Lecture with Visiting Artist Tannaz Farsi
About the event
Please join us for an artist talk with visiting artist Tannaz Farsi, as part of the Jo Hockenhull Distinguished Visiting Lecture Series.
Farsi’s work will be on display in the Fine Arts Center Gallery II from March 18th – March 29th.
Some information about the exhibition and the artist:
Tannaz Farsi’s practice spans sculpture, installation and image making allowing her to work within a serial structure to create interdependencies in meaning. She uses organic materials such as flowers and plants, creates spatial compositions from light, air, words and continually engages with the history and specificity of objects to critically address broader socio-political systems through both an analytical and poetic framework. Farsi’s research draws from historic cultural objects, feminist histories, and theories of displacement evidenced by long standing colonialist and authoritarian interventions into daily life to complicate the network of relations around conceptions of memory, history, and geography.
Farsi’s work has been exhibited at venues including SFAC Galleries, San Francisco; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland; Disjecta Art Center, Portland; Linfield Gallery McMinnville; Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma; the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids; Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington; and The Sculpture Center, Cleveland. She has been granted residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Ucross Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Studios at Mass MOCA, Santa Fe Art Institute and the Rauschenberg Foundation. Her work has been supported through grants and awards from the Oregon Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, University of Oregon and the Ford Family Foundation. She received a Hallie Ford Fellowship in 2014 and was named the twenty-eighth Bonnie Bronson Fellow in 2019. Born in Iran, Farsi lives in Eugene, Oregon where she is on faculty at the University of Oregon. Past Hockenhull lecturers have been visual artists, poets, and performance artists who emphasized the important connections between art, social justice and political practice. They include Octavia Butler, Coco Fusco, the Guerrilla Girls, Anna Chavez, Faith Ringgold, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Ayana Jackson, Marie Watt, and Jin-me Yoon.
The lecture series was launched in 1996 to honor Jo Hockenhull, a WSU emeritus professor of fine arts who served as director of women’s studies for more than a decade.
The 2020 Jo Hockenhull events are organized by the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and The Department of Art, and College of Arts and Sciences, and with support from the Center for Arts and Humanities and the Women*s Center.