Visiting artist Jessica Stockholder to lecture July 13

Jessica Stockholder, an internationally known artist whose work has been described as ?a colorful and exuberant hybrid of sculpture, painting, and assemblage,? is the featured visiting artist this year in Skidmore?s Summer Studio Art Program.  In addition to working with students while on campus, Stockholder will give an illustrated public lecture on her work at 6 p.m. Monday, July 13.

Free and open to the public, the lecture will be in Davis Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.  The talk is part of a series of events dubbed ?Art-A-Rama? Week by Katie deGroot, director of Skidmore?s Summer Studio Art Program.  During the third week of July, there will be a series of special events by visiting artists who will work with Skidmore?s summer art studios during the day, and provide public lectures at other times during the week.

Celebrated for her complex installations that have included an array of objects both natural and manufactured, Stockholder also is known for making careful decisions about color and composition in her art, which has been called energetic and idiosyncratic. In 2007 the Smithsonian American Art Museum presented her with its annual Lucelia Artist Award, intended to encourage the artists? future development and experimentation.  In its award citation, the Smithsonian noted Stockholder?s ?extensive and ongoing achievement as an artist? and ?her profound impact on generations of artists,? citing ?her rigorously formal abstract sculptures (that) engage the viewer in a physical and perceptual encounter, which are at once highly evocative, yet resolutely unsentimental.?

The artist herself, in an interview with the Yale Bulletin and Calendar (Oct. 19, 2007) said,  ?My work isn?t sculpture or painting, but a combination of both, resting heavily on the conventions of painting?. I?m interested in picture making and the surface of things, and in the wall and other kinds of surface as evocative of space ? fictive, imaginary space. Also, I think to really understand my work you have to have some sense of framing in mind, which comes from photography and painting and books and magazines. You can?t be alive in this culture and not have some very vivid and always-present sense of framing.?

A professor of art and director of the graduate studies in sculpture program at Yale, Stockholder earned an M.F.A. degree there. She obtained a B.F.A. degree at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. She has created site-specific installations throughout North America and Europe, and her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Venice Biennale, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.  In addition to the Smithsonian?s Lucelia Artist Award, Stockholder also has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was featured on the PBS television series art: 21, a showcase of artists in the 21st century.