Fine Arts Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Fall 2026 Schedule

The Departments of Fine Arts and Art History are pleased to share our schedule for our 2026 fall semester Visiting Artist & Scholar Lectures!

Each lecture will have plenty of reminders leading up to the date, so keep an eye out for more information regarding our wonderful visiting artists and scholars

The talks are free to the public and open to all VCU students and alumni to attend.

We hope to see you there! 🐏☀️

Erin Jane Nelson
🗓️ September 14th
⏰ 12:30 PM
📍 Grace St. Theater

Erin Jane Nelson’s practice is grounded in photography sourced from her personal archive of found and original images. Raised—and later based—in the American South, Nelson travels throughout the region to photograph her surroundings and lived experiences. She intuitively merges these images onto unexpected support structures—including silk, hand-crafted quilts, panels, and ceramic inspired by vernacular craft objects and the history of collage—their multiple references engaging the nuanced anxiety, conflict, and humor of the present and immediate future. Her work plays with the hierarchies of value, class, and taste in contemporary culture, often embracing femme cuteness as a potent symbolic tool. Nelson’s newest works have expanded to include ceramic cameras that the artist creates herself and uses to capture landscape photographs that further emphasize the material and conceptual foundation of her practice.

Jessica S. Hong, Capital Prize Curatorial Talk
🗓️ September 24th
⏰ 12:30 PM
📍Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU

VCUarts Painting and Printmaking invites you to attend a talk with Capital Prize exhibition juror Jessica S. Hong, chief curator at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Gain insight into the curatorial process of selecting artworks from submissions by VCUarts Painting and Printmaking alumni. Prior to joining the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Jessica Hong was the Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Toledo Museum of Art where she organized the premiere of Stan Douglas’s major film installation Doppelgänger in a U.S. institution, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg–Machine Auguries: Toledo, the artist’s first U.S. solo presentation, and Toledo’s presentation of Marisol: A Retrospective.

Nancy Lupo
🗓️ October 12th
⏰ 12:30 PM
📍 Grace St. Theater

Nancy Lupo is an artist currently based in Berlin. Her sculptures engage with material culture and language, exploring how collective fantasies and emotions become embedded in form. She tests ambiguity and confusion as conditions that are both unsettling and full of potential. Lupo holds degrees from The Cooper Union and Yale University. Since 2024, she has been a professor at Kunsthochschule Mainz and in 2026 was awarded the Miss Edith Bloom Fund Rome Prize.

Khaled Jarrar
🗓️ October 21st
⏰📍 TBA

Khaled Jarrar was born and raised in Jenin-Ramallah, occupied Palestine, currently living in NYC. Khaled Jarrar is an artist whose career transitioned from the military discipline to a subversive art practice. His work is deeply rooted in his personal history and the lived reality of the West Bank. Jarrar uses diverse mediums including photography, sculpture, and performance art to highlight the complexities of life under occupation and the weight of sovereign identity. One of his projects includes upcycled concrete sculptures made by physically chiseling fragments from the apartheid wall and morphing them into pop art objects, to purchasing a land with 56 olive trees, all of which reclaim cultural endurance as a means of liberation, liberating the land (Ardh) from toxic synthetic fertilizers using black goat manure. His lecture for VCUarts is titled, “A Man Fights Nurture – Flat-White Revolution.”

Maura Reilly
🗓️ November 4th
⏰ 5:30 PM
📍 Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU

Maura Reilly is the Director of the Zimmerli Art Museum and Professor of Art History at Rutgers University. She has held several leadership positions in the arts, including as Executive Director of the National Academy of Design and Senior Curator at the American Federation of Arts. She is the Founding Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she developed and launched the first exhibition and public programming space in the USA devoted entirely to feminist art. While there, she organized several landmark exhibitions, including the permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party and the blockbuster Global Feminisms (co-curated with Linda Nochlin), among others. Reilly has curated over two dozen exhibitions internationally with a focus on under-represented artists and social justice concerns, including, most recently, transfeminisms (2024-5), Michelle Agins: Storyteller (2024), judy watson: shadow bone (2024), and Wandamba yalungka/Winds change direction (2021). She has also organized international exhibitions on contemporary Indigenous art, LGBTQI+ art, feminist art, as well as retrospective exhibitions with artists Ghada Amer, Nayland Blake, Richard Bell, and Miriam Schapiro. Reilly has written extensively on curatorial practice, including Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating (Thames & Hudson, 2018), which has received many accolades, including a listing as one of the “Top 10 Best Art Books” of 2018 from The New York Times. Her next book, Museums & Social Justice, is forthcoming from Thames & Hudson in 2026, followed thereafter in 2027 with Speculating Otherwise: Feminist Art Now, co-authored with Liisa Rávna Finbog. Reilly has held academic positions at the Tufts University (Medford, MA), Queensland College of Art (Brisbane, Australia), and at Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ). Dr. Reilly received her M.A. and PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Matt King
🗓️ November 18th
⏰ 12:30 PM
📍The Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU

Matt King’s work examines the production, circulation, and use of familiar objects and images, expanding their capacity to turn the ordinary into the productively strange. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at The University of Georgia, Werkstätte Gallery, Massimo Audiello, MassArt, Reynolds Gallery and Fourteen30 Contemporary as well as group exhibitions at venues including Jane Lombard, Luhring Augustine, and the Vienna Kunsthalle. Honors include a VMFA Visual Arts Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship, and visiting artist residencies at the Mountain Lake Biological Station; Fiskars Village, Finland; NCCA, St. Petersburg, Russia; and at the American Academy in Rome. King has taught at institutions including MassArt, Cooper Union, Umass Dartmouth, and VCUarts where from 2015-2019 he served as Chair of the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media. He is currently a Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design.