Olivia Gude is a Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago and was awarded the National Art Education Association’s 2009 Lowenfeld Award for significant contributions to the field of art education. Professor Gude is the Founding Director of the Spiral Workshop, a curriculum research project that provides art classes for urban teens.

In her lecture, Gude, an artist whose work emerges out of the Chicago street mural tradition, considers making murals and mosaics as a form of relational aesthetics, engaging intergenerational groups in dynamic investigations that lead to fresh insights regarding self and community.

Guerra de la Paz is the composite name of Cuban-born, Miami-based artist duo Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz, who have been collaborating since 1996. Guerra de la Paz’s work, while focusing on sculpture and installation, ranges in terms of media to include painting, photography, and video.

In Until Now: Guerra de la Paz, the artists present an overview of their sixteen-year long collaboration, which began with two-dimensional work and transitioned to work almost exclusively based on clothing.

John Waters is a man of many monikers: The Prince of Puke, The Duke of Dirt, The Sultan of Sleaze. Any way you put it, John Waters is famed the world over for his trash epics including Pink Flamingos (which celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2012), Female Trouble, Desperate Living, Polyester, Serial Mom, Pecker, Cecil B. Demented, and A Dirty Shame.

This Filthy World is Waters’ rapid-fire one-man spoken word "vaudeville" act that celebrates the film career and joyously appalling taste of the man William Burroughs once called "The Pope of Trash." Updated and expanded from the original film version that enjoyed critical success at the Edinburgh, Toronto and Berlin Film Festivals, the live performance of "This Filthy World" focuses on Waters’ early negative artistic influences, his fascination with true crime, exploitation films, fashion lunacy, the extremes of the art world, Catholicism, sexual deviancy and a love of reading.

Reading List
Suggested materials by John Waters can be found here.

Born in Hong Kong, Shirley Tse relocated to the United States in 1992. Her work has been exhibited at the 2002 Sydney Biennial, the 2002 Bienniel Ceara America in Brazil, the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (MoMa) in New York City, to name a few. Her work is profiled in the comprehensive overview of contemporary sculpture, Sculpture Today (2007).

In her lecture, Tse discusses the philosophy of her practice, and the way in which she constructs perceptual frameworks for the objects and materials that dominate the visual landscape of our globalized world.

Rick Poynor is a British writer, critic, lecturer and curator, specializing in design, media and visual culture. He was the founding editor of Eye magazine in London, which he edited from 1990 to 1997, and he contributed the “Critique” column in Eye since 1999. In 2003, he co-founded Design Observer where he blogs regularly.

Reading List
Suggested materials by Rick Poynor n can be found here.