Artist Talks

Maine College of Art & Design's Artist Talks provide our community with invaluable dialogue and exchanges of ideas within creative disciplines. Our mission is to create a dynamic engagement between young and established creatives working across the fields of Art, Craft, Design, and academic areas of cultural production. We aim to amplify Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and LGBTQ voices through a balanced program. All viewings are free and open to the public on a space-available basis.

Fall 2023 Schedule

Catalina Ouyang

Presented in conjunction with the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design
Monday, September 11 (12:00-1:00pm)
Osher Hall

Catalina Ouyang engages object-making, interdisciplinary environments, and time-based projects to indicate counter-narratives around representation and self-definition.

Through expansion, fragmentation, and abstraction, Ouyang proposes the body as a politicized landscape subject to partition. Working gnostically with materials ranging from hand-carved wood and stone to appropriated literature and historic artifacts, Ouyang also attends to critical reimagining of historical formation wherein monstrosity, animality, and toxicity act as ciphers for the psycho- affective alienation of the minor subject.

Catalina Ouyang has had solo exhibitions at Lyles & King, New York, NY; No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH; Make Room, Los Angeles, CA; Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; and Knockdown Center, Queens, NY. They have been featured in group exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Kimball Art Center, Park City, UT; Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY and Los Angeles CA; Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, AT; Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK and Hong Kong; and Micki Meng, San Francisco, CA; among others. Their work has been written about in publications including Artforum, Frieze, The Cut, Flaunt Magazine, The New York Times, and Art & Object. Ouyang received an MFA from Yale University and is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Artist website: https://catalinaouyang.com/

Athena LaTocha

Presented in conjunction with the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design
Monday, October 16 (12:00-1:00pm)
Osher Hall

Athena LaTocha (b. Anchorage, Alaska) is an artist whose massive works on paper explore the relationship between human-made and natural worlds, in the wake of Earthworks artists from the 1960s and 1970s. The artist incorporates materials such as ink, lead, earth and wood, while looking at correlations between mark-marking and displacement of materials made by industrial equipment and natural events. Her works are informed by her upbringing in the wilderness of Alaska. LaTocha’s process is about being immersed in these environments, while responding to the storied and, at times, traumatic histories that are rooted in place.

Her work has been shown across the country in places such as the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico; CUE Art Foundation and Artists Space, New York City; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings, South Dakota; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana; and the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage, Alaska. In 2021, her work was on view in Land Akin at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New York and ID: Formations of the Self at Shirley Fiterman Art Center in New York City. Also in 2021, she had two solo exhibitions in the New York City area: Athena LaTocha: In the Wake of . . . on view at BRIC House in downtown Brooklyn; and Athena LaTocha: After the Falls at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit. Her work was additionally featured in Greater New York 2021, at MoMA P.S.1 in Long Island City. During 2022 and early 2023, she has had solo exhibitions at JDJ | The Ice House in Garrison, New York; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and at The Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. Currently, LaTocha has work on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and The Green-Wood Cemetery.

LaTocha is the recipient of artist grants and awards, among them the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Pocantico Art Prize in Visual Arts in 2022, Eiteljorg Fellowship, the National Academy Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Painting in 2021, Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2019 and 2016, Wave Hill in 2018, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2013. LaTocha received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Stony Brook University, New York. The artist divides her time between New York City and Peekskill, New York.

Artist website: www.athenalatocha.com

Louise Witthöft & Rodney LaTourelle

Monday, October 23 (12:00-1:00pm)
Osher Hall

Witthöft & LaTourelle is a project-based collaboration between Danish designer Louise Witthöft and Canadian artist Rodney LaTourelle.

Working together since 2007, they have completed a wide range of projects including art installations and public art commissions, as well as exhibition design for galleries and museums. Their interdisciplinary approach activates relationships between color, pattern, space and user experience. The use of color is central to their practice, which is characterized by chromatic immersion, interaction and sensuality. By employing color and pattern to re-structure spatial systems they expand typically disembodied aesthetics into direct experience. 

Their artwork is found in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Remai Modern, Saskatoon and Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg.

Artist Website: www.witthoeft-latourelle.com