About the Speakers

Sans Façon – January 31
Sans façon is an art practice that responds to the relationship between people and place. Working internationally, their approach renews awareness and tempts interaction with the surroundings, and is realized through networks of communities, organizations and individuals. Their projects range from ephemeral performances, temporary installations in public space and large scale permanent artwork to collaborating with design teams on major infrastructure projects and developing city-wide strategies involving artists in discourse with a city. The majority of their work tempts interaction with the surroundings and is often realized in close collaboration with communities, corporations and individuals including city councils, scholars, architects, engineers and designers.

Established in 2001 in Glasgow, Scotland, the practice moved to Calgary in 2011 to be lead artists for the innovative public art project Watershed+, integrating artists and creativity within the City’s Utilities & Environment Protection department.

Amy Franceschini – February 7
Amy Franceschini lives and works in San Francisco and Gent, Belgium. She is the founder of Futurefarmers, an international group of artists, activists, farmers and architects with a common interest in creating frameworks of participation that recalibrate our cultural compass. Their work uses various media to enact situations that disassemble habitual apparatus. Through public art, architecture, museum installations, publications and temporary educational programs inside institutions, they have transformed public policy, urban planning, educational curricula and public transportation plans. Futurefarmers’ work often creates relational sculptures and tools for audiences to gain insight into deeper fields of inquiry- not only to imagine but also to participate in and initiate change in the places we live.

Amy’s work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Whitney Biennial in New York, MOMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, the 2014 Venice Architectural Biennale, the 2017 Sharjah Biennale, the 2018 Taipei Biennale and she is the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Herb Alpert Award for Visual Arts and a 2019 Rome Prize Fellow in Design.

Lauren Frances Adams – March 21
Lauren Frances Adams is a painter and installation artist who teaches at Maryland Institute College of Art. She earned her B.F.A. at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and completed her MFA in 2007 at Carnegie Mellon University. She was born in Snow Hill, North Carolina, on a pig farm. She lives and works in Baltimore. Her work engages political and social histories through iconic images and domestic ornament. She has exhibited at Nymans House National Trust (Sussex, England); The Walters Museum in Baltimore; The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri. Recent projects include Smack Mellon in Brooklyn and a site-specific collaborative public art project with Stewart Watson at a historic tavern museum in Alexandria, Virginia. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and has held residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and the Sacatar Foundation in Brazil. She is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation M.F.A. Award, and a 2016 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. She is the winner of the 2016 Trawick Prize. Her work has been reviewed in Frieze Magazine, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Artslant, and Hyperallergic. Lauren is a founding member of Ortega y Gasset Projects, a project space in New York.

Christie Hodgen – April 18
Christi Hodgen is the author of books of fiction. Her most recent novel, Elegies for the Brokenhearted, was hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “the literary equivalent of a hand grenade.” Elegies was an Editors’ Choice selection in both The New York Times Book Review and Booklist and was released in 2014 its German translation. Her second book, Hello, I Must Be Going, was featured by Barnes & Noble in their “Discover Great New Writers” series. A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw, Hodgen’s collection of short stories, won the 2001 AWP Award for Short Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award.

Hodgen has also published short works of fiction and nonfiction in over a dozen literary journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Conjunctions, New Stories from the South, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Two novellas, Special Problems and The History of Baseball, have been published as Kindle Singles. Her work has received several national awards, including two Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship.