UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The College of Arts and Architecture’s School of Visual Arts at Penn State will continue its annual Anderson Lecture Series by welcoming artists Heather Dewey-Hagborg on Tuesday, Sept.16, at 11:30 a.m., and Rico Gatson on Tuesday, Sept. 23, at 11:30 a.m. Both lectures, which are free and open to the public, will be held in Foster Auditorium located in the Paterno Library and on Zoom.
The lecture series is supported by the John Muller Anderson endowment, which was named in honor of the professor emeritus who was an Evan Pugh University Professor of Philosophy and the first director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg — Sept. 16
Dewey-Hagborg is a New York-based artist and biohacker who is interested in art as research and technological critique. Her biopolitical art practice includes the project “Stranger Visions” in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (hair, cigarette butts and chewed up gum) collected in public places.
She has shown work internationally at events and venues including the World Economic Forum, the Daejeon Biennale, the Guangzhou Triennial, the Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture Biennale, Transmediale, the Walker Center for Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and PS1 MoMA. Her work is held in public collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, SFMoMA, among others, and has been widely discussed in the media, from the New York Times and the BBC to Art Forum and Wired.
Dewey-Hagborg earned a doctorate in electronic arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is an artist-in-residence at the Exploratorium and is an affiliate of Data & Society. She is a founding board member of Digital DNA, a European Research Council funded project investigating the changing relationships between digital technologies, DNA and evidence.
Rico Gatson — Sept. 23
Gatson is a multimedia visual artist whose work explores themes of history, identity, popular culture and spirituality, through sculpture, painting, video and public art.
Over the course of almost two decades, he has been celebrated for politically layered artworks, often based on significant moments in Black history, from the Watts Riots, the formation of the Black Panthers, to the election of President Barack Obama. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including exhibitions at Contemporary Art Museum at the University of South Florida; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Essl Museum, Austria, Vienna; and The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
In 2019 he completed a commission for the MTA Arts and Design titled “Beacons,” eight permanent large-scale mosaic portraits of prominent individuals associated with the Bronx, installed at the 167th street subway station on the Grand Concourse.
His work is featured in numerous private collections and the permanent collections including those of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Denver Art Museum, the Cheekwood Museum, the Kempner Museum and the Yale University Art Museum.
Gatson is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts and New York University, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.