Alex Callender, a guest faculty member in Chautauqua Institution’s School of Art, will speak at 6 p.m. tonight in Hultquist Center. This is the third lecture in the 2024 Chautauqua Visual Arts Lecture Series and the second faculty lecture. The next lecture will be given by Sachiko Akiyama, who is also a guest faculty member with CVA.
Callender works primarily with painting and drawing in her artistic practice, and will bring both her technical skill set and her personal artistic vision and perspective to the program.
According to Callender’s artistic statement, her studio practice “incorporates painting, drawing, and installation to explore intersections between myth, colonial legacies, and material culture,” and “through the visual forms of historical narrative, repurposed archival imagery, and speculative fictions, she considers questions of race and borders, environmental instability, and hybridized landscapes.”
She utilizes multiple mediums and techniques including drawing, painting and installation work to explore the intersections of myth, identity and material culture, according to her Smith College faculty bio.
Callender’s work commands a strong understanding of the temporal, impermanent side of life that transcends medium or material. Characterized by dark tones and intricate detail, Callender employs ink, graphite, oil, acrylic and more — frequently at the same time — to convey her messages.
She utilizes archives and historical references to examine, explore and contextualize perceptions of gender, race, class and other facets of social identity through her multimodal work.
In her work, she makes use of different “visual modes of annotation, hybrid narratives, and speculative storytelling.” In doing this, Callender “recontextualizes static (or seemingly fixed) renderings of history to consider their relationship to social forces like scale, time, and memory,” according to her CVA faculty bio.
Callender has exhibited nationally and internationally and has participated in artist residencies at programs including the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Santa Fe Art Institute, The Vermont Studio Center, Urban Glass and the BAU Institute, among others. She has participated in many solo exhibits, has work in the Art in Embassies collection as well as the Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Eastport, Maine, and was commissioned by University of Massachusetts Amherst’s University Museum of Contemporary Art to create a public art work.
Originally from New York City, Callender is now an assistant professor of art at Smith College. At Smith, according to her faculty bio, she’s currently researching “representations of gender and tourism in colonial painting and textiles, and the construction of the World’s Fair and other modes of spectacle futurisms.”
