Ann Hamilton to lecture on “The Practice of Work: From Silence to Speech” Oct. 26

Ann Hamilton, one of the most challenging and provocative installation artists working today, will lecture on “The Practice of Work: From Silence to Speech” at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 26.

The talk, sponsored by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, is free and open to the public and takes place in Brown Hall, Room 100. Brown Hall is located on Washington University’s Danforth Campus, at the intersection of Forsyth Boulevard and Hoyt Drive.

Hamilton’s visit comes just a day after the official dedication of the Sam Fox School’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and Earl E. and Mrytle E. Walker Hall, both designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki. A reception for Hamilton will precede the talk at 5 p.m. in the Kemper Art Museum, located a short walk east of Brown.

For more information, call (314) 935-9347 or email mara_hermano@wustl.edu.

Hamilton — a 1993 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, popularly nicknamed the “genius grant” — creates site-specific environments that combine new technologies with unusual, often playful materials and an almost theatrical sense of staging.

Born in Lima, Ohio, in 1956, Hamilton received a BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979 and an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art in 1985. From 1985 to 1991 she taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and since 1992 she has made her home in Columbus, Ohio. She is currently a professor of art at The Ohio State University.

Hamilton’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout North America, Europe and Japan. In 1999 her installation Myein represented the United States at the 48th Venice Biennale. The piece included a large glass screen that both obscured and transformed the neo-classical American pavilion, which appeared to ripple behind it like water. Inside, newly uncovered skylights illuminated intense, fuchsia-colored powder (distributed by a hidden mechanical system) as it flowed slowly down the walls.

For Corpus, an acclaimed 2004 commission for Mass MoCA in North Adams, Mass., Hamilton fashioned a kind of indoor-snow storm, filling the museum’s vast converted factory space with millions of sheets of fluttering white writing paper. The pages were continuously “inhaled” (in the artist’s phrase) and re-circulated by 40 large pneumatic mechanisms while bright natural light, screened by red silk organza, added a warm sunset glow.

Hamilton’s installations often include an element of performance and she has frequently collaborated with dancers and musicians. In 1988 she won a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for her installation The Earth Never Gets Flat. Appetite, a collaboration with choreographer Meg Stuart and her company, Damaged Goods, toured Europe and the United States during the 1998-99 season.

Other honors include a Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (1998), a National Endowment for the Arts’ Visual Arts Fellowship (1993), the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (1992); and a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1989).

A book about Ann Hamilton’s work by Joan Simon was published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. in 2002.