We are thrilled to announce the keynote speakers for the 52nd Annual ARLIS/NA Conference in Pittsburgh!
On Thursday April 4th, world-renowned artist Ann Hamilton will present our Convocation keynote. Hamilton has received numerous prestigious awards and honors including a National Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, an NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Having a keen interest in text, many of Hamilton’s works include words and books and reading, a current that I’m sure appeals to many ARLIS/NA members. Her work explores themes of gender, power, and humanity. She is one of the Ohio Valley’s most iconic artists, and we’re grateful to have her joining us in Pittsburgh.
On Friday morning April 5th, Kilolo Luckett, of Pittsburgh’s ALMA | LEWIS, an experimental, contemporary art platform, will present the closing keynote. ALMA | LEWIS is a catalyst for critical thinking, constructive dialogue, and creative expression dedicated to Black culture. As executive director and chief curator of ALMA | LEWIS, Luckett has shaped the arts community in Pittsburgh and beyond for over twenty years. ARLIS/NA members may be particularly interested in The Black Archive, an archive of Black art, culture, and history recently begun by ALMA | LEWIS. Luckett is an expert in curation and cultural production and ARLIS/NA is lucky to hear more about her work and Pittsburgh's vibrant art scene.
We look forward to welcoming you and these illustrious speakers to the 52nd Annual ARLIS/NA Conference. Visit the conference website for more information and to register.
Read on for more information about our keynote speakers.
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Ann
Hamilton is a visual artist internationally acclaimed for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations. Her site-responsive process works with common materials to invoke particular places, collective voices,
and communities of labor. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Whether inhabiting a building four stories
high or confined to the surface of a thimble, the genesis of Hamilton's art extends outwards from the primary projections of the hand and mouth. Her attention to the uttering of a sound or the shaping of a word with the hand places language and text at the
tactile and metaphoric center of her installations. To enter their liminality is to be drawn equally into the sensory and linguistic capacities of comprehension that construct our faculties of memory, reason and imagination.
In a time when successive generations of technology amplify human presence at distances far greater than the reach of the hand, what becomes the place and form of making at the scale and pace of the individual body? How does making participate in the recuperation and recognition of embodied knowledge? What are the places and forms for live, tactile, visceral, face-to-face experiences in a media saturated world? These concerns have animated the site responsive installations that have formed the bulk of Hamilton's practice over the last 20 years. But where the relations of cloth, sound, touch, motion and human gesture once gave way to dense materiality, Hamilton's work now focuses on the less material acts of reading, speaking and listening. The influence of collaborative processes in ever more complex architectures has shifted her forms of making, wherein the movement of the viewer in time and in space now becomes a central figure of the work.
See Ann Hamilton’s website for more information.
Kilolo
Luckett Kilolo Luckett is a Pittsburgh-based art historian and curator. With over twenty-five years of experience in arts administration and cultural production, she is committed to elevating the voices of underrepresented visual artists, especially Black
and Brown artists.
Luckett is Founding Executive Director and Chief Curator of ALMA | LEWIS (named after abstract artists Alma Thomas and Norman Lewis), an experimental, contemporary
art platform for critical thinking, constructive dialogue, and creative expression dedicated to Black culture.
She has curated exhibitions by national and international artists such as Peju Alatise, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Thaddeus Mosley, Tajh Rust, Devan Shimoyama, and Shikeith. She served as an Art Commissioner for the City of Pittsburgh’s Art Commission for twelve
years. Luckett has held positions as Curator of Meta Pittsburgh’s Open Arts, Consulting Curator of Visual Arts at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Director of Development at The Andy Warhol Museum, and Curatorial Assistant at Wood Street
Galleries, where she helped organize shows that included Xu Bing, Louise Bourgeois, Larry Bell, Catherine Opie, Nam June Paik, and Tim Rollins + K.O.S.
See the ALMA | LEWIS website for more information.
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Stephanie Grimm
ARLIS/NA 2024 Conference Publicity Coordinator