Sculptor Joan Livingstone to present illustrated talk

Sculptor/installation artist Joan Livingstone will deliver the 2007 Rosanne Brody Raab Visiting Artist Lecture at 5:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 5, in the Payne Room of the Tang Teaching Museum on the Skidmore campus. Sponsored by Raab, an alumna of Skidmore?s Class of '55, and the College?s Department of Art and Art History, the annual illustrated lecture is free and open to the public.

Sharon McConnell, director of the Fosdick-Nelson Gallery at the School of Art and Design, Alfred University, calls Livingstone?s work salient and compelling, physically arresting and quietly evocative. The artist?s materials, through which she conveys the idiosyncrasies of our corporeal nature, range from stitched felt to translucent resin. Livingstone is a professor of art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives and works in Chicago.

Livingstone was born in Portland, Oregon, and studied art at Portland State University, where she earned a B.A. degree in 1972, and Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she obtained an M.F.A. degree in 1974. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States and Asia. Selected recent solo exhibitions include Membranes, Margins, Disruptions, Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, Alfred University (NY, 2006); Dorothy Uber Bryan Gallery, Bowling Green State University (Bowling Green, OH, 2006); Jack Olson Gallery, Northern Illinois University (DeKalb, Ill., 2006); Re/Locations, mn gallery (Chicago, 2005); the Laura Russo Gallery (Portland, Ore., 1995, 2001, 2004); Roy Boyd Gallery (Chicago, 1992, 1995, 1997, 2001, 2005); variable quantities, Sybaris Gallery (Royal Oaks, Mich., 2000); and Limits of Capacity, Dennos Museum Center (Traverse City, Mich., 1998).

Recent group exhibitions include Takeover, Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, 2006); The Body and Fiber, Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University (Charleston, Ill., 2006); Art Works Chicago, Tree Studios (Chicago, 2006); Material Inquiry, Macalester College Art Gallery (St. Paul, Minn., 2005); Abstract Vocabulary, Rockford College (Illinois, 2005); Voices of Site: Tokyo-Chicago-New York, Tokyo Gei Dai National University of Fine Arts and Music Museum (Japan, 2004); and Daegu Textile Art Documenta: The Garden of Hybridization (Korea, 2004).

Livingstone has received fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Virginia A. Groot Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.

Her work belongs to numerous collections, including the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; Detroit Institute of Arts Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Racine Art Museum, Racine, Wisc.; and the Portland Art Museum, Portland, Ore.

(Photo above: Membranes, Margins, Disruptions, 2006, installation at the Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, School of Art and Design at Alfred University. Photo by David Ettinger.)