Spring 2025 RISD Photo Lecture Series

Spring 2025 RISD Photo TC Colley Lecture

Tuesday, April 29, 2025, Metcalf Auditorium
Justine Kurland

Justine Kurland is an artist known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and the fringe communities, both real and imagined, that inhabit them. Her early work comprises photographs, taken during many cross-country road trips, that counter the masculinist mythology of the American landscape, offering a radical female imaginary in its place. Her recent series of collages, SCUMB Manifesto, continues to make space for women by transforming books by canonized male photographers into a new feminist form.

Kurland’s work has been exhibited at museums and galleries in the United States and abroad. Her work is included in permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum, Pennsylvania; Getty Museum, California; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, among others.

Spring 2025 RISD Photo Gary Metz Lectures

Tuesday, April 1, 2025, Metcalf Auditorium
Carla Liesching

Carla Liesching is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, writing, collage, sculpture, bookmaking and design. Grounded in experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa, she considers the intersections of representation, knowledge and power, with a focus on enduring constructions of race and geography. In resistance to dominant forms of knowledge production, Liesching’s practice reveals ways of knowing that are fragmented, contested, contingent, subjective and in constant negotiation. She is the author of Good Hope (Mack, 2022) a hybrid image-text memoir chronicling centuries of empire and struggle shortlisted for the Aperture Paris-Photo First Book Award, and the Arles Prix du Livre in the Photo-Text Category. She contributed to On Whiteness: The Racial Imaginary Institute, (SPBH Editions, 2022) as part of a collective of artists, writers, and activists committed to examining whiteness as a dangerous ideology that has been intentionally positioned as neutral. She has installed exhibitions and public works both domestically and internationally, most recently at PhMuseum in Bologna (2024), the Deutsche Börse Foundation in Frankfurt (2023), and Foam Museum in Amsterdam (2022). Liesching lives between South Africa and Ithaca, NY, where she works as a Visiting Critic in the department of art at Cornell University, as a Lecturer in the department of art at Ithaca College; as faculty at the International Center of Photography; and as coordinator of the School of Criticism and Theory. As part of her socially engaged practice, Liesching is also a youth educator focused on image-making, visual literacy and self-publishing as vehicles for expression and empowerment. She is a contributing editor of PUZZAZZ Mag and Chief Editor of the Book Arts Review, published by the Center for Book Arts in New York City.

Tuesday, April 22, 2025, Metcalf Auditorium
Mark Armijo McKnight

Mark Armijo McKnight (b. Los Angeles, CA) is an artist whose work has been exhibited internationally. His work has been written about in the Los Angeles Times, Interview, The New Yorker, GQ Magazine, Aperture, Art in America, Frieze, ArtForum, Brooklyn Rail, Mousse and BOMB Magazine, among others. His work is in the collection of The Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA), Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA) and The Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA). His first monograph, Heaven is a Prison, was published in September 2020. His second monograph, Posthume, is forthcoming (TBW Books, Oakland, CA, 2025).

Armijo-McKnight is a Fulbright Scholar (2008-9), the recipient of the 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize, The 2020 Light Work Photo Book Award, a 2020 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, and a 2023-4 Guggenheim Fellowship.