Otis College Presents Guest Lectures with Artist Dawoud Bey, Architect Xu Tiantian, and Art Critic Darby English

The free public programs run throughout spring. 

Otis College will present several prominent guest lecturers on its Los Angeles campus this spring. On Thursday, February 20, 2025 at 7:00 p.m., Dawoud Bey will deliver the annual Mandy and Cliff Einstein Visiting Artist Lecture in conversation with Provost Colette Veasey-Cullors. The Donghia Designer-in-Residence, architect Xu Tiantian, will deliver a lecture followed by a Q&A on March 27 at 7:30 p.m. On Thursday, April 10 at 7:00 p.m. Darby English will give a public lecture as this year’s Fine Arts Critic-in-Residence.

These public engagements continue the College’s practice of bringing distinguished artists, curators, and thinkers to campus and into close dialogue with students. They all are free and open to the public and will be held in The Forum on the College’s campus at 9045 Lincoln Boulevard in Los Angeles. These events also complement the Visiting Artist and Visiting Writers lecture series that run throughout the academic year, as well as the MFA Thesis Shows that are on view through April.

Based in Chicago, Dawoud Bey is celebrated for his rich, psychologically compelling portraits in which he explores a range of formal and material methodologies to create images and projects that connect deeply with the communities he photographs. During his visit this week, he will also spend time with Otis students. The intimate engagement between visiting artists and students is a distinctive hallmark of Otis’s Einstein Visiting Artist Lecture series. Fine Arts students developing photography-based practices will especially benefit from dedicated time with Bey, who also has a long history as an educator. 

Xu Tiantian, this year’s Donghia Designer-in-Residence, is the founding principal of DNA Design and Architecture’s Beijing Office. She received her Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard Graduate School of Design, and her baccalaureate in architecture from Tsinghua University in Beijing. Prior to establishing DNA Beijing, she worked at a number of design firms in the United States and the Netherlands. She received the 2006 WA China Architecture Award and 2008 Young Architects Award from The Architectural League New York.

Preceding her lecture, Tiantian will hold a Donghia Master Class followed by a reception, both of which are made possible through a generous donation from the Angelo Donghia Foundation, a privately-held nonprofit that supports the advancement of education in the field of interior design. 

Darby English, this year’s Fine Arts Critic-in-Residence, will deliver a lecture titled “The Salad-Bar Theory of Art,” which will center on the art-people relation as a privileged site where the otherness of art, and of people, gets negotiated. English is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. After joining the faculty in 2003 he later received the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the nation’s oldest such prize, in 2010. He is an associate faculty in both the Department of Visual Arts and its Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. English’s teaching and advising address subjects in cultural studies as well as modern and contemporary American and European art produced since the First World War. His writing has appeared in Art Bulletin, Artforum, Art Journal Open, ARTMargins, caareviews, The Guardian, and The International Review of African-American Art, among others. He has a bachelor’s degree in art history and philosophy from Williams College and a PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester. 

Concurrent to these events is the College’s Visiting Artist and Visiting Writer lecture series, which take place throughout the academic year. View a schedule of upcoming lectures on Otis’s public events calendar. While you’re there, be sure to check out the remaining MFA Fine Arts Thesis Shows, which switch out weekly through the end of April. 

The thesis shows culminate the students’ public exhibition of their work, following Annual Open Studios and a Mid-Residency Show, all of which take place over the course of the two-year MFA program. Students are available to discuss their work during in-person receptions held during their respective exhibitions and they are subsequently available for online viewing in virtual galleries.

See the public events calendar for more happenings on campus through the end of the academic year.

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