Author: cmetzger

THURSDAY MARCH 10, 2022 – 5:00-6:00pm

GCC, Horowitz Auditorium

Caleb Cole is a Midwest-born, Boston-based artist whose work addresses the opportunities and difficulties of queer belonging, as well as aims to be a link in the creation of that tradition, no matter how fragile or ephemeral or impossible its connections. They were an inaugural res-ident at Surf Point Residency and have received an Artadia Finalist Award, Hearst 8×10 Biennial Award, 3 Magenta Flash Forward Foundation Fellowships, and 2 Photolucida Critical Mass Finalist awards, among other distinctions. Caleb exhibits regularly at a variety of national venues and has held solo shows in Boston, New York, Chicago, and St. Louis, among others. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Newport Art Museum, the Davis Art Museum, Brown University Art Museum, and Leslie Lohman Museum of Art. Caleb teaches at Boston College and Clark University and is represented by Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 24, 2022 – 5:00-6:00pm

GCC, Horowitz Auditorium

A theorist, historian, and practicing artist, Dr. Jill H. Casid is Professor of Visual Studies in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Talk title: Melancholy as Medium

What to do with the ways we’re being undone? Casid will present their new film, Untitled (Melancholy as Medium) to pursue the refusal to move on as a necessary queer, crip and trans* activist medium for our moment of disposability. The film calls up an activist wake that remains stubbornly attached to the unmourned dead. Unfolding a ritual of mediumship, the film conduces our outraged grief as catalytic for the uprising and care work of living with more than one virus, amidst more than one pandemic, carrying our as yet unaddressed losses into the battles we’re still waging in the name of supports for the thriving of Black, Brown, Indigenous, crip, queer and trans vitalities. Centered on a set of fragile Polaroids, the film conjures with the material fragility of analogue photography to commune with the incalculable but still powerful presence of unredressed loss. In reversing the primacy of showing over telling, the film incorporates disability access as aesthetic gain by making closed captioning integral and image description its primary vehicle.

JANUARY 19th – MARCH 4th

Hartmann Gallery

Brian Kjellenberg was the sculpture area technician for around fifteen years.  Affectionately known to everyone as “Kj”, he was a retiree from his work as an aircraft engine mechanic at the 182 Airlift Wing National Guard base in Bartonville.  After previously enrolling at Western Illinois University, he began to take sculpture and printmaking classes at Bradley.  We were able to offer him the part time sculpture technician position at a point where there was an opening.   Kj could fix anything, and enjoyed building tables, stools and cabinets. Kj opened the studio at 8 am on the days he drove in from Yates City and always had a pot of coffee brewing for everyone.  He was prolific making sculptures out of a number of different materials.  His energy and playful spirit kept the studio warm, and his handiwork, and some of his artwork, are daily reminders of him in the sculpture studio.  We are very pleased to honor him with a solo exhibition and hope you are also warmed by his playful nostalgia.