Stanley + Selma Hollander Visiting Artist, Designer, and Scholar Lecture

Karyn Olivier will be joining the Department of Art, Art History, and Design on Monday, October 18 at 6 pm EST on zoom. Olivier is a Philadelphia-based artist who creates sculptures, installations, and public art. Olivier’s artistic practice merges multiple histories and collective memory with present-day narratives. Manipulating familiar objects and spaces, the artist re-contextualizes the viewer’s relationship to the ordinary. Questioning what we presume to be the function or “facts” of an object or space, she asks us to reconcile memory with conventional meanings, ultimately revealing contradictions and dualities as well as new possibilities and ideas. Olivier’s work often reflects on public versus private space or the exterior versus the interior, recalling communal nostalgias connected to social and physical experiences and how those phenomena relate to inclusivity and acceptance.

Her work often intersects and collapses multiple histories and memories with present-day narratives. She has exhibited at the Gwangju and Busan Biennials, World Festival of Black Arts and Culture (Dakar, Senegal), The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum of Art, MoMA P.S.1, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), The Mattress Factory and SculptureCenter (NY), among others. Olivier has created large-scale commissioned work for Monument Lab, Creative Time, and New York City, and Philadelphia’s Percent for Art program. She received a 2020 Anonymous Was A Woman grant and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. She was awarded the 2018-19 Rome Prize and has been the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the William H. Johnson Prize, a Pew Fellowship, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award and a Creative Capital Foundation grant. Olivier is currently an associate professor of sculpture at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.

For more information about Karyn Olivier please visit her website:
https://karynolivier.com/

This virtual event will be held on zoom and is free and open to the public but requires preregistration. To register please click the registration button.

Karyn Olivier, Fortified, 2018-20, Bricks, used clothing and steel. h. 15 ft. w. 30 ft. d. 30 in. Installation view Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Photo by Constance Mensh.