CECA Visiting Artist Speaker Series

Throughout the history of the Department of Art + Design, we have been committed to bringing top artists, designers, curators, and thinkers to Austin Peay State University and the Clarksville community. Along with the support of the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts, all of our events within the Department of Art + Design are free and open to the public.

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VASE 24-25

Fall 2024

Sept. 17, 2024: Ashanté Kindle will talk about her work and creative practice in conjuction with her exhibition Building Castles in Air, on display in The New Gallery from August 26 - October 4, 2024. Kindle is a multidisciplinary artist known for her abstract sculptural wave paintings. Originally from Clarksville, TN, she received her BFA from Austin Peay State University (2019) and MFA from The University of Connecticut (2022). Kindle's work is grounded in the textures and science of Black hair and her healing journey back to self. Repeated gestures manifest as abstracted waveforms over time and become an act of labor and meditation that engages her body and emotions. She conjures feelings of autonomy and freedom, utilizing improvisation in her work as a vehicle for spiritual exchange. She was a NXTHVN Cohort 04 Fellow and has exhibited her work at Philadelphia's Magic Gardens, The Benton Museum, Red Arrow Gallery, Johnson Lowe Gallery, Sean Kelly and most recently a solo exhibition at Belmont University along with numerous other galleries and institutions nationally. Kindle’s work was recently acquired by The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT, and is represented by Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville, TN. Artist Talk, 6 p.m., AD120; Sept. 18, Gallery Talk/Reception, noon-1:30p, The New Gallery.

Sept. 24, 2024: Erick Oh is a former Pixar animator, and an Oscar nominated filmmaker based in California, USA. His films have been introduced and awarded at numerous film festivals including Academy Awards, Annie Awards, Annecy Animation Festival, Zagreb Film Festival, SIGGRAPH, Anima Mundi and more. With his background in fine art in Seoul National University, Korea and film at UCLA, USA, Erick became an animator at Pixar Animation Studios from 2010 to 2016. Erick is currently working on various projects, ranging from short films, series, VR, media art, installation and more. Artist Talk, 6 p.m., AD120.

Oct. 22, 2024: Danielle Duncan is a multi-hyphenate American artist based in Paris who runs the innovative studio, Marmalade Bleue. She founded Food Typography, a sub-genre of design, in 2013 when she discovered food and objects speak their own languages within our everyday lives. She combined everyday items with thoughtful lettering to create photographic commentary on society, consumerism and human existence. Clients include Target, Disney, theGuardian, Tesco, Cadillac, Kansas City Chiefs, PwC, Aria, SXSW and others. Combined with augmented reality her work bridges the physical and digital worlds. Her work currently spans advertising, activism, fine arts and events. Artist Talk, 6 p.m., AD120

Oct. 29, 2024: Sarah Sudhoff will talk about her work and creative practice in conjuction with her exhibition Not A Drill, on display in The New Gallery from October 21 - December 6, 2024. Sudhoff is a Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist who interweaves themes of art, science and technology. She deconstructs narratives to gain clarity and create immersive spaces for discovery through photographs, video, installation, and sound. For the past 15 years, her work has been influenced by her professional background as a photojournalist, which has allowed her to systematize her curious nature while maintaining a personal and ethical obligation to any given subject area.

All of her works are, in some way, socially engaged and inherently participatory. The way these methods and materials are utilized vary from project to project and take advantage of the media, site, and participants involved. Sudhoff's works can be categorized into one or more of the following three areas of concern: Ethics of Care, Social Practice, and Data Employment. By using creative practice as a mediator between subjective and objective experiences, she engages in conversations that address bodies and communities as shared and yet, ultimately, distinct.

Sudhoff's work has been exhibited at Blaffer Art Museum, McNay Art Museum, Donggang Photo Museum, Austin Museum of Art, Pioneer Works, Luckman Gallery, Magenta Foundation, Filter Photo, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, Galveston Arts Center, and the Colorado Photographic Arts Center. Artist Talk, 6 p.m., AD120; Oct. 30, Gallery Talk/Reception, noon-1:30p, The New Gallery.

Feb. 4, 2025: Yun Shin will talk about her work and creative practice in conjuction with her exhibition Record-Keeping, on display in The New Gallery from January 21 - February 7, 2025. Shin transfers ordinary objects onto two-dimensional surfaces based on her interpretation to celebrate their emotional value, preserving the objects and her memories and relationships. The relationship among objects, repeated actions, and anticipation evokes a magical power and charged energy that is ironic and compelling. Her work aims to approach containment and preservation from an emotive standpoint by utilizing ordinary objects that lend a sense of history and authenticity to individuals' experiences. These objects connect to personal biographies and embody the essence of individual lives.

Shin lives and works in Clarksville, TN, and is an assistant professor of drawing at Austin Peay State University. She holds several art degrees, including an MFA in studio arts from the University of Texas at Austin, a BFA in craft and material studies from Virginia Commonwealth University, and a BFA in industrial design from Cho Sun University in South Korea. Shin has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in cities across the United States, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, Omaha, Des Moines, Nashville, and Minneapolis. Artist Talk, 6 p.m., AD120; Feb. 6, Reception/Gallery Talk/Clarksville's First Thursday ArtWalk, 5-7:30p / gallery talk at 6p, The New Gallery.

March 4, 2025: Khari Turner will talk about his work and creative practice in conjuction with his exhibition Lost at Sea, on display in The New Gallery from February 24 - March 28, 2025. The knowledge that water holds is in all of us, and realizing that we share this commonality is important to his practice. He uses water from oceans, lakes, and rivers that have historical or personal connection to Black people -- water that he collects to mix with ink and pour onto his paintings. His paintings and drawings utilize abstraction and realistic renderings of Black noses, lips, and appendages to investigate the spiritual and physical existence of unknown ancestorial relationships with water. He paints to navigate through history and my identity, discovering the air of a story; A story of an embodied drop of water from the depths of the ocean - the imagined life of beings of water evaporated into the world and raised on the land of the free.

Turner is an emerging artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Khari is currently living in Brooklyn, NY after finish his residency in Miami Florida with AIRIE. His early inspiration was his grandfather that worked as a draftsman drawing small images that Khari would recreate at an early age. Growing up in Milwaukee, his landscape consisted of vast nature and dense cityscapes fighting amongst a city well known for its continued segregation. This created a relationship to Black people, water, and his environment that plays a major role in his work now. He currently takes water directly from different bodies of water including the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, his hometown’s Lake Michigan and Milwaukee River water. He incorporates them in the work either mixing the water with paint or pouring directly on the surface of the work. His aims are to eventually start work directly related to water health, environmental conservation, and bringing art to low-income neighborhoods. Artist Talk, 6 p.m., AD120; March 5, Gallery Talk/Reception, noon-1:30p, The New Gallery; Clarksville's First Thursday ArtWalk, 5-7:30 p.m., The New Gallery.

March 27, 2025: Stacy Kranitz, will give a talk about her work and creative practice at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, TN, as the recipient of the 2024-25 CECA TN Artist Fellowship. Working within the documentary tradition, Stacy Kranitz makes photographs that acknowledge the limits of photographic representation. Her images do not tell the “truth” but are honest about their inherent shortcomings, and thus reclaim these failures (exoticism, ambiguity, fetishization) as sympathetic equivalents in order to more forcefully convey the complexity and instability of the lives, places, and moments they depict.

Kranitz was born in Kentucky and currently lives in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee. She is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Additional awards include the Michael P. Smith Fund for Documentary Photography (2017), a Southern Documentary Fund Research and Development grant (2020), a Puffin Foundation grant (2022), and a Center for Documentation Fellowship (2023). Her work was shortlisted for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2019). She has presented solo exhibitions of her photographs at the Diffusion Festival of Photography in Cardiff, Wales (2015), the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France, the Cortona on the Move festival in Cortona, Italy (2022) and the Tennessee Triennial (2023) Her photographs are in several public collections including the Harvard Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, and Duke Universities, Archive of Documentary Arts She works as an assignment photographer for publications including Time, National Geographic, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic and Mother Jones. Her first monograph, As it Was Give(n) to Me, was published by Twin Palms in 2022. It was shortlisted for a Paris Photo - Aperture First Photobook Award. Artist talk, 6:30 p.m., Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN.

April 7, 2025: Domee Shi will talk about her work, artistic practice, and animation/director career as part of the innaugural CECA Director Interdisciplinary Series. Shi began her career as a story artist on the Academy Award®-winning feature film “Inside Out.” Since then, she has worked on the feature films “The Good Dinosaur,” “Incredibles 2” and the Academy Award®-winning “Toy Story 4.” In 2015 she began pitching ideas for short films, and soon was green lit to write and direct “Bao” which won the Academy Award® for Best Animated Short Film. In her role as a Creative VP, Shi is involved in key creative decision-making at the studio and consults on films in both development and production. Shi most recently made her feature film directorial debut on “Turning Red,” which released on Disney+ March 11, 2022.

Shi was born in Chongqing, China and resided in Toronto, Canada most of her life. She currently lives in Oakland, California and notes that her love of animation is only rivaled by her love of cats. 6 p.m., Mabry Concert Hall, MMC

CECA Visiting Artist Speaker Series

Below is just a selection of nationally and internationally renowned artists that the Department of Art + Design has hosted at APSU.