Syracuse University, School of Art, Visiting Artist Lecture Series

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Syracuse University, School of Art, Visiting Artist Lecture Series This Visiting Artist Lecture Series is a Syracuse University School of Art course that is also OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

Carrie Valenzuela is this week’s VALS speaker. She will speak at Shemin at 6:30 on Thursday, October 16.Carrie Valenzuel...
10/14/2026

Carrie Valenzuela is this week’s VALS speaker. She will speak at Shemin at 6:30 on Thursday, October 16.

Carrie Valenzuela is a Chicanx printmaker and hand bookbinder who established Amaranth Press and Bindery soon after graduating from college in 2000 with a printmaking degree. Focusing on creating history, on centering justice and inclusion in their work both as a production worker and teaching artist in Syracuse, Carrie has pushed every avenue to further this mission. Trained in a range of techniques including bookbinding factory work, classical hand binding, client-driven projects, letterpress job printing and fine art printmaking, Valenzuela constructs endlessly unique books and ephemera. In the midst of the pandemic, the new imprint of Salt City Book Arts was launched (delayed but growing only stronger) to more intentionally continue this vastly important work of teaching bookmaking and letterpress printing along with more dedicated community work. With a mighty belief that "a rising tide lifts all boats", Carrie continues making, showing others how to do it and working with other grassroots organizations to push for a better humanity.

https://www.amaranthpressandbindery.com/

This week’s VALS speaker is Anne Yoncha. She will speak via zoom on Thursday, October 8 at 6:30. The class will meet at ...
10/06/2026

This week’s VALS speaker is Anne Yoncha. She will speak via zoom on Thursday, October 8 at 6:30. The class will meet at Shemin to see the zoom.

Anne Yoncha is an Associate Professor of Art at Metropolitan State University Denver. She was awarded a Fulbright fellowship at Natural Resources Institute Finland, where she worked with restorationists to make collaborative art-science work about former peat extraction sites outside Oulu.

Her practice often begins with analog processes, like painting with ink she makes from locally-sourced plant matter to get to know a place and its inhabitants. Translating these drawings again into scores, sound, video, or installations reveals a gap in what we often can see or know about an ecosystem. Across her work is an interest in listening to and understanding other-than-human beings, both animate and inanimate.

Anne is part of ongoing research with HAB (High Altitude Bioprospecting), where artists, biologists, and programmers make contact with high-altitude microbes using a heli-kite and reconsider the agency of our invisible airborne neighbors; and Ruminant, where soil chemists, visual artists, conservators, and musicians reveal how keystone species like bison continue to shape chemical changes in soil even after their death, and reconsider the liveliness of soil matter in decay. Outside the studio she can often be found doing another kind of environmental research via bicycle.

https://anneyoncha.com

This week’s VALS speaker is Lauren Simkin Berke. They are speaking at Shemin at 6:30 on Thursday, October 1.Lauren Simki...
09/30/2026

This week’s VALS speaker is Lauren Simkin Berke. They are speaking at Shemin at 6:30 on Thursday, October 1.

Lauren Simkin Berke is a Brooklyn based visual artist and illustrator, drawing for clients such as Smithsonian Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the New York Times. They have a BA in Anthropology from Cornell University and an MFA in Illustration as Visual Essay from the School of Visual Arts. Though mainly focused on creating work on paper, in the forms of drawing, bookmaking, painting, and printmaking, they can often be found reading, writing, futzing, and pondering. Berke is the author of Zine making & Bookbinding: A Beginner’s Guide in 25 Projects, the illustrator for B is for Bibliophile by O.E. Zelmanovich, and they currently teach as an adjunct faculty member in the MFA illustration program at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and the BFA illustration departments at the School of Visual Arts and Parsons School of Design. They are an alum member of A.I.R. Gallery, and are represented by Illustration Division. More of their work can be viewed at simkinberke.com.

This week’s VALS speaker is Blake O’Brien. He will speak at Shemin at 6:30 on Thursday, September 24.Blake O’Brien is an...
09/23/2026

This week’s VALS speaker is Blake O’Brien. He will speak at Shemin at 6:30 on Thursday, September 24.

Blake O’Brien is an artist and educator living and working in Queens, NY. His painting practice engages with disparities of value among individual collected objects and the cultural institutions that house them. It uses literary strategies of relation to reidentify with cultural objects and grant them new potentials and purposes, both inside and outside of the hegemonic environment of the museum. O’Brien’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions. He received his BFA from The University of Southern Mississippi and MFA from Indiana University and currently teaches at the New York Studio School.

https://blakeobrienstudio.com/

https://www.instagram.com/blake_obrien/

This week we will have the semester’s first speaker for the Visiting Artist Lecture Series, Amber Rane Sibley, our new f...
08/26/2026

This week we will have the semester’s first speaker for the Visiting Artist Lecture Series, Amber Rane Sibley, our new faculty member in ceramics. She will speak at 6:30 on Thursday, August 27 in Shemin.

Amber Rane Sibley is a NYC-based ceramic sculptor and Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of Ceramics at SU. Her figurative sculptures investigate behavioral psychology, empathy, and the motivations behind harmful behaviors. Working primarily through hand-built ceramic forms, Sibley creates custom glazes that combine candied colors with grotesque surfaces, using attraction and discomfort to discuss difficult psychological narratives.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Artforum, and Ceramics Now. She is represented by Fierman Gallery in New York and holds an M.F.A. from Tulane University and a B.F.A. from Hunter College.

https://amberranesibley.com/about/

This week’s VALS speaker, the last of the semester, is Monique Aimee. She will speak in Shemin at 6:30 on Thursday, Apri...
04/21/2026

This week’s VALS speaker, the last of the semester, is Monique Aimee. She will speak in Shemin at 6:30 on Thursday, April 23.

Monique Aimee is a Boston illustrator and multidisciplinary artist. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Lesley University in 2014 and has been freelancing since her graduation.

She has illustrated over 40 book covers and worked with clients big and small, local and worldwide. Her style is bold, harmonious, and celebrates living in New England. With a love of the fiber arts, Monique draws inspiration from textiles to weave a story together through her illustrations.

She’ll also be hosting a workshop called Hand Lettering For Book Covers in Shaffer 332 at 12:30 pm on Thursday.

https://moniqueaimee.com/

This week’s VALS speaker is Francisco echo Eraso. He will speak in Shemin at 6:30 on Thursday, April 16.Jointly presente...
04/14/2026

This week’s VALS speaker is Francisco echo Eraso. He will speak in Shemin at 6:30 on Thursday, April 16.

Jointly presented in conjunction with the Center on Disability and Inclusion and Syracuse University Art Museum, artist Francisco echo Eraso offers an experimental lecture on the intersections of disabled identity and ecological crisis. Given the increasingly toxic and disabling environments across the globe, disability is simultaneously deemed “unnatural” and therefore disposable and to be eradicated.

Francisco echo Eraso (he/él) is a Colombian-American interdisciplinary artist, educator and access worker. He uses textiles and ceramics as well as minimalist sculpture and sound art to engage topics of liberation theology, family, and revolution.

Through an “Eco-Crip” framework, Eraso challenges the idea of disability as a pathological deficit. Looking to Disability Justice principles to challenge binaries of natural/unnatural and normal/abnormal, disability is presented as part of human diversity and as a cultural and political identity. Eraso discusses his own art practices alongside the work of contemporary disabled artists to illuminate disability as a crucial source of wisdom and leadership for the future ahead of us.

Eraso received his MFA in Fine Arts from Rutgers University in 2025 and a BA/BFA from Parsons, The New School in Visual Studies and Fine Arts in 2018. He has been a keynote speaker at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2025), received the Wynn Newhouse Award (2024), received the LEAD award from the Kennedy center (2023) and served as the call to action speaker for the Art-Reach Conference on Arts, Culture and Disability (2023). He has been an artist-in-residence at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts SHIFT residency for arts workers (2022-2023), FABSCRAP (2022-2023), Textile Arts Center (2020-2021), 77Art (2021) and Art Beyond Sight’s Art and Disability Residency (2021). He has exhibited at Mason Gross Galleries (NJ), The Re-Institute, Tempest Gallery, The Shed, EFA Project Space, Westbeth Gallery, Chashama Space Gallery, Ford Foundation Gallery, Amos Eno Gallery, Flux Factory and Sheila C. Johnson Gallery (NY), Mead Museum and A.P.E. Gallery (MA), The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (OH), Museo Antonini in Peru, among others. He has been published by NYU Press (2025) Art in America (2022), and Ugly Duckling Press (2020).

Eraso currently works as an accessibility consultant, independent curator, youth minister, and part-time lecturer at Rutgers University, Parsons, The New School and Middlesex Community College.

This event is part of the Syracuse University Humanities Center’s 2025-2026 Syracuse Symposium on “Creativity.”

A reception, which is open to all, will be held in the Galleria (outside the Museum and Shemin) from 5:00-6:30 on the 16th.

Eraso will also hold a workshop in the Galleria on April 17 from noon-2:00.

https://franciscoechoerasojr.com/home.html

https://humcenter.syr.edu/calendar/eco-crip-workshop/

This week’s VALS speaker is Sara Felice. She will speak at Shemin at 6:30 on Thursday, April 9.Sara Felice is the Curato...
04/07/2026

This week’s VALS speaker is Sara Felice. She will speak at Shemin at 6:30 on Thursday, April 9.

Sara Felice is the Curator of the Leepa Rattner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs, Florida, where she cultivates over fifteen rotating exhibitions per year, implements collegiate and community programming, and develops LRMA’s permanent collection of over 7,000 works of modern and contemporary photography, prints, fine art crafts, paintings and sculpture. In the Tampa Bay Region, she has served as a guest judge and consultant of several art festivals and organizations, most notably Gasparilla Festival of the Arts, one of the largest juried fine art festivals in the Southern United States.

She received her MA in Museum Studies from Syracuse University and was the Director of Point of Contact Gallery in Syracuse from 2017-2021.

Outside of her practice as a curator and arts administrator, Sara has been a working professional photographer since 2006.

Address

Shemin Auditorium At The Shaffer Art Building On The SU Main Campus
Syracuse, NY
13244

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