Hales Gallery is delighted to announce that Michael Smith is taking part in the Fall 2017 Judith Zabar Visiting Artist Series.
Michael Smith is a video, performance, and installation artist best known for his performance personae Mike and Baby Ikki. Mike, an innocent Everyman named after the artist, continually falls victim to trends and fashions in an imperfect landscape; Baby Ikki, a mute, ambiguous character fixed neither by age nor gender, is an archetype with an unclear mission onto which spectators may project their own interpretations. Both characters wander through their own worlds, allowing Smith to create an unsettling mixture of humor and pathos while commenting on discrepancies and absurdities in our culture.
Smith’s serious, satiric, poetic work has been seen on commercial and cable television, in festivals and nightclubs, as well as in museums and galleries, and on the street. He has shown internationally since the late 1970s, most recently in 2017 at Sculpture Project, Münster. Other recent museum and gallery exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New Museum, and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York; Glasgow International; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; The Tate, South London Gallery, and Hales Gallery, London; Dan Gunn Gallery, Berlin; Ellen De Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam; Le Magasin, Grenoble; Jeu de Paume and Pompidou Center, Paris; Mumok, Vienna; Blanton Museum, Austin; and ICA, Philadelphia.
Smith has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T., New York Foundation for the Arts, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and Alpert Award in the Arts. Throughout his career, Smith has been actively engaged as a lecturer, critic and instructor at a number of institutions, among them Yale University, Columbia University, the Royal Danish Academy, CalArts, and UCLA. Smith, who lives and works in New York and Austin, currently serves as Professor of Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has been teaching performance art since 2001.
About the Judith Zabar Visiting Artists Program
Since November 2007, the Judith Zabar Visiting Artist Program Fund has enabled Hunter College to bring a series of internationally recognized artists to campus to work directly with students in the MFA program, in master classes, critical seminars, and private tutorials, providing students with the unique opportunity to interact with top practitioners in the field. Zabar Visiting Artists also present public lectures where they discuss their work and engage in conversation with members of Hunter’s faculty, our broader student community, and the general public.
Past Zabar artists have included: Vito Acconci, Janine Antoni, Julie Ault, Robert Barry, Mel Chin, Peter Doig, Nicole Eisenman, Charles Gaines, Alfredo Jaar, Joan Jonas, Martin Kersels, Jeff Koons, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Robert Longo, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Christian Marclay, Kerry James Marshall, Tracey Moffatt, Matt Mullican, Wangechi Mutu, Gabriel Orozco, Laura Owens, Trevor Paglen, Elizabeth Peyton, Paul Pfeiffer, William Pope L., Walid Ra’ad, Yvonne Rainer, Doris Salcedo, Shahzia Sikander, Fred Tomaselli, Nari Ward, Carrie Mae Weems, and Stanley Whitney.
Zabar Visiting Artist talks are free and open to the public.
Judith Zabar Visiting Artists Program - Michael Smith
Hunter College MFA
205 Hudson Street
New York
USA
Wednesday 1 November 2017, 7pm
For more information please visit the Hunter College website here.
