It isn’t often that some of the nation’s leading contemporary artists decide to stop by Clarksville, but that’s exactly what’s happening this semester at Austin Peay State University.
At 7 p.m. on March 16, Suzanne Bocanegra and Mel Ziegler, two of the country’s most renowned working artists, will deliver a joint lecture at the Roxy Regional Theatre, hosted by APSU’s Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts. The event is free and open to the public.
Bocanegra, who maintains a studio in New York City, is a recipient of the Rome Prize, and she has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her recent work involves large-scale performances and installations, frequently translating two-dimensional information, images and ideas from the past into three-dimensional scenarios for staging, movement, ballet and music.
Ziegler serves as a professor and chair of the Vanderbilt University Department of Art. His work has been exhibited in top galleries and museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Doug Lawing Gallery in Houston, the Canadian Center for Architecture, the Arts Club of Chicago, the Osaka National Museum in Japan and the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.
Noted art curator Ian Berry will join Ziegler and Bocanegra at the Roxy on March 16. Berry, an art history professor and curator of Skidmore College’s Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., is this year’s Acuff Chair of Excellence at APSU.
“It’s a fantastic opportunity to be in the same room with the artist themselves,” Berry said. “That has always been the reason why I do what I do. I love being in studios. I love being in conversation with artists as they’re thinking through ideas. As they’re responding to the world, we’re all responding, too.”
Established in 1985, the Roy Acuff Chair of Excellence brings regionally and nationally acclaimed artists to campus to work with students and the community in a dynamic atmosphere of unrestricted experimentation.
For more information on the lecture or the Acuff Chair of Excellence, contact APSU assistant professor Sharon Laor-Sirak at 931-221-7344 or laorsiraks@apsu.edu.
