The Fall 2024 Graduate Art guest lecture series, organized by Kelly Akashi

Arthur Jafa in Conversation with Mark Godfrey

This event is free & open to the public. RSVP’s are not required.

See the full Fall 2024 Seminar schedule here.

Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) is an artist and filmmaker. Jafa’s films have garnered acclaim at the Los Angeles, New York and Black Star Film Festivals and his artwork is represented in celebrated collections worldwide including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Tate, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The High Museum Atlanta, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Stedelijk, Luma Foundation, The Perez Art Museum Miami, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions of Jafa’s work include presentations at Luma Arles, France; Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland; OGR Torino, Italy; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebæk, Denmark. In 2019, he received the Golden Lion for the Best Participant of the 58th Venice Biennale May You Live in Interesting Times.

Mark Godfrey is an art historian and curator. He runs New Curators, a paid one-year curating course based in London for international students from lower socio-economic backgrounds. His PhD from University College London became his first book, Abstraction and the Holocaust, published by Yale in 2007. From 2002-2007 he taught Art History and Theory at the Slade School of Fine Art. From 2007 to 2021 he was Senior Curator at Tate Modern where his exhibitions included Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Turbine Hall commissions by Abraham Cruzvillegas and Anicka Yi, and major retrospectives of Sigmar Polke, Franz West, Alighiero Boetti, Richard Hamilton, Gerhard Richter, Roni Horn, and Francis Alys. He was one of the curatorial team for Philip Guston Now. During this period, outside Tate he curated major exhibitions by Christopher Williams, David Hammons, and R.H. Quaytman, and published texts on artists including Fischli & Weiss, Pierre Huyghe, Tacita Dean, Anri Sala, Thomas Demand, and James Welling. Since leaving Tate, he has curated Laura Owens and Vincent Van Gogh in Arles, Jacqueline Humphries’s survey at the Wexner, Nicole Eisenman: What Happened at the Whitechapel, and a Pino Pascali exhibition at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. He is currently at work on a major survey of Kerry James Marshall’s work for the Royal Academy in London for 2025. Publications in the past year include texts on Oscar Murillo, Nairy Baghramian, and Arthur Simms, and he has texts in forthcoming catalogues on Jack Whitten and Matthew Barney.

Image credit: courtesy of the artists.

Support for this series is generously provided by the following: Jack Shear, Brenda R. Potter, Brendan Dugan, Lisson Gallery, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Sprüth Magers, BLUM, Alan Hergott, and David Kordansky.

ArtCenter’s Graduate Seminar lecture series is a forum for graduate students, members of the ArtCenter community and the general public to enter into dialogue with internationally recognized artists, critics, and art historians. Unless otherwise indicated, lectures are free, open to the public and take place most Tuesday evenings at 7:00 pm in the L.A. Times Auditorium. Check out the Graduate Art website to confirm dates, times and locations for the lecture series and for more information about the Graduate Art program.

ArtCenter's Graduate Art program is based on intensive studio practice and rigorous academic coursework. The program is distinguished by its low faculty-to-student ratio, which provides students with the attention and feedback they need to refine and achieve their artistic goals. Faculty and students are artists working in all genres of film, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance and installation. A significant number of alumni have achieved national and international acclaim and often return to share their insights and expertise as visiting faculty and guest lecturers.