Visiting Artist Lecture Series Brings Otis College Students into Dialogue with Working Artists

This fall’s series includes such artists as Alfonso Gonzalez, Kyungmi Shin Gray, and Elliott Hundley, among others.

When Otis College’s BFA and MFA Fine Arts programs were united on the main campus in 2023 one of the main goals was to bring the undergraduate and graduate students together to better enable the sharing of ideas, resources, and information. A hallmark of both programs is the Visiting Artist Lecture Series, which brings distinguished artists, curators, and thinkers into close dialogue with students. Recent speakers include Audrey Chan, Miles Coolidge, Beatriz Cortez, Nicole Eisenman, Anne Ellegood, Darby English, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Karen Finley, Charles Gaines, Malik Gaines, Katie Grinnan, Ann Hamilton, Salomón Huerta, and more.

By bringing students into close proximity with working artists and designers, the lecture series is an extension of the Fine Arts programs’ efforts to prepare students for careers in the arts as exhibiting artists, photographers, gallerists, curators, designers, or educators, among others.

The artists we invite each week to speak about their work and ideas come from a diverse range of practices and histories,” says Soo Kim, a Fine Arts faculty member who helps organize the program. “These artists give students and the larger Otis and Los Angeles communities access to the discussions and contradictions underlying contemporary art, and allow them to form effective responses to current issues and production.”

The lineup for this fall’s Visiting Artist Lecture Series was recently added to Otis’s public events calendar and includes a mix of local and visiting artists working in a variety of mediums. All lectures are followed by a Q&A, are held in the Forum auditorium in Otis’s campus in Westchester, and are free and open to the public. 

Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.

Tuesday, September 3
11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m.
Forum

Los Angeles-based Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. is an artist whose work developed from close observation of his father’s skillful trade in commercial sign painting. He draws inspiration in the permanence of hand-painted signage and the physical weathering remnants of Los Angeles to narrate his own familial histories of labor and image-making.

​Gonzalez’s paintings, while seemingly passive still-lifes, excavate the sedimented interactions that happen on everyday public surfaces. His multi-layered works function as contemporary palimpsests, surfaces in which the original facade has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain. Gonzalez’s works are not merely metaphors, but objects that uphold the visual as a form of knowledge and language.

Oli Rodriguez

Tuesday, September 10
11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m.
Forum 

Oli Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, photography, performance, and writing. Currently he is on the faculty of the Photography Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). His projects conceptually intersect and dialogue within consent, queerness, childhood, and sexuality. He curated the exhibition, The Great Refusal: Taking on New Queer Aesthetics, at SAIC. He is a part of the monograph Confronting the Abject, named from his research-themed class that he co-taught with Catherine Opie at SAIC. He just finished his book, The Papi Project, which archives the AIDS pandemic through his queer, POC family in Chicago during the 1980s. Rodriguez has screened, performed, lectured, and exhibited his works internationally and nationally.

Carmen Argote

Tuesday, September 17
11:00–12:15 p.m. 
Forum

Carmen Argote works in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. She received her BA in 2004 and MFA in 2007 from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited at various institutions, including Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2017); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); Denver Art Museum (2017); Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California (2017); National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago (2015); MAK Center, Los Angeles (2015); and the Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (2013). She is a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation YoYoYo Grant and California Community Foundation Emerging Artist Grant.

Kyungmi Shin Gray

Tuesday, September 24 
11:00–12:15 p.m. 
Forum

Kyungmi Shin Gray is a visual artist living in Los Angeles, working in painting, sculpture, and photography. Using her own family archive and juxtaposing historical and cultural narratives, she places the marginalized bodies at the center of the work—creating artworks that shift the gaze from dominant narratives to immigrant, creolized, and complex stories.

She received a MFA from UC Berkeley in 1995. Her works have been exhibited at The Getty, Berkeley Art Museum, Sonje Art Museum in Korea, Japanese American National Art Museum in L.A., and the Torrance Art Museum. She also has received numerous grants, including a California Community Foundation Grant, Durfee Grant, Pasadena City Individual Artist Fellowship, and a L.A. Cultural Affairs Artist in Residence grant. Her artwork is in the collections of The Getty, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMFA). 

Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Tuesday, October 1
11:00–12:15 p.m. 
Forum

Paul Mpagi Sepuya received his BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Sepuya’s work highlights the constructed nature of the photographic document and the performative space of the photographic studio, embracing the medium’s potential for fragmentation and connection. In Sepuya’s closeup studies of human forms, subjects are enmeshed in creative, desirous exchanges.

Elliott Hundley

Tuesday, October 8
11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m.
Forum

Los Angeles-based artist Elliott Hundley creates work that incorporates photography, painting, collage, sculpture, performance, and drawing. In 2021 he participated in the Prospect New Orleans triennial, Yesterday We Said Tomorrow. Major institutional solo exhibitions include The Bacchae at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, which traveled to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas; and Elliott Hundley at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Hundley’s work is held in prominent museum collections, including LACMA, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others. Hundley received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. 

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