Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist Lecture: Marie Lorenz
New York-based artist Marie Lorenz will deliver the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist Lecture. Her work is rooted in the exploration and narrative of New York City’s waterfronts. Combining psycho-geographic exploration with highly crafted, material forms, Lorenz uses boats to create an uncertain space and bring about a heightened awareness of place. In 2005, she started her Tide and Current Taxi project, taking people around the New York Harbor in a boat built from salvaged materials, using the tide to guide her navigation. Solo exhibitions include Waterways, at the Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery at Bennington College (Bennington, Vt.); Tide and Current Taxi, at the Rib Gallery (Rotterdam, Netherlands); and Graybelt, a multimedia project funded by the Bridging Barriers research initiative, at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the recipient of many awards and residencies, including the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Lorenz earned an MFA from Yale.
This lecture is also part of the NCAA 50th annual conference hosted by WashU’s Sam Fox School.
Upcoming Public Lectures
Apr 15 at 5:30pm • Museum Lobby
Being and Becoming in Contemporary Chinese Art
This talk by Peggy Wang, associate professor of art history and Asian studies at Bowdoin College, addresses the conflicting pressures that artists in China confronted during the 1990s and early 2000s, including rapid urbanization and cultural globalization. Even as they navigated political constraints and deficits in resources, contemporary artists enacted productive strategies for making and exhibiting their art. This lecture foregrounds artists’ assertions of being and becoming, both as critical tactics for configuring identity and generative topics unto themselves. Wang will particularly examine how artists studied the vibrant dynamics of change through temporal, historical, and material dimensions in their art.
This lecture is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China, on view at the Kemper Art Museum from February 27 to July 27, 2026.
Part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series