Students interested in installation art are welcome to join award-winning artist Katie Grinnan at Cal Poly as she speaks about her work this Friday.
Grinnan, who has won a Guggenheim Fellowship among other awards, was invited to speak by art and design professor Michael Miller. Miller occasionally teaches an installation art class at Cal Poly and jumped at the chance to provide Grinnan a forum to speak to students as well as the general public.
“(Installation art) is art where you’re kind of moving through an environment, a sculptural environment the artist has set up,” Miller said. “I’d say Katie’s work is somewhere between sculpture and architecture and installation.”
Miller contacted a former student of his who works at the Museum Of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles to ask if she knew anyone who could speak as part of the department’s guest lecture series. When the student provided Grinnan’s name, Miller said he thought it was great because he’d shown her work in class.
Grinnan is well known in the art field after she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006 as well as the Whitney Biennial. She has shown in the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria in New York City and the ACME art gallery in Los Angeles, as well as several other galleries.
Grinnan creates site-specific art, Miller said. Her work also has included large-scale photographs combined with other elements ranging from paint to plastic to rubber foam. One piece involved photographs suspended from the ceiling (along with other elements) that represents Grinnan’s travel memories.
“I think the way we perceive our environment is very complex and the spaces that make up an experience are so varied: the street, your place, your job, your head. is distanced from the narrative you create for yourself because you begin to edit information,” Grinnan said in an interview with Ana Finel Honigman for Artnet Magazine. “My sculptures use photographic imagery that interplays with physical elements in actual space to portray this process where multiple logic systems come together.”
In choosing Grinnan, Miller said the department looks for different criteria. The artist should be someone who is an expert in their field, but also they look for someone who crosses categories. Miller said Grinnan not only appeals to art and design students but could also attract students interested in architecture.
Grinnan is on the “cutting-edge” of what is happening in the art world, according to Miller, and her lecture will give students and the general public the opportunity to see something normally only in Los Angeles.
The lecture, which begins at 6 p.m., will last about 50 minutes and then a question and answer period will follow. The event is free and open to the general public.