First Season of Meet the Artist

July 5 marked the end of the first season of the Meet the Artist Lecture Series, a monthly lunchtime event at Webster Geneva Campus. Co-hosted by Webster University's Global Citizenship Program, the Webster Center of Creativity and Innovation, and the department of Media Communications, this lecture series gives artists the chance to present their work and creative process to an audience from the Webster community as well as external guests. The artists who presented between the months of March and July included Chilean painter Marisa Cornejo, Swiss photographer Jennifer Niederhauser Schlup, British ceramicist Paul March, Danish installation artist Nina Rodin, US sound artist Marquis' McGee, and British painter Tim Young.

For the organizer, Dr. Julianna Sandholm-Bark, the lecture series serves important research, learning, and community outreach university goals. "Each lecture provides an opportunity to engage in a dialogue with an artist about their art-making practices, and thus enables learning and research experiences for the students, faculty and community at large. We've been lucky to host a highly inquiry-driven group of speakers during the lecture series’ first season, and we hope to host many more in the future.”

The Meet the Artist lecture series also highlights the many crossovers that exist between the visual arts and other fields of study offered at Webster Geneva Campus. For instance, visual artist Marisa Cornejo, discussed how her art-making was intimately connected with her experience of exile after Pinochet's dictatorship forced her family out of Chile; she also explained that her creative process is closely connected with the idea of memory and the visualization of dreams.

According to senior undergraduate student Iraj Nabavi, who attended several Meet the Artist presentations, "Giving us the opportunity to meet [artists] didn’t just feel like a privilege, it felt like a necessity. It’s true having access to Geneva’s artists and [their] visions as we had with Nina Rodin and Marquis McGee should be available to everyone in Geneva for us to realize how flourishing and alive the artistic scene is in our home city."

Each invited artist is also interviewed for the Webster Geneva Campus podcast.

Meet the Artist will return in fall 2018, with a new lineup of speakers, which will be announced shortly at geneva.webster.edu/events. For questions about the Meet the Artist Lecture Series or about how to get involved, please contact Dr. Julianna Sandholm-Bark (juliannabark21@webster.edu).