundation, McKnight Foundation and Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. Her work is among many public and private collections such as the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Denver Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is represented by Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis and VSF Gallery in Los Angeles.

Editor's Note:
Be sure to check out our series of profiles of each of the McKnight fellows. We'll be releasing a new profile of each of the six artists in the weeks leading up to the discussion. You can also read the profiles of previous McKnight Fellows starting with the 2017 cohort.