The NAU School of Art announced the first two presenters for its Visiting Lecture Series, Xiaoyu Weng and Jon Rubin. Both will be participating virtually. Dates are yet to be announced.
Weng is an Associate Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. At the Guggenheim, she has curated the highly acclaimed exhibitions Tales of Our Time (2016-17) and One Hand Clapping (2018).
Previously, she served as the founding director of the Kadist Art Foundation’s Asia Programs (San Francisco/Paris); as program director of the Asian Contemporary Art Consortium in San Francisco; and as a curator at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts (CCA).
In the past ten years, Weng has organized numerous exhibitions and programs internationally. Most recently, she curated the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (2019) in Yekaterinburg, Russia, and the exhibition Neither Black / Red / Yellow Nor Woman (2019-2020, co-curated with Nikita Yingqian Cai), the first act in a trilogy, at Times Art Center in Berlin.
Weng is the recipient of the 2017 Visionary Awards, where are presented by Art in General, New York, to highlight the work that champions the transformative power of art and that nurtures and supports diverse artistic talents. Weng was selected for her innovative leadership and singular contribution to the field.
She was also the winner of the eighth edition of Premio Lorenzo Bonald per L’arte Enterprize for international curators in 2015. In 2018, she was a visiting faculty member of CCS Bard Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art in New York. She is a guest editor of the column e-flux in Chinese for the bilingual publication Heichi.
Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates interventions into public life that re-imagine individual, group and institutional behavior. He has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; the Shanghai Biennial; the Carnegie International, The Lyon Biennale; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York; Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Rooseum, Malmö, Sweden; Sazmanab Center for Contemporary Art, Tehran; as well as in backyards, in living rooms, and on street corners.
Rubin has received awards from the Art Matters Foundation, the Creative Work Fund, Americans for the Arts, the Creative Capital Award and was a finalist for the International Award for Participatory Art.
He recently collaborated with artist Lenka Clayton on projects for the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York and the 15th edition of The Lyon Biennale. He is currently collaborating with Iranian-based artist Sohrab Kashani on a project situated in both Tehran and Pittsburgh titled The Other Apartment. Jon is an Associate Professor and Graduate Director in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
The NAU School of Art’s Visiting Lecture Series is a project put together with donated funds. You can contribute and help bring more artists and lecturers to the series here.