Visiting Artist Lecture Series, Fall 2026
Angela Ellsworth
Monday, September 14th at 4:00 PM
Visual Arts Complex, 1B20 Auditorium (lower-level)
Angela Ellsworth is a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, sculpture, drawing, and social ritual. Rooted in her heritage within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Ellsworth critically examines identity, gender, bodily endurance, and institutional memory. Her work challenges conventional historical narratives by re-centering women’s experiences, spiritual agency, and collective resilience.
In her recognized series, The Seer Bonnets: A Continuing Offense, Ellsworth transforms complex socio-religious histories into tactile sculptural forms. Composed of thousands of pearl-tipped steel corsage pins inserted into fabric bonnets, these objects reference the thirty-five wives of Joseph Smith. Reinterpreting the bonnets as "tools of translation," she reclaims visionary power for women whose historic labor was marginalized. The sharp internal positioning of the pins turns each garment into an emblem of quiet resistance and generational trauma.
Beyond sculpture, Ellsworth examines the body as a site of physical limits and spatial awareness, staging public interventions that prompt unexpected collisions between private history and collective memory. She has exhibited at the Getty Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, Crystal Bridges, and Phoenix Art Museum. Her honors include grants from Art Matters and Franklin Furnace. She is represented by Lisa Sette Gallery and Modern West Fine Art.
Andrew Polk
Monday, September 28th at 4:00 PM
Visual Arts Complex, 1B20 Auditorium (lower-level)
Andrew Polk is a printmaker, painter, and educator whose career spans nearly six decades of technical refinement and formal experimentation. Since beginning his professional practice in 1968, Polk has established himself as a versatile figure within contemporary American print culture, rejecting stylistic stagnation in favor of continuous discovery and conceptual risk across printmaking, painting, and digital media.
Polk’s body of work moves fluidly from non-objective abstraction to meticulous representation across lithography, watercolor, drawing, digital programming, video, and installation. Driven by the philosophy to "stay inspired," Polk transitions to new aesthetic territory whenever a direction risks becoming predictable. Despite shifting styles, core thematic threads—human vulnerability, structural balance, and narrative ambiguity—interweave through his entire trajectory.
Polk served for thirty-two years as Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Arizona, leading the lithography department. Following his retirement as Professor Emeritus, he relocated to rural Indiana, co-founding L-vis Press alongside his artist wife, Kathryn Polk. Polk has participated in over 600 exhibitions worldwide, and his work is held in major collections, including the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Denver Art Museum, and the Tucson Museum of Art.
Linda Nguyen Lopez & Mathew McConnell
Monday, October 5th at 4:00 PM
Visual Arts Complex, 1B20 Auditorium (lower-level)
Linda Nguyen Lopez is a first-generation American artist of Vietnamese and Mexican descent whose vibrant ceramic sculptures examine the psychological resonance of domestic life. Investigating objecthood, material culture, and animism, Lopez explores how everyday items absorb and project human emotion, rearticulating common household forms into fluid, organic abstractions.
Central to Lopez’s practice is the poetic re-imagining of the mundane. Through textured and glazed ceramic forms, she constructs a visual lexicon where inanimate objects seem to possess distinct personalities and moods. Sponges, lint, and furniture fragments are transformed into soft, slumped silhouettes that blur the line between utility and abstraction, inviting viewers to reconsider their relationship with static objects.
Lopez has exhibited extensively across the U.S. and internationally in Italy, England, and New Zealand. Notable museum venues include the Craft Contemporary Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. A 2024 United States Artists Fellow, Lopez serves as Associate Professor of Art at the University of Arkansas and currently lives and works in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Mathew McConnell is an artist, educator, and researcher whose ceramic practice critically investigates artistic influence, historical lineage, and the mechanics of visual perception. Working primarily in ceramics, McConnell explores how form, texture, and cultural memory are transmitted through replication, systematically destabilizing notions of authorship, originality, and historical record.
McConnell’s conceptual framework begins with the work of other artists, historical artifacts, or iconic design objects. Through a deliberate process of re-creation and formal abstraction, his sculptures interrogate the spaces between copy and invention, examining how objects alter over time when filtered through personal memory. His smooth, carefully articulated clay surfaces and restrained compositions challenge viewers to consider how value and authority are constructed within the visual arts canon.
McConnell earned his MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his BFA from Valdosta State University. He has presented solo exhibitions at Mindy Solomon Gallery and Greenwich House Pottery, and has participated in over 80 group exhibitions globally. Recipient of an NCECA Emerging Artist Award, he has completed residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation and Anderson Ranch. McConnell serves as Associate Professor and Area Head of Ceramics at the University of Arkansas.
Ana Teresa Fernández
Monday, October 12th at 4:00 PM
Visual Arts Complex, 1B20 Auditorium (lower-level)
Ana Teresa Fernández is a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, land art, video, photography, painting, and site-responsive intervention. Informed by linguistics and her fluency in five languages, Fernández interrogates the intersectionality of place, personhood, and sociopolitical borders to construct a shared visual vernacular centered on gender, climate change, and human displacement.
Central to her ethos is "Magical Non-Fiction," a conceptual framework that uses time-based actions to create dreamscapes of possibility within sites of geopolitical conflict. In her iconic public intervention along the U.S.–Mexico border, Fernández painted a portion of the Tijuana–San Diego border fence sky-blue while wearing a black cocktail dress and heels, visually dissolving the physical barrier against the horizon and transforming her body into a site of resistance.
Fernández’s work includes major public commissions and residencies across Haiti, Brazil, Spain, Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. She was featured in a solo presentation at the 2022 Armory Show Focus section. Based in San Francisco, her work is held in permanent collections including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Denver Art Museum, Blanton Museum of Art, and the Kadist Art Foundation.
Rebecca Fortnum
Monday, November 16th at 4:00 PM
Visual Arts Complex, 1B20 Auditorium (lower-level)
Rebecca Fortnum is an artist, writer, and academic whose practice bridges fine art painting, curatorial research, and critical scholarship. Through an interdisciplinary approach encompassing visual art and institutional leadership, Fortnum investigates the mechanics of artistic labor, the creative process, and the historical representation of women artists to uncover marginalized studio voices.
Defined by a rigorous engagement with archives and historical memory, Fortnum’s visual work interrogates gendered dynamics within traditional artistic production. A prominent example was her solo exhibition, Les Praticiennes, at the Henry Moore Institute, which explored the overlooked contributions of female studio assistants and sculptors during the Paris Belle Époque. By placing painted interventions in dialogue with sculptural history, Fortnum examines how value and authorship are assigned over time.
Alongside her visual practice, Fortnum is an influential scholar whose major books include Contemporary British Women Artists: In Their Own Words (2007) and On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (2013). She serves as Associate Dean of Research at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and has exhibited widely at institutions including the Freud Museum, Compton Verney, and the V&A Young Museum.