KCAI will be closed today for the Labor Day holiday.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles is an artist for whom maintenance, labor and the environment are central themes. She incorporates service work and the environment into her performances and public art works. Ukeles gained national recognition for her ongoing 30-year-long artist’s residency in the New York Department of Sanitation. Touch Sanitation, her large-scale citywide performance, 1979-1980, took 11 months; she shook the hand of each of the city’s 8,500 sanitation workers while saying “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” Ukeles has focused on the transformation of degraded land of Fresh Kills (New York) and Danehy Park (Cambridge, Mass.) into safe public parks. She also has created six work ballets in the U.S. and internationally, choreographing them directly with the workers, in an attempt to ask: Can work be art? Ukeles’ work has been shown at Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, the Jewish Museum of New York, the MMKA in Arnhem, Netherlands, the Kunstverein Wolfsburg and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among many others. Ukeles is a recipient of multiple awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Andy Warhol Foundations.

Mags Harries and Lajos Héder formed Harries/Héder Collaborative in Cambridge, Mass., in 1990 and since then have worked together on more than 25 major public commissions. The focus of their collaboration is to activate public space through art. They create public places that have ongoing practical use as well as strong metaphoric significance. Their projects focus on water, energy, transportation and other physical and performance elements that connect people and communities.

http://www.harriesheder.com/

This lecture will consist of presentations by KCAI faculty on how they utilized development grants they received during the 2010-11 academic year. Jessie Fisher will discuss her residency at AIA and Watershed Center for Ceramics Arts. Diana Heise will talk about the two new works she produced for a solo show at Review Studios. With funds from the grant, Phyllis Moore spent a month in Paris working on a novel. Miguel Rivera used the grant to pay for an artist residency at Proyecto´Ace in Buenos Aires.

Ryan Humphrey was born in 1971 in Ashtabula, Ohio, and currently lives and works in New York City. He received his B.F.A. degree from Ohio University and his M.F.A. degree from Hunter College, and attended the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has had numerous one-person exhibitions at museums and galleries nationwide, including DCKT Contemporary, New York; Salina Art Center, Salina, Kan.; Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Hollywood, Fla.; Levy Gallery for the Arts, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Mo.; and Road Agent Gallery, Dallas. Important group exhibitions include the "Queens International 4," Queens Museum of Art, New York; "Will Boys be Boys?: Questioning Adolescent Masculinity in Contemporary Art," curated by Shamim M. Momin, traveled to multiple venues; and "Five by Five: Contemporary Artists on Contemporary Art," Whitney Museum at Philip Morris, New York.